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Four new faculty join the MIS department

The Fox School’s Department of Management Information Systems is pleased to welcome four new full-time faculty members in fall 2015.

Detmar Straub  Detmar Straub is Professor and IBIT Distinguished Visiting Professor of MIS. He recently retired from Georgia State University after 23 years. He is a hiker on trails all over America and turns wood for a hobby. 
 Laurel Miller Laurel Miller, Assistant Professor, received her MS in Education from the Temple University. She also is the Director of the Institute for Business and Information Technology and manages the corporate membership program.
 Jing Gong Jing Gong, Assistant Professor, will soon to receive her doctorate at Carnegie Mellon University. She enjoys studying consumer and firm behavior in technology-mediated markets. Jing likes to cook and go hiking, and is always eager to learn new technologies and methods.
 Amy Lavin Amy Lavin, Assistant Professor, received her MBA from the Fox School of Business, Temple University, where she was most recently responsible for the implementation of Salesforce as the Technical Training Manager. Aside from teaching, her other passions include spending time with family, cooking and reading.

 

Temple Learning Platform at Loyola University and KIPP Charter School

What if there was a tool that created an educational environment that didn’t just teach but engaged students so that learning was communal—an interactive social activity, not a static one-way street of facts and stats flowing from teacher to student?And suppose that same tool allowed high school kids to learn how to manage their digital lives and, as those kids became college students, gave them a chance to build their online professional presence.

That tool exists, and it was built by Fox School’s Management Information Systems department.  This year it was used not just by Fox MIS, but by college students at Loyola University Maryland and by high schoolers at KIPP DuBois Collegiate Academy, in Philadelphia.

The Temple Community Platform is a Web 2.0, cloud-hosted platform based on WordPress. It allows students to create profiles and maintain e-portfolios of their work.  Professors and administrators also have profiles, plus share assignments and course descriptions.  All users comment and share– some blog and post articles.

Plus, it’s gamified.  Students get points for their efforts.

Loyola UniversityAt the Loyola University Maryland’s Sellinger School of Business and Management, Professor and DeFrancis Scholar in Information Systems, Paul Tallon, read about MIS students using e-portfolios at a Fox career fair. Tallon was intrigued.  “It whetted my appetite because we talked about doing something like that,” he said.

Tallon reached out to do some fact gathering, and shortly thereafter found himself running a pilot program at Loyola, with the platform hosted and supported by Temple. The first semester the platform was up and running, Tallon made creating an e-portfolio a class requirement in one of his courses.  Twenty-eight students went step-by-step through the process of creating a deliberate digital identity. 

Tallon said, “I’m convinced this is the way to go.”  By using a platform that works the way Facebook and LinkedIn work, but is specifically for educational and professional purposes, students learn to post and interact in ways that are more polished than on social media sites.

By the end of the year, more than 60 Loyola business school students had created e-portfolios.  Tallon thinks that, moving forward, sophomores should be using the platform as part of their required Intro to Information Systems class. At that point they “should have a resume and be interested in internships.”

With the Temple and Loyola platforms, future employers can search the e-portfolios, looking for specific skill sets and experience and see the resumes and projects that have been posted.  This helps match students with the right internship—and, eventually, the right job.

KIPP PhiladelphiaThe second pilot program took place at KIPP DuBois Collegiate Academy, in Philadelphia (a public charter school in an historically underserved area of the city). Rachel Kyler, a teacher and the Director of College Placement, explained that at the high school level the community platform is closed to outsiders, due to a need for student privacy, but open to the school community.

But, like the business schools, one of the major goals of KIPP is to prepare kids for the working world. To be successful, they need to develop “soft skills (like) networking” and to work at internships, Sarah Gomez, Managing Director of KIPP Through College said.

The platform (note: link leads to password protected site) was rolled out to more than 100 11th graders as part of their Junior College Seminar.  The goal was to give the students a place put their resume, showcase their work and communicate with each other about their internships over the summer.

The feedback from the students is positive, Kyler said. “They’re excited about communicating and connecting—they can share what’s working at their internships.”

The platform helped streamline the internship process for the school staff, and will help with both accountability and helping kids overcome challenges during the summer.

Plus, “It’s good college prep because colleges are moving in this direction.”

The Temple Community Platform was conceived in 2008 for the Fox School’s Department of Management Information Systems and since inception has hosted 7300+ members, 5900+ sites, 1200+ e-portfolios, 17,000+ posts, 48,000+ comments, and 300+ courses. It is being used by Temple’s School of Tourism and the Fox School’s Department of Human Resource Management and talks are underway to expand use at Loyola University.

Peter Hwang steps up and wins

Peter HwangIt came as a complete surprise to Peter Hwang to learn that he’d won the 2015 Student Leadership Award given by Fox School‘s Management Information Systems Department and Institute for Business and Information Technology.

But win he did, and he, along with several other honorees, received his award at the 15th annual Information Technology Awards event on April 14, 2015.

Hwang is a Junior, majoring in Management Information Systems. The award is given annually to a full time undergraduate, or part or full time graduate student, who’s made a significant contribution to the students and extended community of the MIS department.

It’s unusual for such a young student to get the award, but Hwang has been stepping up as a leader since his sophomore year when he first joined Temple AIS (the founding student chapter of the Association of Information Systems.)

The organization offers students a chance to hone a variety of skills directly and indirectly related to MIS, through workshops, resume critiques and forums with speakers.  It also gives students a chance to promote their current field of study, MIS.

“I tried to be active as possible. I would go to all the events and participate in their mentorship program.” Hwang says about his sophomore year with AIS.

“I applied to be the Director of IT my junior year. After the first semester, the VP of Operations stepped down. I was offered the position and gladly accepted.”  Hwang says he had a strong desire to help out. By taking on the dual role, Hwang was effectively doing twice the standard level of volunteer work, which was seen by fellow students as well as faculty as much more than “helping out.”

Plus, he did it with a positive attitude.

Since arriving at Temple, a choice he made because it was close to home and he was interested in business, Hwang says he’s transformed.  In high school, he was not as involved in academics. Now, he is “able to give back, to give workshops.”

One thing that hasn’t changed during his college career– his love of tennis.  Hwang was the captain of his tennis team at Marple Newtown High School, and continues to play club tennis.  It is, he says, for balance in his life. “It’s important to be physically active.”

Other people honored for making a significant contribution to the students and extended community of the MIS department include:

  • Faculty Leadership Award – James Moustafellos
  • Administrative Leadership Award – Debbie Riley
  • Administrative Achievement Award – Jillian Reilly
  • Faculty Teaching Award (full-time) – David Schuff
  • Faculty Teaching Award (part-time) – Amy Lavin
  • MIS Researcher of the Year – Paul Pavlou

Temple’s AIS Student Chapter wins 1st again – for 4th consecutive year!

AIS 2015 ConferenceTemple’s AIS Student Chapter won big again at the Sixth Annual AIS Student Leadership Conference and Competition receiving first and second place. These victories mark four straight years of Temple’s clinching a first-place at the AIS conference – further affirming a remarkable year for the chapter, which was recently named Distinguished Chapter by the Association for Information Systems (AIS).

Held over April 9-11, 2015, in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and hosted by the University of Alabama, the AIS conference hosted about 300 participants from schools around the globe, whose student teams had the opportunity to enter into various competition tracks. Fox MIS students competed in the IS that serves society track.

  • 1st Place: Ken Wunderle and James Dantonio for MyPhilly Access
    A city-wide network of kiosks that would provide essential information for the homeless population of Phila.  It is a very simple interface to allow people with varying levels of literacy and technical ability to be able to access vital information on housing, food, medical services, emergency housing, job training, and counseling.
  • 2nd Place: Stephen Scanlon, Peter Hwang, Jack Portnoy, and Matt Keenan for Got Your Back
    Designed to create transparency between Law Enforcement and Society.  Incorporates Google Glass to live stream video and data to the dispatcher, while storing the information in a Cloud database.  A real-time “second set of eyes” promotes greater safety and informed decision making for police officers in the field, and will significantly enhance both officer accountability and evidence gathering.

The AIS conference’s goal is to connect students, faculty, and corporate representatives, share best practices on operating and funding the chapter, and foster valuable (and competitive) information-system based activities. This year, as with previous years, Temple was more than up to the challenge.

Congratulations to the Temple champions!

Alum Ron Riddell ’68 endows 100K scholarship

When Ron Riddell graduated with a B.B.A. from Temple in 1968 computers were, he says, a “mystic temple in society.” But, armed with his degree, Riddell found himself in the computer field, and wound up, nearly 40 years later, with a successful career as a mainframe programmer. He’s currently a system support analyst and Assistant Vice President at Wells Fargo Bank.

Part of the achievement he attributes to luck, but “with out a degree at Temple I wouldn’t have gotten where I’m at…it opened doors to reasonable success.”

Now he’s helping other Temple students get their degrees, and have a chance at finding open doors, by funding the Ron and Ronda Riddell Endowed Scholarship with a $50,000 gift which is being matched by the Fox School for a total endowment of $100,000.

Munir Mandviwalla, Associate Professor and Chair, MIS, says the gift is “transformational because it will support hard working Temple students who choose business technology as a career. It is also the first such gift in the short history of the department.”

Riddell understands hard work and tight finance. He chose Temple because he could afford the tuition and live at home (commuting to class was common at the time). He got a further boost about two years into his studies. Temple became “state-related,” a designation that Pennsylvania gives universities that are independently run, but receive financial appropriations—in exchange for offering tuition discounts to students that are residents of Penn.

It was while he was at school that he met his future wife, Ronda Currens, although she didn’t attend Temple. The two met at church and she was only in Philly for a year before going home to Minneapolis. “ Four and a half years, and a lot of phone calls later,” the two married.

A job at Philco was Riddell’s first open door. After 18 months in production, he moved into programming. At the time, Philco was heavily involved in defense contracting, including work with NASA. His first computer was a Burroughs with 256 kilobytes. “I’ve got more memory sitting in my programmable alarm clock,” he points out.

The position at Philco lead to a stint at The Franklin Mint, then years of work at Combustion Engineering (a company who, at the time, was a leader in the development of both fossil and nuclear steam supply power systems.)

Then he took a job with Fidelity Bank and he’s now bee n in banking for 30 years.

“I didn’t build a better mousetrap. I got lucky getting a job in computers when demand was high.” Riddell says. He also invested, and lived a comfortable but modest life with Ronda (who succumbed to MS in 2009).

He wanted to do something that was large enough to make an impact, and the endowed fund does just that.

He also hopes that naming the scholarship after his wife, Ronda, will help people remember her. She was with him for 45 years.

Most importantly, though, “if it helps get a kid through college” then Riddell’s more than happy to have made sure doors continue to open.

Language influences the emergence of online community leadership

What you say and how you say it may be just as important in online interactions as it is in face-to-face conversations. Especially, if you want to be thought of as a leader. Assistant Professor of MIS, Steven L. Johnson and colleagues recently analyzed the language used by members of threaded discussion boards to determine who was a leader, and who was perceived to be a leader.

The key finding? “Emergent leaders — those viewed as most influential by other participants — tend to use language differently than other participants.” Johnson says.

The research was conducted by asking members of the boards who they thought were influential. A method Johnson describes as similar to a nomination process.

After “controlling for the obvious: formal role, boundary spanning and centrality” the team came up with about 3,000 potential leaders. They then looked at the written texts posted by the 59 nominees and compared them to the 3,000.

What you say onlineThey found that people who are thought of as leaders:

  • are among most frequent posters,
  • use positive language,
  • have concise posts (fewer words per post),
  • use simpler language (higher readability scores)
  • use language that is more prototypical of the community (language in their posts looks more like the typical language of all other participants).

These findings superseded whether or not the emergent leader had a formal title or position, although having one (such as administrator or moderator) did sometimes help a person get nominated.

The research was conducted by looking at all the posts in a one-year period of three online communities—all of which had a computer technology focus.

Johnson says that he was surprised, when they began the work, that there weren’t more studies done “that looked at how we wrote.”

The new findings provide, he says, empirical evidence that supports what most people in leadership theory believe. “To be a leader, you have to have good communication skills.”

S. L. Johnson, Hani Safadi, and Samer Faraj (forthcoming). “The Emergence of Online Community Leadership,” Information Systems Research.

Studying the evolution of digital artifacts with ‘big data’

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded a three-year grant totaling nearly $900,000 to trace human behaviors through big data. This marks the fourth NSF-awarded grant in the last five years that an interdisciplinary team of Temple faculty members has received to study the evolution of digital artifacts using large-scale digital trace data. The collaboration joins researchers from the Fox School’s Management Information Systems Department and College of Science and Technology (CST).

“When humans interact with digital systems, we leave a trace. Every call we make, every website we visit, it’s stamped with time and space information,” said Dr. Youngjin Yoo, the Harry A. Cochran Professor of Management Information Systems at the Fox School, and the research grant’s primary investigator. “What we do is constantly changing, and the trace data can act as DNA. What we focus on through this research is the repeat behaviors in humans that can be captured through digital trace data.

“Using those evolutionary patterns, we believe we can predict future behaviors of individuals and organizations. For example, by detecting the changes of commute patterns of individuals, we can predict overall public-transit systems’ performance in the future. Similarly, we want to be able to predict the changes in individual behaviors based on environmental changes. 

Yoo said he and the grant’s co-principal investigators will study digitally enabled processes in complex digital systems, which “are like a living ecosystem, in that they constantly evolve,” he said. If patterns in the trace data represent what they call “behavioral genes,” Yoo said, alterations to those behavioral routines are “gene mutations.” Eventually, he said, the research team envisions developing software that will better predict the changes to those behavioral genes.

The benefits in doing so, according to Yoo, “are endless.” In a healthcare application, trace data could develop a pattern by which a patient sees a doctor or produce an average cost of care per patient. In an industry sense, such “gene mutations” could impact performance and cost.

“On the surface,” Yoo said, “all smart phones, for example, look the same. But everybody’s phone is different because of apps. It used to be that the product’s designer would make the product, and that was the end of the story. Now, it’s only the beginning. Millions of apps are downloaded. They’re changing constantly.

“Our argument is that, particularly in digital space, innovation never remains the same. It constantly changes and takes different forms.”

The research team includes: Yoo; Dr. Sunil Wattal, Associate Professor of Management Information Systems at the Fox School; Dr. Zoran Obradovic, Laura H. Carnell Professor of Data Analytics at CST; and Dr. Rob Kulathinal, Assistant Professor of Biology at the College of Science and Technology.

The NSF-awarded research grant runs through Jan. 31, 2018.

– Christopher A. VitoAdd New

Creative Capstone Projects Cap Off 2014

FOX MIS Capstone 2014

A little friendly competition and a lot of hard work are the hallmarks of the Fox School of Business Management Information Systems Capstone Project Showcase, an event where teams of MIS seniors present their final projects.Last semester, though, fun won out over hard, when a panel of judges awarded first prize to the team that built findr, a mobile app that sends people out, scavenger hunt style, into the city of Philadelphia tracking down fun things to do, see and eat.

Giovanna Corridoni, a recent MIS and International Business graduate who was part of the winning team, says that creating a capstone project is, “intense, more intense than a paper or a case study.”

One of the hardest parts was figuring out what to do in the first place, she says.  The team wanted “something worth doing” that could have a solid business plan.  If they didn’t create something people wanted to do, or buy, “what’s the point?”

Jordan Szenicer also said that agreeing on a viable idea was tough.  The five person team (which included himself, Corridoni, Jalen Blot, Matt Philips and Chaitra Nataraj) had two brainstorming sessions with no big epiphany until he shared his own wish that sites like Yelp served as better guides for urbane exploration.  “I wished there was something that just scouted out a day for me.”

So that’s what they built. 

The application is designed to take the user from point to point in a city, with incentives for visiting each spot. Take a picture at the Rocky statue and get the address of a great restaurant; go to the restaurant and get a free appetizer. Then continue onto a concert that the app tells you is happening—rather than hearing that a great band is town too late to get to the show.

The revenue stream would come from partnering with restaurants, Corridoni says, and the target market was 18 to 35 year olds— people who want to explore, but are overwhelmed with choices so “always go back to the same restaurant.

The road to completing the explore and enjoy app wasn’t smooth.  Both Szenicer and Corridoni say that there was a last minute scramble to pull everything together.

But they pulled it off, and won.  The actual prize was 100 Diamond Dollars for each member of the team, but Corridoni says the reward was really that she got to use her skills to create something awesome.

Alumnus Ben Hasan, Senior Vice President, IT Strategic Services, at Walmart, served as the team’s mentor and thinks they won because both the product and the presentation was the best.

Szenicer says, “After our presentation ended, I knew at that moment that we won. I was so proud of all of us. I just felt so great in what we had achieved.”

Of course, just completing and presenting a capstone project is quite an achievement. 

Other projects presented at the December event included:

Rapid Rampup
A gamification-based app that aims to reduce the time it takes for new-hires to become 100% proficient in their job.
Mentor: Michael Bradshaw

Ian Johnson
Jude Habib
Daniel Hoffens
Brandon Warech

SafEvac
The smartphone application and dashboard provide schools and local police with a tool to better respond, secure, and evacuate during a school shooting.
Mentor: Bruce Fadem

Corey Kalkanoglu
Josh Meth
Michael Nguyen
Karrie Burgess

HealthFit Pro
HealthFit Pro is a lifestyle application that enables diabetic and non-diabetic users to take control of their health by monitoring their diet, exercise and glucose readings.
Mentor: Tim O’Rourke

Mathew Cotton
Kira Greenlee
Mahfuz Hassan
Veer Patel
Jerrin Raju

ZAP
ZAP is a gamified energy management app. that displays real-time energy use relative to other citizens with similar homes in their zip code, city, or state.
Mentor: Jeff Hamilton

Steven Cawley
Michael Fracas
Jonathan Gavala
Alexandra Guilford
John Hendricks

TIM- Time is Money
TIM is a mobile app that allows people to outsource waiting in line, so they can best take advantage of all of their free time.
Mentor: Joseph Spagnoletti

Jesse Dahms
Zachary Silverstein
Thane Tagg
Rachael Voluck
Christopher Pak

Dr. Youngjin Yoo is the first Harry A. Cochran Professor of MIS at Fox

Yoo_Professorship

Getting a named professorship is like making it to a pro ball team, says Dr. Youngjin Yoo, Professor of Management Information Systems and Director, Center for Design and Innovation, Fox School of Business and Management, Temple University.  On Friday, November 14, he was named the “Harry A. Cochran Professor of Management Information Systems” at the Fox School’s Research and Teaching Award ceremony.

Harry A. Cochran is “the dean who laid the foundation upon which the Fox School of Business thrives,” said Fox School Dean, M. Moshe Porat, “being recognized as the inaugural holder of a professorship in his name is a significant honor.”

The honor is not, Yoo says, just a validation of his research but of the ideas he pursues.  The unique viewpoint– that digital technology is now ubiquitous, in every part of our lives, and that it requires a mix of creativity, innovation and even a little philosophical examination to manage and effectively use technology and the tools it creates- is one that has evolved over years of study, research and life.

“When Youngjin first came to Fox, we not only saw in him a good researcher, but also what I like to call an academic entrepreneur,” Porat said. “He’s not simply someone with an idea who follows the conventional way of thinking. He always finds a different angle, using a creative, innovative and contrarian way of thinking. He has distinguished himself in his research, in the grants he has received and in the creativity that he has brought to the Management Information Systems department and the Fox School of Business.”

Why is Yoo so creative, innovative and contrarian?  The answer dates back to Yoo’s experiences as a student in South Korea. “How,” Yoo asked then, and still ponders now, “can I think about ways to improve human lives with the tools and resources we have?” As a teenager Yoo was determined to become a government civil servant, one of the obvious paths (along with doctor, lawyer or engineer) open to smart kids growing up with limited resources. Until he entered Seoul National University and found himself studying management and business administration; the econ department didn’t want him.  At university, Yoo read a passage which he says changed his life: If academic disciplines start from pure science to applied one, then management is the ultimate destination of applied science as it explores ways to improve human lives by mobilizing all the resources that the creator has given to people.

It was also at University that his determination, and maybe his ability to be contrary, were forged. Early on he made one trivial arithmetic mistake on an exam in his operations research class and earned a low final grade, despite his protestations to the professor that it was a small mistake. Yoo spent two years studying the material and signed up for advanced operations research, determined to prove the professor wrong in his assessment of Yoo’s ability. The first day of class, he answered a question correctly and, when asked, explained his answer so well that the professor told Yoo he, too, should teach.  The professor then wrote a recommendation for Yoo to study in the U.S. Yoo earned his Ph.D. in Management at the R. H. Smith School of Business, The University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland in 1997.

The rest of the story is a multi-faceted journey of research and publishing in the areas of digital innovation, design, organizational genetics, and the societal use of technology.  He is currently a senior editor for the “MIS Quarterly” and other journals. He’s worked with industries ranging from Samsung Electronics to American Greetings and, recently, was featured (with 12 other technologists) in Philadelphia Magazine’s, “The Smartest People in Philadelphia.” And, of course, he’s taught.  His university experience is global, ranging from Sweden and China to the more local world at The Weatherhead School of Management, Case Western Reserve University.

At Temple, Yoo has worked both inside and outside the classroom; he’s the Founding Director of Center for Design+Innovation at Temple. 

Design is, Yoo says, “the driver of innovation, particularly in the digital domain.  Digital technology is a force that destabilizes things…blurs the boundary of product and industry, and design is how we re-imagine things.” 

So, like musical notes or written language, digital technology will never “remain in a box” and must be created and re-created. “Design is inseparable” from digital technology, Yoo says. The necessary creativity can be found in surprising places.

Recently, Yoo’s taken his work to the streets of Philadelphia and brought Philly teenagers onto campus via Temple’s Urban Apps and Maps Studios program (funded by The Knight Foundation and EDA.) The project teaches teens design, coding, and story telling so they can create apps that help solve problems encountered by residents of urban communities—like turning vacant lots into viable urban community farms. The students are “awesome” Yoo says.  “They do things we don’t think about…a goldmine of creativity.”

Yoo says that working with high school students isn’t the only surprise he’s encountered over the past few years.  The fact that he’s become a named professor, his own success, still seems to startle him. He’s “honored, flattered…it’s great news.” But he’s not ready to rest on his laurels or bask in his new title. Yoo’s moving forward by looking back—at 200 years of technology, and how it was managed and has been a driver of economic change.  

That econ department in Korea?  They don’t know what they missed.

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