Angelika Dimoka, Paul Pavlou and Vinod Venkatraman received a $350,000 grant from the Advertising Research Foundation (ARF) to investigate the marketing success of TV advertising. The Center for Neural Decision Making (CNDM) will establish a model to predict the success of TV advertising by evaluating multiple TV ads with multiple neurophysiological tools. Participating firms include major companies in the technology, financial, pharmaceutical, and consumer goods industries.
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IT Auditing and Cyber-Security program aligns with international association ISACA
The Master of Science in Information Technology Auditing and Cyber-Security (ITACS) at the Fox School of Business is aligned with the curriculum set forth by ISACA, the international governing organization for IT assurance that designs and awards the Certified Information Systems Auditor (CISA) certification.
Officially aligning with the organization responsible for the CISA designation is important, ITACS Director Richard Flanagan said. One great benefit is that graduates of Temple’s ITACS program are required only two years of work experience before they can earn their CISA designation from ISACA, instead of the usual five years.
“It’s a big deal,” Flanagan said. “Information systems have become increasingly important to businesses, and firms sometimes spend more on information systems staff than any other department. What students are learning at Fox is what ISACA thinks they should be learning.”
The ITACS program began in January 2012. For 10 months, students from around the world learn to assess, manage and control IT risks while preparing for the CISA exam.
The strengths of the ITACS program and its faculty benefit undergraduate students, too. It was with the help of Flanagan that Kazuhiko Koyanagi, a management information systems and accounting double major, won a $2,500 Fall 2011 tuition scholarship from the Philadelphia chapter of ISACA for his essay, “Secure Mobile Device Management in This Information-Driven Era.” Koyanagi was recognized for the accomplishment in June 2012.
In addition, the ITACS program is now recognized by the U.S. government as a Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) degree, which means that international students are granted 17 additional months of Optional Practical Training, which allows them to work at U.S. firms without needing a special visa.
“Our international students can now work for almost two and a half years for an American company before needing sponsorship,” Flanagan said.
IT Career Fair on October 10, 2012
The Institute for Business and Information Technology (IBIT) announces the Fox IT Career Fair on October 10, 2012, 11am-3pm, Alter Hall. Interact with top employers who are specifically interested in recruiting Fox MIS, ITACS, ITM, Digital Marketing, and ITIE students (majors and minors, grad and undergrad).
Employers from GSK, Lockheed Martin, AstraZeneca, Cigna, ARAMARK, Deloitte, Dow, and Merck are attending as well as many others to recruit for full-time and internship positions. See http://ibit.temple.edu/careerfair for a complete list of employers. These employers are coming because they have made a commitment to your program and major, and to the Fox Department of Management Information Systems.
To participate in this career fair you will need:
- To be CSPD’d
- An approved eportfolio listed on the Fox MIS Community eportfolio site at: http://community.mis.temple.edu/eportfolios/
- Completed registration on http://ibit.temple.edu/careerfair/about/attendance-and-registration/. The deadline is September 28, 2012.
In order to have an approved eportfolio you must submit it to the above site for approval. Please be sure to read all of the points on the samples and resources page before submitting your eportfolio.
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 special cards will list your name, major, email address and will have a QR code so that the employer can scan it with an iPAD and see your eportfolio while they are speaking to you. Only these special business cards are allowed at the career fair.
Digital Business Strategy by Niraj Patel
MIS 5108: Digital Business Strategy on Mondays 6:00pm to 8:30pm at Temple Center City
Technology creates new business opportunities. Learn to be an Digital Business Strategy leader from Digital Business Strategy leaders. See how they exploit the power of technology to create new products and services.
- Learn best practices from industry experts in a workshop format
- Analyze and evaluate leading edge digitally enabled business models in multiple industries including small start-ups and the largest most successful digital business titans
- Formulate new digital business strategy for your firm or in specific industries based on your interest and knowledge
- Apply web 2.0, social media, and analytics as strategic levers in digital business models
Tentative list of guest speakers
- Ravi Bala, Chief Operating Officer, HealthSignals
- Joshua Palau, Vice President, Sales and Marketing, Comcast
- Imad Farhat, Director, Firmenich
- Patrick M. Donohue, Vice President of National Accounts and Inventory Sales, MAACO
- Jim Datin, Executive Vice President, Safeguard Scientifics
- James Hayden, Senior Vice President Global Sales and Marketing, Certara (Tripos-Simcyp-Pharsight)
- Mary Hagy, CEO, cWyze Inc.
The course will be taught as a practical workshop. You will analyze existing digital business strategies in the first half of the course. In the second half of the course, you will put on the master training wheels and repeatedly construct and deconstruct new digital business strategies. The course will feature a who’s who list of guest speakers and analysts who will help you evaluate and construct digital business strategy.
About Niraj Patel
Niraj Patel, Co-founder of ISGN, is a leader in building global technology and services businesses especially in the mortgage and financial technology industries. He has more than 20 years’ experience in applying corporate management, entrepreneurship, and technology as business accelerators to generate organic and externally driven growth and investments. At ISGN, Niraj has deployed over $90 million in funding, and generated more than $100 million in revenue.
Niraj is also a founding partner of Witmer Partners. Witmer is responsible for launching 4 startups in the mortgage industry including Selene opportunity fund ($850 million), Selene finance, Helios (3x exit in 3 years) and Tavernier.
Prior to this Niraj was a part of the founding team of GMAC Commercial mortgage as executive vice-president and chief information officer. He was a key contributor to the organization’s international growth by consistently delivering double-digit net income growth for over 13 years and sold to private equity in 2006. At GMAC Commercial, Niraj was also responsible for spinning off several new startups (MortgageRamp, Gtel, Epitome Systems, EnableUs, olive), all of which had successful exits to growth equity and corporate community.
Recognized as an award winning innovator and viewed as one of the leading technologists of his generation, Niraj serves on boards and panels, speaks at industry conferences and is frequently quoted. These include the HSBC PA & DE Advisory Board; Microsoft Executive Circle; Eastern Technology Council; the Information Technology Advisory Board of the Fox School of Business, Temple University; the NPower CIO Advisory Council and his executive board experience includes: the Mortgage Industry Standards Maintenance Organization (MISMO) Board of Directors, EnableUS, Epitome Systems, Savana, MortgageRamp, Deskom and GTEL. Niraj graduated with a BBA in information systems and Finance from the Fox School of Business, Temple University.
Fox AIS student chapter earns top honors in global contest
Fifteen students from the Fox School’s Association for Information Systems (AIS) student chapter recently traveled to Provo, Utah, where they participated in the first-ever international AIS student chapter competition and earned first or second place in each of the categories they entered. The event included approximately 150 participants from 24 schools.
AIS is the premier global organization for information systems. The Fox School’s AIS chapter was the first student chapter in the world and was named a 2010 and 2011 Outstanding Chapter. This April, four teams of students advanced to the AIS competition finals in three categories: Mobile App, IT Video and IT Risk. Three of the four teams came out on top and earned international recognition with first- and second-place wins during the annual AIS student leadership conference.
Fox’s Mobile App team, which developed Sutify – an app to manage users’ professional wardrobes – and the IT Video team, which produced a video promoting IT as a career choice, won first place in their respective categories. One of the two IT Risk teams won second place in the IT Risk category for a detailed case study.
I have to say they were dominant in every facet of the conference
E. Carey O’Donnell, AIS chapter faculty advisor, Assistant Professor.
In addition to making it to the finals in Utah and winning first and second place in their target categories, Temple’s AIS students also presented at two sessions during the conference, held in conjunction with the competition. One of the presenters was Michelle Dy-Reyes, outgoing president of Temple AIS.
The recent AIS student chapter competition awards were a direct reflection of the drive, talent and competitive spirit of our AIS chapter here at Temple. We have been able to cultivate critical thinkers with keen eyes for award-winning technology solutions.
Michelle Dy-Reyes, AIS President
Students were able to network with leading executives, including the chief information officer of Walmart, Karenann Terrel, who mentioned the Fox students in her conference speech. The students also attracted attention and praise from AIS Executive Director Pete Tinsley.
Winning awards in three out of the four competitions makes the chapter one of the most decorated this year. Temple continues to be a shining example of an outstanding AIS student chapter of which others should strive to emulate.
Pete Tinsley, AIS Executive Director
For the Mobile App team, this competition was a tremendous boost to the recognition they have received since launching Suitify. The app, which allows users to store their wardrobe options, save outfits and plan clothing choices in a calendar format, has been approved for display in the Windows Phone marketplace. To date it has received an average 4.8 out of 5 rating. The app’s first-place win at the AIS competition was attributed, in part, to the group’s strong business model and projected success.
We have plans to continue developing the app, to finish fleshing out our business model of saving users’ wardrobe data and implementing a clothing suggestion feature.
Andy Roche, Suitify team member
In terms of national prominence, this competition was the Fox School AIS chapter’s biggest success yet, and the students are eager to continue competing, O’Donnell said. The winning Fox School AIS teams were:
- Mobile App first-place team: Andrew Roche, Scott Raff and John Shaw
- IT Video first-place team: Ryan Oliviera, Matt Adrien and Sara Rezaeian
- IT Risk second-place team: Valerie Spinosi, Menora Labrooy and Haoren Yu
- IT Risk finalists: Roman Nicholas, Czarina Agravante, Courtney Minich and Natalie Divalentino
Gamification of MIS3538: Social Media Innovation
Gamification in Higher Education
Is it possible to use gamification to motivate students above and beyond grades?
These students in my class certainly think so:
“The Quest was an amazing experience. Being able to score myself really helped me stay competitive with my site and made me do things now as opposed to later because I feared losing my rank.”
“I thought this was a great idea on Professor Johnson’s end, mainly because it was a friendly competitive challenge, and really engaged everyone to take part in it. Personally, I struggled in the beginning to keep up with other students, but since I had quite a few posts I was able to get myself on the leaderboard most of the time. There was definitely a peak in the middle of the semester where I really focused on posts and activities. Even though I never made it to the top, I was happy I made it to the leaderboards. Overall I thought that it was a great idea, and I have also noted the experience with other teachers to maybe incorporate it with other classes.”
“The Quest helped to motivate projects outside of the classroom. Quest points absolutely made me do projects in a timely matter so that I did not look like a slacker in front of the class. I thought it was a great idea to announce winners this let students know if they were slacking. Originally when the Quest started I was not ranked my goal starting out in the class was to make the leader board. By the end I was ranked [in top third]. The Quest without a doubt motivated me more to do more projects.”
“Participating in the Quest, what I learned was that you have to be dedicated and be active for your blog to be successful. In order to be on the Quest leader board, you had to be active and keep up with the activities given. During the first couple weeks I was on the leader board. However, after slowing down my activity on my blog, I was no longer on the leader board and was not on it since. The professor said that although being on the leader board does not equal an A for the course, people who are on the leader board generally do better in the class. I can see how this would hold true because being constantly active is one part of what makes a good blog. I believe that not being on the leader board directly correlated with the amount of effort that I put into the activities at that time. If I had kept with the activities as they were given and stayed on the leader board, then I could have had a better blog overall. “
“The Quest” leaderboard is a great idea for operating a class. Even though there’s no grading benefit to participating, it served as a great checklist for logging which social media activities each user completed. … Additionally, human beings are born with a competitive nature, so even though there’s no tangible reward for participating in “The Quest”, students still have a desire to compete to be the best among their peers. … Going over the leaderboard at the end of class in front of everyone also helps motivate students to participate. People love attention so this is a great opportunity to get noticed in front of a large audience. “
(All quotes from end of semester reports by students in Spring, 2012 section of MIS3538: Social Media Innovation.)
Social Media Innovation Quest
I recently completed my third semester teaching Temple University’s Fox School of Business MIS3538: Social Media Innovation course with the Social Media Innovation Quest as a gamification element.
I developed The Quest in order to encourage self-paced learning through a series of required and self-selected activities that got progressively more difficult. Through a combination of the WordPress Achievements plug-in and Google Forms, students:
- Earn points and badges,
- View their standing on a leader board, and
- Receive weekly recognition for “leveling-up”.
As the student feedback attests, well designed gamification can work in a college class room. In the rest of this blog post I’ll lay out the major elements of The Quest along with why I think they work.
Introducing the Quest
The Quest starts at the beginning of the semester, with points accruing to students with activities beginning on the first day of class. In the course syllabus, it is introduced as follows:
To help motivate students to maximize learning opportunities in this course, we also run a Social Media Innovation Quest (hereafter, The Quest). This is a “scoring” system that awards Quest Points (QPs), badges, and levels for class-related achievements. Students who gain sufficient QPs will be promoted to higher Quest levels and will rise to the top of the leaderboard!
Quest points, badges, levels, and the leaderboard are for fun!
Lots of Quest Points, numerous badges, a high level, and the top spot on the leaderboard are no guarantee of a high course grade. Nonetheless, past experience shows that the number of QPs earned and strong course performance usually goes hand-in-hand. Therefore, during the semester your QPs do provide one assessment, albeit imperfect, of your course performance to date.
The class instructor solely determines your grade based on completed work, assignment requirements, and grading criteria. Pay attention to the formal assignment requirements as posted on the Course Instructor Blog and expectations stated on the blog and in the course.
The building block for the quest is Quest Points. There are primarily earned by completing activities that are also reflected in a student’s participation grade (20% of final grade) or the major individual assignment grade (40% of final grade).
The Mechanics
The Achievements plug-in automatically keeps track of how many posts and comments students make on the Course Participation Hub blog (all 45 students had authoring privileges at the blog). I set it up so that students earn points (and badges) for their first three posts and for pre-set levels of comments (e.g., 1st, 5th, 10th, 20th, and on up to 100th). To keep things interesting, the comment levels are not entirely predictable and some of the achievements are even hidden until earned.
There are many ways that students can earn points (and badges). Every couple of weeks during the semester I release more activities. Once a student completed an activity, they enter it at the Activity Submission Form. I review submitted activities multiple times a week and either (a) grant the achievement or (b) provide feedback on what still needs to be done.
(If I had an unlimited budget for enhancing my “courseware,” I would create a system to release new activities individually based on which activities had already been completed. Also, I would have some way to have all achievements machine-graded in order to provide immediate feedback. If anyone wants to fund such an effort, please contact me!)
Leaderboards and Leveling-Up
On the course website there is a leaderboard showing the very top performing students (Top 10 out of 45). Compared to a typical course where the highest performing students have little motivation to achieve beyond an “A” level, the Top 10 leaderboard provides constant reinforcement to highly motivated students to go well beyond the course requirements.
The leaderboard promoted at the end of every (weekly) class meeting serves a different purpose. It does not show point totals, instead it shows a much larger number of students grouped by level. The cut-off for making this leaderboard tracked the pace for “meeting course expectations” (roughly a B grade).
Also, instead of implicitly rewarding only the top performers, everyone who made significant efforts that week is recognizing for “leveling-up” to a new performance band. This provides motivation not just for the very top performing students, but important feedback for everyone in the course.
Why does it work?
I’ll leave the final word to my students:
I find this system very useful because it served as a strong motivator for me to stay not only on top of the material, but also to be on the leader board. As a student who consistently appeared on the leader board through the whole semester, I must acknowledge that the level of satisfaction I gained each time I moved a level up, strongly influenced my course performance and the amount of effort I put into completion of all activities.
I would say that The Quest is important because of the way it ties everything together and incentivizes getting your work done. On top of that, it motivates some students to go above and beyond, which enriches the class experience for the rest of us. Over the course of the semester, the participation hub got better and better with comments and people replying to comments. Even though it was for a grade, you can’t just make up stuff in the comments – you have to put some thought into what you’re saying (I may have put too much thought into mine, but I felt good after I gave my opinions on things which I felt were well explained).
The Quest Leader board was the best aspect of the social media class. Having a friendly competitive atmosphere that motivated all of us to learn as much as we could about social media was awesome. There were some activities within the leadership board that I wish we received a tutorial on first but I guess the best way to learn something new is to actually try it out and fail a couple of times.
MIS3538: Social Media Innovation is an upper-level elective offered by the Management Information Systems Department in the Fox School of Business.
Faculty news – O’Donnell, Wattal, Flanagan, Pavlou, Dimoka, Johnson, Schuff, and Mandviwalla
- Carey O’Donnell to speak at the NFAIS Conference on a pilot program on the use of iPad’s and all-digital content in the classroom, June 15th, 2012.
- Sunil Wattal spoke on Crowdfunding: A New Era of Democratized Entrepreneurship at the Knowledge Leadership Series organized by the International Executive Education Center, Singapore, May 30, 2012.
- Rich Flanagan spoke about IT Governance at Beijing National Accounting Institute, May 25, 2012.
- Paul Pavlou was quoted in a Philadelphia Business Journal article on Big Data, May 25, 2012.
- Angelika Dimoka recently had a paper accepted at MISQ: How to Conduct a functional Magnetic Resonance (fMRI) Study in Social Science Research, MIS Quarterly (forthcoming)
- Steven L. Johnson wrote an open editorial on The rise and fall of Facebook, Philadelphia Inquirer, May 22, 2012. He was quoted in an article on social media by the Philadelphia Business Journal, May 4, 2012 and was also quoted by Advertising Age on brand management in social media, April 23, 2012
- David Schuff and Munir Mandviwalla spoke about Making Education Social: The FoxMIS Community Site, at the Campus Technology Forum – Los Angeles, CA, May 1, 2012 (click here for the video) and will present on the same topic at the Campus Technology Forum, Boston, MA, July 16, 2012.
- David Schuff was cited by Find-MBA on the value of MBA programs with an IT focus, April 23, 2012.
FOX Update features MIS
The April 2012 FOX Update features MIS rankings, research, advisory board, conferences, IT awards, and innovation. Read it now!
Jessica Samph: Make ITM Work
Professor Sunil Wattal measures the business value of personalization
Professor Sunil Wattal measures the business value of personalization in a forthcoming article on firms’ use of different types of information for email advertising. When firms use product-based personalization, consumers respond positively. On the other hand, consumers respond negatively when firms are explicit in their use of personally identifiable information (e.g., a personalized greeting). The negative response to personalized greetings is more intense for consumers who are not familiar with the firm.
The study shows the the benefits of personalized e-mails and also highlights consumers’ concerns over the use of information in personalization. The research is based on a unique data set of over 10 million e-mail advertisements sent by a website to over 600,000 customers.
The article titled ‘What’s in a “Name”? Impact of Use of Customer Information in E-Mail Advertisements’ has been accepted for publication in Information Systems Research.
