News: Spotlight on student excellence

Graduation is days away: the W. P. Carey School of Business’ convocations are May 14. What better time to shine a light on the achievements of some of our students? At the top of our update, however, is news about a scholarship created this spring by the local chapter of one of the leading IT professional organizations.

Graduation is days away: the W. P. Carey School of Business’ convocations are May 14. What better time to shine a light on the achievements of some of our students? At the top of our update, however, is news about a scholarship created this spring by the local chapter of one of the leading IT professional organizations. The award expands the support the school is able to offer our excellent students. The first recipient will be announced in the fall.

Phoenix ISACA chapter endows scholarship

The Phoenix chapter of the Information Systems Audit and Control Association, an association of IT governance professionals, has endowed a scholarship for a student in the Department of Information Systems with a strong interest in the information security or IT audit field. The scholarship, which will be awarded for the first time this fall, is supported by an outright gift of $25,000. ISACA serves 140,000 professionals worldwide, providing practical guidance, benchmarks and other tools. The Phoenix chapter offers educational seminars and workshops in addition to regular meetings.

The organization encourages students to join, allowing them to attend the workshops and the quarterly meetings — which are “the place to be,” according to one longtime member, if you want to stay current with the field and meet its top practitioners. Given that focus, it’s no surprise that the group stepped up to fund the scholarship. “There’s a growing demand for the next generation of cyber professionals, given the risk to the economy and our national security from attacks on our infrastructure,” said Aaron Carpenter, a director in the Phoenix chapter. “ASU has one of the strongest programs preparing information systems professionals, and the department has been a partner with ISACA in attracting the best students to the IT governance, security and audit professions.”

Department Chairman Michael Goul affirms the importance of the school’s relationship with ISACA. “ISACA has long been one of our most important partners. The association is especially attuned to the need for timely educational adjustments to curriculum to better prepare our students at all levels,” he said. “ISACA’s leadership and members have been committed to help us continuously improve programs to match what industry needs, and that engagement has been essential. And now — stepping up with this scholarship — frankly, we are humbled.” Carpenter credits IS Professor Paul Steinbart, a longtime ISACA member, with recruiting promising students to join the group and ultimately enter the profession. As a result, Carpenter says, the Phoenix chapter has the largest student membership of any ISACA chapter in the world. “ISACA’s professionalism and commitment to our next generation is absolutely outstanding,” Goul said.

Student team proposes health insurance solutions

A team of computer information systems (CIS) and business data analytics (BDA) students traveled to Minneapolis last month to compete in CoMIS, the Competition on Management Information Systems. Most of the top 10 programs were among the 15 teams. Team members included Laura Gagliano, Ioannis Kaneris and Manoj Panikkar; Emily Parriott was the alternate. The W. P. Carey team prevailed over teams from the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Utah and Texas A&M University to proceed to the finals, where they took third place. “We have definitely done well and raised the bar for ourselves,” said Clinical Assistant Professor Altaf Ahmad, faculty advisor to the team. The case was based on the Affordable Care Act, which has changed the health insurance landscape and increased focus on the individual insurance marketplace. CoMIS students were asked to come up with solutions that would enable health insurance companies to better serve customers and help them navigate a complex decision. Students were given 24 hours to prepare the case. “The competition was an intense experience, but we had fun with it, too,” said team member Laura Gagliano, who graduates next month with a degree in CIS. Gagliano was on the W. P. Carey team last year. “It was great to meet all these other CIS students who were so passionate about technology and coming from different perspectives and different curricula.

While we were in seclusion throughout the actual competition and did not get to actually see any of the other teams perform, the solutions we heard were varied and engaging. It was a great experience and I'm very proud of my team!” Each team member had a defined role. Ioannis Kaneris, who is a dual major in CIS and computer systems engineering, provided analytical and technical insights. Manoj Panikkar worked on finances and developed the framework for the presentation. All of the students commented that getting under the hood of the insurance industry in such a short time was challenging. “The case really challenged us to think not only about reforming the current health insurance buying process, but also to consider and incorporate future trends in the industry, such as the change from corrective health care to preventative health care,” Kaneris said. Manoj Panikkar commented that insurance seemed like a simple concept, but the terminology was unfamiliar. Also, he discovered it’s not easy to uncover the average profit an insurance company makes on a customer. “It made me realize that not everything is clear cut, and you have to make reasonable assumptions when presenting a solution,” he said.

The students said they learned a lot from the experience, honing skills such as critical thinking, presentation and public speaking and creativity. And, they learned that a good idea isn’t enough unless you have the details on implementation, time to complete and cost. CIS major Emily Parriott travelled with the team as an alternate, and the plan is for her to participate next year, bringing experience to the team. “Being part of the camaraderie between the teams as well as being able to see many of the presentations live has given me a focus and an incentive for next year’s competition,” she said. “I look forward to going back!”

Student wins speech award

The Department of Information Systems understands that employers recruit employees that possess soft skills — communications and presentation — as well as technical expertise. The curriculum for computer information systems and business data analytics include opportunities for students to learn them. But CIS junior James Qian has the soft skills covered. Quian, a member of the ASU Speech and Debate Team, was the winner of the impromptu speaking competition at the 2015 American Forensic Association National Individual Events Tournament — a feat never before accomplished by any ASU student. The tournament was hosted April 3-7 at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon.

The American Forensic Association is the largest organization for college speech and debate in the country. Quian also did well at the National Forensic Association’s National Tournament at Ohio University, April 16-20. The ASU team was unable to defend the team’s national championship in division II of the President’s Sweepstakes, won at last year’s National Forensic Association Tournament, but Quian placed third in extemporaneous speaking and fifth in impromptu speaking. Quian has been competing in speech for six years, starting when he was a student at Tempe Preparatory Academy. “I think that speech and debate is incredibly important,” he said. “Communication skills are especially in the tech field, because many individuals in the tech world lack them,” he said. “Being able to talk helps distinguish you amongst your peers.”

Information systems students at AIS conference

The W. P. Carey School was well represented at the 2015 Association for Information Systems Student Chapter Leadership Conference at the University of Alabama April 9 through 11. A team of our students faced off with other top schools at a case competition (see below), while officers of our DISC club contributed at sessions. Vi TranLe, the DISC vice president of corporate relations, shared best practices with representatives of other student chapters at a break out session. Other DISC officers participating included outgoing president Ethan Selin, who is graduating, next year’s vice president of finance Jeremy Knorr, and in-coming president Aaron Ortega. Students competing in the QVC Analytics Challenge were Felicia Utami, Corey Rizzi-Wise and Chadwick Tialino comprised the W. P. Carey School’s team; Clinical Associate Professor Joseph W. Clark traveled with the team. The winning team were master’s degree students from the University of Utah. But the W. P. Carey students performed well, and were the only team to come up with an innovation solving one of the issues in the case.

The competition challenged students to create data visualizations with real-world data sets provided by major corporations. The W. P. Carey students chose a business problem submitted by the pharmaceutical company, Merck & Co. They were given several hundred employee zip codes along with the addresses of the current office and two new proposed locations. The problem was to advise Merck on how the moves would impact employees. The goal was to measure the effects the move would have on their employees. The students were given a distance calculator by Merck, but it estimated distances as the crow flies. The students had to develop their own software to access the Google Maps API to produce data about driving distance and commute time, which allowed them to provide more meaningful information about the impact of the proposed moves on employees. “The approach we took was to use a Google Maps API to calculate the travel distance and travel time data for all employees traveling to work,” Tialino explained. “All of the other groups used a less reliable method of a latitude-longitude calculator.”