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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
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.
When is it a good idea for state governments to spend more tax dollars? When that money goes to information technologies, it turns out.
Min-Seok Pang, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Information Systems, Fox School of Business, is a self-proclaimed “news and political junkie.” That interest lead to a question: what is the value of IT in the public sector? While there has been extensive research on the fiscal value of information technologies in the business sector for the last couple of decades, little has been done about evaluating the way in which government spending on IT affects or improves services or efficiencies.
In the business world, the research has demonstrated that more investment in IT leads to improvement in firm performance in terms of productivity, profitability, or market value. But, in the public sector there was only anecdotal evidence illustrating that the correct use and implementation of information systems in public organizations could save taxpayers’ money, for instance, by digitizing business processes, which can save time, or improving transparency of an administration.
Pang and co-authors Dr. M.S. Krishnan, University of Michigan, and Dr. Ali Tafti, University of Illinois, Chicago, first compared all 50 states to see which was most efficient, measuring efficiency by looking at how much money various states spend to produce the same level of government services. They then looked at the level of IT spending to calculate the cost savings. Finally, they compared spending data, from 2001-2004, from 44 U.S. state governments.
If one state spends more money to produce the same amount of government services than other states, that state is less efficient than others. I found that the more tax revenues a state government spends in information technologies, the more efficient it is.
How efficient? An additional $1 investment in IT made by a state’s chief information officer (CIO) leads to a savings of $1.13 in the state’s administrative costs, in terms of operational expenses and capital deprecation. Somewhat surprisingly, the savings was highest in rural areas. “Cost savings from $1 IT investments are larger when a state is more rural. But it does make sense – if a state is more rural, it has to maintain more state government offices and operations in remote locations (a DMV office for example). Providing government services via the Internet can save costs for both rural residents and state governments.” Pang said.
Pang’s research is one of the first rigorous scientific studies with a large-scale dataset that measure returns on IT investments in governments. With declining tax revenues and mounting budget deficits, some public-sector organizations have scaled back their investments in IT in recent years. Pang’s study shows that it is not a wise move. He believes that government IT officials can use the study to convince taxpayers and their representatives that IT investments generate sufficient returns to the public to justify needed, strategic, spending on IT.
Pang, M.-S., Tafti, A., and Krishnan, M.S. (2014) “Information Technology and Administrative Efficiency in U.S. State Governments – A Stochastic Frontier Approach,” MIS Quarterly (38:4) pp. 1079-1101.
Learn more about Min-Seok at: http://community.mis.temple.edu/minspang/
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An MIS degree from the Fox School of Business reflects far more than hours spent in the classroom. Beyond the program’s top-ranked courses are extensive and required opportunities for students to gain professional and academic experience, including scholarships, internships, career advancement, and friendly competition with peers.
Three students have seized these opportunities — Tyler Nelson, Elizabeth Calise, and Horatio Thomas – each taking full advantage of what the MIS program has to offer, and exemplifying Temple’s ongoing commitment to excellence.
Beginning this Fall of 2014, the Fox IT Advisory Board launched a new scholarship program that awards $50,000 annually to standout students. Among the first roster of recipients was Tyler Nelson, Class of 2016, who was delighted to be selected. “I felt accomplished knowing that I was being recognized for my academic work,” he said.
The IT Advisory Board seeks students who exhibit academic achievement, previous accomplishments, future potential, and maintain a top-notch e-portfolio. For Nelson, the scholarship was an affirmation of his decision to study MIS. “[It] came at a time when I was already interested in Management Information Systems, and it helped to solidify where I felt I belonged. Since I started attending Temple, I have always had something to do, places to go, and goals to aim for.”
Beyond this exciting new scholarship, there are many other ways in which an MIS student can distinguish him or herself.
Year-round, all those enrolled in the program can earn Professional and Academic Achievement Points. These points are tallied then translated to online public rankings – ultimately eligible to be redeemed for Temple merchandise at an online “Points Store.” The result is a spirited, fun exchange that helps foster incredible student achievement.
Elizabeth Calise is among the Leaderboard’s top Academic students, while Horatio Thomas is a “Grand Master” on the Professional Achievement scale – the highest possible ranking.
Calise, Class of 2016, is pursuing dual degrees at MIS and International Business, and began her college career in Virginia before transferring. “Moving to Philadelphia and attending Temple brought a wealth of new experiences, perspectives, and opportunities. All of these combined have positioned me to achieve tremendous success both personally and academically.”
She credits her accomplishments to her “amazing mentors within the faculty and my outstanding peers that have supported and helped me since day one.”
Horatio Thomas, currently a Grand Master (meaning, he has earned over 2,000 points) is an MIS and Accounting double major. A glance at his online portfolio helps explain his Grand Master status; he is the current President of the Association for Information Systems and spent this past summer interning in the Innovations Lab at the world’s largest company, Wal-Mart.
Horatio credits his success to the overwhelming support of his professors, faculty, AIS officers, and friends at Temple.
“My favorite part…is the access [Temple] gives you to opportunities to develop yourself personally and professionally.”
These three students’ stories are emblematic of what the Fox MIS program has to offer. And for every Tyler, Elizabeth, and Horatio are dozens of other students who are similarly striving for academic and professional excellence.
The Institute for Business and Information Technology (IBIT) announces the Fox IT Career Fair on September 24, 2014 (Wednesday) from 11am-3pm in Alter Hall.
Interact with top employers who are interested in recruiting Fox MIS, ITACS, ITM, Digital Marketing, and ITIE students (majors and minors, grad and undergrad). Twenty employers including Merck, Campbell Soup Company, Lockheed Martin, Walmart, Electronic Ink, LiquidHub, Wells Fargo, GlaxoSmithKline, Cigna, PwC, Vanguard, and Deloitte have already confirmed their participation to recruit for full-time and internship positions. See: http://ibit.temple.edu/careerfair.
These employers have made a commitment to your program and major, and to the FOX Department of Management Information Systems. To participate in the career fair you will need:
In order to have an approved eportfolio you must submit it to the above site for approval.
Each student that registers by the deadline will receive free special business cards to hand out to employers at the Fox IT Career Fair. These business cards will list your name, major, email address and will have a QR code so that the employer can scan to access your eportfolio. Only these special business cards are allowed at the career fair.
The Fox School’s MIS department is pleased to welcome three new full-time faculty in fall 2014. We took a moment to speak to them about their backgrounds, previous positions, and plans for Temple.
Brad Greenwood, Assistant Professor, received his Ph.D. in Information Systems from the University of Maryland, College Park. He is an avid cook who loves to spend time in the kitchen.
“Fox MIS offers the unique opportunity to work with world class scholars whose discipline spanning research not only pushes the boundaries of the IS context, but focuses on resolving significant public welfare problems which are faced by both practitioners and everyday people.”
Min-Seok Pang, Assistant Professor, received his Ph.D. in Business Administration from University of Michigan, and most recently served as Assistant Professor, School of Management, at George Mason University. His interdisciplinary research reflects his own personal interests in news and politics, and spans IT, business, public administration, and political sciences.
“What is most exciting about joining one of the best MIS group in the world is that I will have a chance to work with excellent and bright MIS doctoral students. It would be both a responsibility and a privilege to help future scholars thrive in academia.”
Jeremy J. Shafer, Assistant Professor, received his M.S. in Management Information Systems from Fox School of Business, Temple University, where he was most recently Director of Solutions Development. Shafer is deeply committed to service and volunteering; he and his wife are also advocates for and participants in special-needs adoption.
“I very much enjoyed teaching in the MIS department as an adjunct. When the opportunity arose for me to teach full time, I jumped at it! I believe in enabling people to create with technology, not just passively consume it. Putting those skills in the hands of entrepreneurial students is very rewarding to me.”
