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Dear colleagues,

It is my pleasure to present the 2018-19 annual report of the Institute for Business and Information Technology (IBIT), Temple University.

The IBIT partnership with nationally recognized member firms and the  IT advisory board is quickly becoming the standard for industry-academic engagement. Please read the report to learn more.

Sincerely,

Munir Mandviwalla
Executive Director

The Institute for Business and Information Technology (IBIT) is pleased to announce the release of The IBIT Report –Information Systems Job Index, by Munir Mandviwalla, Crystal Harold, and Michelle Purnama, Temple University.

Himesh Bhise, president and CEO of Synacor, and a leading broadband, multiscreen, and mobile executive, has joined the IT Advisory Board.

The 17 industry leaders on the Advisory Board guide the Institute in its mission to generate and provide knowledge and connections to sustain excellence in information technology. Board members represent a range of industries, including technology, finance, entertainment, healthcare, retail commerce, and more.

“We are delighted that Himesh has joined the Board and that his company has become a member of the Institute for Business and Information Technology (IBIT),” said Bruce Fadem, IT Advisory Board Chair and retired VP & CEO of Wyeth. “His broad industry and technology experience and accomplishments will be invaluable as we continually strive to expand our education and research capabilities.”

Synacor, which is headquartered in Buffalo, New York, is the newest member of the Institute for Business and Information Technology (IBIT). Known for managed portals, advertising solutions, cloud-based identity management, and email and collaboration platforms, the company reported a revenue of $143.9 million in 2018. Thousands of successful video, internet, and communications providers, device manufacturers, and enterprises have partnered with Synacor to scale their businesses.

Before joining Synacor in 2014, Bhise incubated growth businesses in a VP role at Comcast Cable. Prior to that, he managed Charter Communications’ high-speed internet business, served as general manager of AOL’s mobile division, and was a telecom leader at McKinsey & Company. Bhise has an MBA from the Wharton School and an MA in economics from Temple University. He has been named an honoree on the Cablefax 100 list of influential industry executives multiple times, and he received the Information Technology Award for Distinguished Alumni at IT’s Nineteenth Annual Awards ceremony in April 2019.

The Eighth Annual Temple University Alexion Analytics Challenge, organized by the Institute for Business and Information Technology, is a forum for talented students across colleges to showcase their analytic skills. This year’s Challenge, held in October, featured 300 competing students, all of whom presented analyses aiming to answer a single question: “What makes rare disease clinical trials successful?”

Sponsor Alexion Pharmaceuticals provided the data for the 114 participating teams to analyze over the course of the month; each team presented both analysis and an original visualization, which were judged by a panel of industry professionals. Twelve teams representing three colleges went on to the final round, where they presented their analyses to the judges, who announced the seven winning teams in November.

The winners were:

1st Place Analysis: Jake Green, Lauren Remy, Rohit Bobby

2nd Place Analysis: Sofia Spadotto and Madison Collins

3rd Place Analysis: Vittoria Fani Ciotti, Amanda Olsen, Kyle Miller, Michael Manieri

Honorable Mention Analysis: Aleksey Kravets

1st Place Graphics: Diana Westerfer and Serdar Kurt

2nd Place Graphics: Thomas Swanson, Chirag Bhatia, Christian Siegfried

3rd Place Graphics: Qiwen Tan

Honorable Mention Graphics: Javier Balleste and Brock Brones

“What intrigues me is seeing the evolution of problem-solving capabilities,” says data scientist Hope Watson, challenge engineer and judge representing Alexion at the event. Watson, a Temple alum, is also a former Challenge winner herself: In 2016, her team won first place on the Analysis track. (In fact, upon winning, Watson was hired on the spot by that year’s sponsoring company, Alexion.) “This year I had the privilege of creating and judging this event. I was impressed with the students’ submissions!”

Winners of the Graphics category, Westerfer and Kurt, incorporated hand-drawn images for graphics that felt like a personalized form of story-telling. “With data analytics you have to hit this perfect balance between getting all the important information out, and then actually getting people to listen to you,” Westerfer said. “One of the easiest ways to get people to connect with the story you’re trying to tell is through an engaging visual– it helps them connect the data to YOU and keeps the presentation personal and engaging.”

Meanwhile, the winning team for the Analysis track credited their win to a strategic research approach. Green said: “We realized early on that our analytical methodology would have to be directly tied to our definitions of scientific and monetary success. Only when we fully understood the question’s context did we move on to finding the answers in our data.”

Of course, creating a forum for students to use their data analysis and visualization skills to tackle this type of real-world business issue is exactly the aim of the Analytics Challenge. The competition also serves participants in other ways, offers Laurel Miller, Director.

“It’s an opportunity for students to learn, develop, and showcase their abilities to a room full of industry experts invested in the outcome of the presentation.”

“We are all happy with the result and will take the lessons learned with us throughout our future professional endeavors,” added Green.

Learn more about the Temple University Analytics Challenge.

See all of the winning entries here. 

View the photos