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As expected, I learned a lot on my recent trip to the AMCIS conference in San Francisco. One striking thing is the incredibly high quality of new Ph.D.s in MIS. I met so many talented people, and interviewed as many as I could for our faculty position at RIT (http://bitly.com/ritmis). While advantageous for RIT, the true shame is that there are not enough faculty jobs for these talented people- not by a long shot. The fact that there are so few positions creates a dangerous situation where a whole generation of educators/researchers could be lost (thanks SWH for this idea). At this moment, there is not a lot that we can do about it.

However, longer term there is one obvious thing to do-increase the enrollments in MIS. I believe there are two paths to that: better communication about the discipline, and recentering the discipline on the knowledge areas of its faculty. As an example of communication, the chart above (thanks Chuck Wood) shows clearly that MIS starting salaries have been the highest in the business schools for some time. Employers REALLY want the combination of technology and business and are willing to pay for it. MIS people end up doing a wide variety of things in organizations, but their tech/business/communications skills make them the key players in a lot of what happens. My friend Richard DeMartino comments how well MIS students do in entrepreneurial teams, and I am proud of what this group accomplishes.

A second important approach to reviving the discipline is to find ways to capture the intellectual curiosity and new knowledge developed by its faculty. While for some researchers this is already happening, for many of us the curriculum is a standard that is far away from our interests. At AMCIS, I learned that MANY people are researching things that will never be taught in the standard curriculum. I feel that this is a shame, and possibly a detriment to the discipline.

The MIS discipline has room for lots of different subjects in its conferences. We should find the way to bring them back to our students, because that natural energy that comes from doing what you like does not have a substitute. Students feel it, and become interested themselves. Take the now-500 strong DigEnt social network.

The DigEnt social network, once just courseware for the 24 people enrolled in the Digital Entrepreneurship class at RIT, has now achieved Membership of over 400 people.  I find this a truly great achievement by the contributors!

Along the way, we have received local and national media attention, benefitted from the wisdom of individuals throughout the world, and created connections that are today advancing new business ideas, while creating great educational experiences for students.

More and more, I receive requests to help people get up to speed on the latest technologies for business. May I recommend to everyone the IDG article that was reprinted in the NY Times Yesterday called Nine Web Sites IT Pros Should Master.

The article includes some tech that is specific to corporations (such as Green Grid computing), but it also demonstrates the now constant interplay of social and work technologies (Twitter, Yammer, Blackberry, iPhones…). Many knowledge workers do not want the redundancy of multiple devices, accounts, or passwords when the social computing technology admirably supports both work and personal communication.

And away we go…The winter quarter welcomes a new group of stewards to our media-darling Digital Entrepreneurship social network, DigEnt. The Digital Entrepreneurship course in its third offering introduces a group of 24 RIT students representing 5 different Colleges to the larger network of faculty, staff, industry insiders, entrepreneurs, VCs and other interested parties.

Our initial discussion on the true definition of digital entrepreneurship was thought provoking. Even definitions become more malleable in the digital age. At least one of the students remarked about how exciting it was to be part of the emergence of a new area, and I can only agree.

I look forward to seeing where this crew takes us!

Through the magic of social networking, a grade school chum has arranged for me to present (virtually) at the Texas Institute for Creativity and Innovation.

http://www.sfasu.edu/pubaffairs/pressreleases/august2008/29-texas_institute_creativity.asp

ARG Superstar Jane McGonigal describes the business implications of Alternate Reality Games

http://feedroom.businessweek.com/linking/index.jsp?skin=oneclip&fr_story=4ff1e4b3a9adab1fad937c0f767acc92c93cf3ae&rf=ev&hl=true

 

Seems the thoughts of the nation have turned forward to the future after a clear change in the electorate. The visualization to the left shows how a perfect storm moved the voting of the country more democratic than 2004.

I had the pleasure of attending a talk by mayor Bob Duffy at President Destler’s Liberty Hill home EARLY Wednesday morning.  The President and I shared a quick word admiring how impressive it is that a country can turn around nimbly and try a different direction. This is certainly impressive to the rest of the world. Take for example, Lab for Social Computing board member, Joichi Ito’s remarks from the Washington Post. (As an aside, Bob Duffy, my colleague Neil Hair and I generally keep our politics close to the vest)

For those of us in Rochester, there is a lot to improve. We have more crime than we should. We have an uneven track record with large scale public projects…AND the Mayor repeated a statistic that is particularly challenging: New York State ranks 49th (only NJ is worse) in our Tax Climate for Business.

As Business educators (and our many stakeholders), we should begin to unravel how to move that statistic. The group explains their approach thus:

“Good state tax systems levy low, flat rates on the broadest bases possible, and they treat all taxpayers the same. Variation in the tax treatment of different industries favors one economic activity or decision over another. The more riddled a tax system is with politically motivated preferences the less likely it is that business decisions will be made in response to market forces. The SBTCI rewards those states that apply these principles in five important areas of taxation: major business taxes, individual income taxes, sales taxes, unemployment insurance taxes and property taxes.”

At a time of great change, we have the flexibility to do novel things. Let’s come up with something new that moves us up. Who’s in?

Well, it is almost election day, and many people are watching the polls. As a newcomer to teaching stats, I have enjoyed examining the polls while my students have enjoyed quizzes about margin of error and confidence intervals .

The margin of error is the way that statisticians provide detailed information about the uncertainty associated with a particular estimate from a sample to a population. A key point that is misinterpreted all over the place is the fact that the margin of error reported in the media is generally the amount that should be added or subtracted from BOTH candidates estimated percentages in order to report the uncertainty!

A nice explanation is in this pamphlet on polling from the American Statistical Society: http://www.amstat.org/sections/srms/pamphlet.pdf

“A misleading feature of most current media stories on political polls is that they report the margin of error associated with the proportion favoring one candidate, not the margin of error of the lead of one candidate over another. To illustrate the problem, suppose one poll finds that Mr. Jones has 45 percent support, Ms. Smith has 41 percent support, 14 percent are undecided, and there is a 3 percent margin of error for each category.
If we note that Mr. Jones might have anywhere from 42 percent to 48 percent support in the voting population and Ms. Smith might have anywhere from 38 percent to 44 percent support, then it would not be terribly surprising for another poll to report anything from a 10-point lead for Mr. Jones (such as 48 percent to 38 percent) to a 2-point lead for Ms. Smith (such as 44 percent to 42 percent).”

Google’s stock has risen to $353 dollars a share at a time when the stock market has had a wild ride mostly headed downward. The New York Times article on the subject points to the increases in online advertising as an important source of their continued success.

As our Digital Business group evolves and gathers more momentum, we will continue to study, consult and advise on the appropriate uses of advertising as part of a web company’s business model. One thing is clear though, the investment community remains very optimistic that whomever controls the marketplaces for online ads will be a winner no matter what may come!

Update: Time magazine covers the story as well.

Good news! The National Science Foundation has funded a second phase of the interdisciplinary Future Internet research project with Golisano Computing colleague Dr. Nirmala Shenoy for approximately $250,000. As before, the Saunders College team will identify and model the business impacts/ adoption patterns that are likely for a novel Internet technology. The complete award note is available at the NSF website.

This research is funded by NSF’s FIND (Future Internet Design) program which is a new long-term initiative  to envision and plan a future internet by bringing together researchers from many different disciplines.

If you are interested in helping with this research effort, contact me at: vjpbbu@rit.edu

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