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Last year, the MIS department began previewing several redesigned courses, and this fall the new curriculum has been officially rolled out in full. The introductory course, Digital Systems, teaches basic programming skills to all business students, regardless of major. It’s a new approach that will give Fox students a competitive edge after graduation.

“There’s been a push that MBAs should know how to code, and we’re bringing that thinking to our undergradates,” says David Schuff, Professor and Chair of the Department of Management Information Systems. “Some other business school programs start with basic computer literacy, but we’re asking, ‘What’s the next generation of tools and skills?’”

Digital Systems provides an overview of how businesses use technology in today’s economy. The first two-thirds of the course help students get a grasp of the big ideas in an active learning environment. Through hands-on, in-class assignments, students practice applying the concepts they’re learning, including programming.

“It represents a shift from a project-management focus to a product-management focus,” says Schuff.

During the final third of the course, students learn to code using JavaScript to build a digital product of their own. Their final project challenges students to make a tool that can rank potential investors in a fictional firm in terms of various functions like income, assets, and debt. “Their job is to write those functions,” says Steven Sclarow, Assistant Professor of MIS and the course coordinator.

“In the past, coding assignments taught concepts without putting the business perspective on it,” says Sclarow. “Our approach uses an overarching narrative throughout the course to help students see how it relates to them and digital product management,” he says.

The prospect can be daunting for some students, especially outside MIS, but completing the project gives them not only important new skills, but also confidence. And for MIS students, this introduction prepares them expertly for what’s to come: more advanced courses on API-based software development, user experience, and cybersecurity.

“The new Digital Systems course is the latest example of how Temple’s MIS department prepares students for the workforce,” says Bruce Fadem, chair of the IT Advisory Board and retired VP and CIO of Wyeth.

“All business students are going to encounter digital systems, no matter what job they have,” says Sclarow. And Schuff emphasizes this point: “If you’re in accounting or finance, you might have a need to do process automation. In marketing, you might need to manipulate data to do analyses. Programming is becoming an essential tool to do these things yourself.”

When Juhi Ghosh (MS ’07) came to Temple with a computer science degree from India’s Pune University, she was committed to furthering her MIS education while mixing in finance and marketing courses to help her succeed in the fintech industry. “I did a lot of research before I picked MIS,” she said. “It’s one of the few MIS programs offered at a business school and it had the right balance of business and technology management.”

While earning her M.S., Ghosh interned at Goldman Sachs as a software developer and after graduation, returned to New York City to work for the firm. She then spent seven years at Elliott Management Corporation and now is a product manager at Arcesium, a post trade technology company providing solutions for alternative asset managers.

Rachael Voluck (BBA ’14) transferred to Temple from Penn State in search of a diverse student body, a campus connected to urban life, and a major that would make her competitive in the job market.

She found just that with MIS. “MIS is an innovative program that prepares you for the workplace and connects you to potential employers,” she said. “Temple instilled a solid work ethic in me that’s proven very helpful.” That work ethic was evident during her time at Temple – in 2013, Voluck received the Cara and Niraj Patel Scholarship for high performing MIS students.

The Montgomery County native started her career at Vanguard before shifting gears to work for startups in the fintech, insurance tech, and advertising tech fields. Today, she works in San Francisco at Square, a leading financial services and mobile payment company. As a technical product manager on the communication platform team, she builds enterprise software including email, SMS, push notifications, and in-product messages.

While at Temple, Voluck was president of Net Impact, a sustainability and corporate social responsibility organization at Fox. She also co-founded the Rad Dish Co-op Cafe with a group of fellow students. “As the only person from business school involved, I wrote the business plan and handled the economics of menu pricing,” she said. “I helped show that business fundamentals are really important no matter what you’re doing.”

She’s energized by hearing that more women have joined the MIS program in recent years, saying “I like the idea of more women learning about tech and getting out there and doing it.”

It’s been another great year for Temple MIS. We are proud to have hosted the 10th Annual Association for Information Systems (AIS) Student Chapter Leadership Conference. The first conference was held at Temple in 2010, and the opportunity to bring it back to Philadelphia was exciting. In addition, three Temple AIS student teams placed in the Alexion Analytics Challenge track and our student chapter took home two awards.

I am also pleased to share our faculty’s recent research accomplishments. Professor Min-Seok Pang won best paper awards from the Association for Information Systems and Information Systems Research. Professor Detmar Straub’s had a busy year generating eight top journal articles on topics including health IT, knowledge management, outsourcing and two-sided platforms. We also profile Professor JaeHwuen Jung’s research about how mobile devices affect behavior.

Our signature event with the Institute for Business and Information Technology (IBIT), the 19th Annual Fox IT Awards, was a great success. The honorees were technology innovators and leaders Angela Heise of Leidos, John Collier of Wawa, and Himesh Bhise of Synacor. IBIT also launched the Digital Innovation Foundry, a hub for assessing, integrating, and prototyping digital technologies.

Read about our successful alumni, including Google Swarm Engineer Bryce Buffaloe, MIS ‘10, who is using data to tackle the opioid crisis. We also profile Clare Perretta and Anthony Pizzuto, graduates of the MS in Digital Innovation in Marketing, who are applying what they’ve learned to advance in their careers.

Back in 2006, JaeHwuen Jung, assistant professor of Management Information Systems, had something in his back pocket few other people had access to at the time. As an IT application architect at the largest telecom company in South Korea, he had a smartphone with unlimited data.

Almost immediately, he saw the future. “I knew this was going to change the way people shopped, did business, and lived their lives.” It changed his behavior, says Jung. For example, he became a comparison shopper, checking out the items he wanted in a bricks-and-mortar store but making the purchase online, for the lowest price.

After almost seven years in that job, what he saw inspired him to earn a Ph.D. in MIS. Today, he researches the impact of new channels and digital platforms on consumer behavior.

Jung’s paper “Love Unshackled: Identifying the Effect of Mobile App Adoption in Online Dating,” published in MIS Quarterly in March 2019, explores the impact of one such channel—mobile apps—for those in search of romantic partners. His paper shows that accessing dating apps via mobile phone results in users not only increasing their access but also getting better matches than they would have using a desktop version alone.

Why? It all has to do with the way a mobile device affects behavior. “As we rarely share our mobile phone and use it in more private places such as bathroom, it feels more private than a computer,” says Jung. So when people use a dating app on their phones, they are honest, more impulsive, and less inhibited. All these things add up to more time spent using the app and better matches.

Jung’s new research looks at how to optimize the referral program. He’s testing different referral incentive designs and learning surprising things. “If the company rewards the existing customer, there’s some guilt involved because they get something and the friend they are referring doesn’t,” he explains. But if the friend benefits, people are willing to make more referrals, and to closer friends.

In the classroom, Jung teaches data analytics to MIS majors and minors. He shows how businesses can efficiently store and retrieve data as well as how to analyze increasingly complex datasets. “Today, companies can track user locations. They know more about user behavior. With all this data comes marketing opportunities,” he says.