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The Department of Management Information Systems continues to grow. I am pleased to introduce you to our two newest faculty, Anthony Vance and Aleksi Aaltonen. Dr. Vance’s expertise is in behavioral aspects of cybersecurity, and Dr. Aaltonen’s research focuses on digital innovation. We are excited to have them join our department.

Read about how we prepare our students for future success. Read about Bruce Fadem, Chair of the Fox IT Advisory Board. He discusses his role as founding Chair of the board and how that group of senior IT executives shapes our cutting-edge curriculum and provides guidance for our students.

Earlier this Fall the Institute for Business and Information Technology (IBIT) held its annual IT Career Fair, connecting over 250 student attendees with 40 companies. In November IBIT held the Sixth Annual Temple NBCUniversal Analytics Challenge. It was a great success, with over 350 students across the University competing for $12,000 in prizes.

These opportunities are a big part of what make our students successful. We profile Christian Hettinger (BBA ’18) and Danielle Buerger (BBA ’17), who are applying what they’ve learned in MIS in two very different career paths. We also profile Shahla Raei (’17), graduate of the MS in IT Auditing and Cybersecurity, who is applying what she learned to advance her career as an IT Auditor.

Associate Professor Anthony Vance said the most common cybersecurity mistake people make is password reuse. To minimize the threat of a data breach, every online account password must be unique. All that memorization? Impossible.

“If you try to remember all the passwords in your head, they’ll be weak. You shouldn’t even try,” said Vance, who has used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), eye tracking and electroencephalogram to explore how to create security warnings that won’t be overlooked. “I recommend using a password manager.”

These online services require users to memorize a single strong password – Vance recommends a random string of words – and the software will manage the rest.  

“That reduces the number of passwords from dozens to just one, and that’s feasible,” he said.

Vance is one of two new professors on the faculty of the Management Information Systems Department of Temple University’s Fox School of Business. He will teach a cybersecurity elective for undergraduates while juggling research topics including how to make strong passwords easier for the brain to remember. He also serves as Director of Fox’s Center for Cybersecurity.

“At the beginning of classes, I tell students I want them to develop a sense of ‘professional paranoia,’ ” said Vance, who has Ph.Ds in Information Systems from Georgia State University, the University of Paris-Dauphine and Finland’s University of Oulu. “I want people to know what risks are out there and to make intelligent decisions about them.”

Assistant Professor Aleksi Aaltonen, whose research focuses on data-based innovations and organizing using computational methods, is also new to Fox.  He’s also a successful entrepreneur – He co-founded Moves, an activity tracking app that was purchased by Facebook in 2014.   

“I tell students that doing academic research and being a start-up entrepreneur are very similar because with both you have to cope with lots of uncertainty,” Aaltonen said. “Even if you have a great idea, it takes a lot of work to be successful whether you’re an entrepreneur or a researcher. Both also require accepting that sometimes you’ll fail.”

Aaltonen, whose Ph.D. is from the London School of Economics and Political Science, said technology is changing quickly and it’s critical that users evolve and change with it. He cited Wikipedia as an example.

“How did it learn to manage itself? Where did that come from?” he asked. “We have to remember that it’s completely different from 2001 when it started. The original intentions may not drive it today. How do they change and evolve without becoming stale and falling apart?”

Aaltonen will teach a project-based MIS 4596 course requiring students to develop a tech solution to a problem or an innovative application. It’s the final course for MIS undergraduates,  allowing them to integrate all that they’ve learned.

Aaltonen’s real world entrepreneurship means students will benefit from his experiences. He also discourages being a new technology evangelist.

“We need to teach our students to see through the hype and to pick out the technologies that are relevant for their businesses,” Aaltonen said. “Pay attention to tech but not just for the sake of tech.”

During his years overseeing information technology organizations for several large corporations, Bruce Fadem was always surprised that many new employees, even those with newly awarded degrees, were not well prepared for real-world challenges.

“Their knowledge was three to five years behind the times,” Fadem said. Temple’s Department of Management Information Systems is an exception, in part thanks to Fadem and his fellow members of the Fox IT Advisory Board. One of the board’s primary goals since coming together in 2006: helping MIS keep its curriculum contemporary.

“We’ve found a way to change the curriculum on a fairly frequent basis, which is not the norm for large universities, said Fadem, the IT Advisory Board Chairman. “Tech changes quickly and it’s become a critical component of everything we do. … It’s important that students are exposed to and understand it and know how to deal with the new technology and how it can be applied to business processes and products to help companies achieve their goals.”

Fadem, who retired as Wyeth CIO after a 20-year career, reluctantly agreed to found the advisory board, which is today composed of senior IT executives from well-known firms such as AmerisourceBergen, QVC, Pfizer, and NBCUniversal. Fadem explained he’d served on similar councils at other universities—where they used the boards to rubber stamp projects they’d already launched.

Fox’s IT Advisory Board worked differently from the start. Besides keeping curriculum current, board members and their firms engage in symposiums, student competitions, career fairs; provide insights on projects; conduct guest lectures and mentor students, as well fund scholarships and other activities.

“When I talk to students, I try to get them to understand that your career isn’t a series of well-defined steps. It’s shaped by circumstances and opportunities and you have to take advantage of them and adapt,” Fadem said. “I feel so fortunate in my professional career. I got dropped into MIS at Temple when it was still a relatively unknown unit, fast forward to today, I ended up being surrounded by very, very good people – board members, MIS faculty and staff, and students – who carried the organization and me on their shoulders to becoming one of the top MIS programs in the nation.”

 The 6th Annual NBCUniversal Temple University Analytics Challenge attracted more than 135 entries across six colleges, with the first-place finishers coming from Fox School of Business, Klein College of Media and Communications and the Tyler School of Art.

MIS students Jake Green and Rohit Bobby partnered with Klein’s Sergio Aguilar to win the analysis category. Tyler School of Art student Xi (Cynthia) Cheng was the graphics category winner. The first-place finishers took home $2,500. There were also cash prizes for the second and third place winners and two honorable mentions in each category.

“All of the teams put a lot of work into their challenges,” said MIS Assistant Professor Laurel Miller, who organized the event and serves as Director of the Institute for Business and Information Technology. Miller was also a mentor to the three-member analysis team winners and said she was impressed “by how meticulously they looked at each and every angle.”

Teams could choose from three data sets to answer the following questions: The first, from competition sponsor NBCUniversal, asked how media companies align with esports; the second, from global biopharmaceutical company Alexion, sought to learn who the winners and losers were in healthcare funding and payments; the third, from pharmaceutical distributor AmerisourceBergen, questioned why pharmacies buy drugs from non-primary vendors.

This was the first year a sports-related challenge was offered and many teams were drawn to that. Both first place winners took on the NBCUniversal challenge. Graphics winner Cheng used images from Pac-Man and simple synthesizer sounds to look at the overlap between esports viewers and traditional sports fans in her four-minute video. The analysis trio reworked the question, team member Green said, to ask, “What can media companies and specifically, networks such as those powered by NBC sports group do to adapt to the esports audience and remain a leading delivery and engagement platform for sport entertainment?”

“This project taught me so many lessons that will be of value in my future professional endeavors,” Green said. “It taught us to give more with less. It taught us to condense mountains of data and weeks’ worth of information gathering into a four-minute pitch. We had the privilege of coming together as a team in pursuit of a common goal, despite our differences in educational background.”

Aidan Doyle, Alexion’s Director of Data and Analytic Platforms and a first-time competition judge, said he was impressed by the students and the challenges they tackled.

“When I went to college, you signed up for a class, walked into an amphitheater, the professor wrote on a board, you wrote it down and at the end you’d take a test,” said Doyle. “What I see in the system in the US 30 years later, especially at Temple, is a collaborative effort that brings the best ideas together between all faculty while engaging students and industry… To me, it summed up why Temple and other institutions are the place to be.”

Christian Hettinger ’18 and Danielle Buerger ’17 work very different jobs on opposite coasts – but both came to Temple planning on studying other majors before finding Management Information Systems. Now they bring the skills they learned in the program to their work every day.

Hettinger, an IT Business Analyst and Data Visualization Specialist at Valley Forge-based AmerisourceBergen, named some crucial courses: He picked up requirements gathering and project planning skills in Digital Solutions Studio; Data Science allowed him to “mess around with visualization tools without the pressures of a job;” Data Analytics introduced database models.

Electives, too, were important.

“Even the classes that didn’t seem to have as direct an impact have mattered,” he said. “I now see the value in the problem-solving skills I learned in classes unrelated to my job.”

Hettinger enjoyed math and science but found computer programming limiting. He chose MIS as a sophomore.

“With MIS, you get to be a part of tech, but it’s not limited to programming,” he said. “I really liked the idea of being involved in strategy and big picture planning and using problem-solving skills like you would in math.”

Hettinger interned at AmerisourceBergen twice as a student and joined the pharmaceutical company full-time after graduation. He’s met other MIS graduates there and hopes to recruit more. 

“Some new employees have to play catch up because this is their first exposure to some real job challenges,” he said. “I use something I learned at Temple every day.”

Buerger is part of NBCUniversal’s Media Technology Program, a two-year program giving associates technical and managerial experience by working three jobs in different locations; in her case New York, New Jersey and California, where she now lives. 

When the program ends in July, Buerger hopes to join the TV Entertainment division to further explore how technology affects the creation and distribution of TV and online content.

“Technology has played a large role in transforming the media landscape in recent years, providing a lot of opportunity for innovation in the future of entertainment,” she said.  

Buerger decided to combine technology and business as a junior.

“Tech has a large impact on the world and has the power to transform business when paired with competitive advantage,” she said. “Everything we do in life depends on a system.”

She interned at NBCUniversal in News Technology while at Temple. Since graduation, she’s held roles in Enterprise Applications, TV Entertainment Technology, and Brand Development, working as a project manager, business analyst, data analyst and application product owner.

“A great part of being in a rotational program is having the ability to work on multiple projects with different roles at the same time, allowing me to expand both my technical and leadership skills concurrently,” she said.

Buerger has met other MIS graduates at NBCUniversal and, like Hettinger, she wants to recruit more. She believes MIS sets them up for success. 

“MIS definitely prepared me. In addition to giving me an in depth understanding of technology concepts, looking at technology through a business lens is really what set me apart,” she said. “I have the ability to create meaningful business cases with financials, as well as use Systems Thinking to always align my work with the company’s strategic vision and larger architecture.”

Shahla Raei, MS ’17 IT Auditing and Cyber-Security, was back on Temple’s campus recently, screening internship candidates for Wells Fargo during the IT Career Fair. Raei, who’d joined the multinational financial services company as a Senior IT Auditor in June, had already impressed her bosses.  

“I was the first student from the program to join Wells Fargo and now senior management wants to hire more students with a (Management Information Systems) background,” Raei says. “They said it’s because they already have the background in auditing and the auditing process.”

A native of Iran, Raei earned her Bachelor of Software Engineering degree from South Tehran Branch University in 2011 and her Master’s in Science in IT Management from Payam Nour University in 2014. She moved to the U.S. in the Fall of 2014 to take a job at Philadelphia’s Fried Brothers Inc. as a Data Analyst helping optimize product sales and digital assets.

Looking to learn more about auditing, Raei decided to earn a second Master’s Degree at Fox School of Business. She quickly gained practical skills, like how to use Audit Command Language (ACL) and the specific steps of the audit process.

“Most of the professors work in the industry and having that experience is really helpful,” she said. “The teaching was practical.”

Raei also appreciated the opportunity to hone her people skills while at Fox. During her first year, she got a free membership to ISACA, the international professional association focused on IT governance.

“Coming from an engineering background, I was not as good at working with people I didn’t know,” Raei said. “English is my second language and was sometimes challenging. Temple provided the opportunities for me to practice my communication skills.”

After doing an IT Audit Internship with CHUBB, Raei met her current boss when he represented Wells Fargo at the IT Career Fair. He encouraged her to apply to the company.

“Getting that first job is really hard. Then you get into the industry and you can start building your network,” she said. “One of my professors, Thu Nguyen, works in the same department. It’s great because I already have a relationship with her.”

Wells Fargo has more than 1,000 auditors and Raei works with the Enterprise Technology Group. Her day to day work includes doing risk assessments and conducting audits from planning to field work to recording. Her background in Cyber-Security has been a huge benefit to her and her employer; she’s been able to do more security audits, which she finds more challenging.

“It’s really great because I’m working with people who have a lot of experience,” she said. “I’m still learning.”