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Engages with industry to develop digital knowledge and talent

IBIT News

Digital boost for small businesses and non-profits

When the pandemic-related shutdowns started last spring, many small businesses feared the worst. Without the know-how to take their business online, they couldn’t see a way to generate revenue from behind a locked storefront.

It was during this fraught moment when the Institute of Business and Information Technology (IBIT) had a big award winning idea. These struggling firms could undergo a digital transformation that allowed them to survive and even thrive through the pandemic. In April 2020, the Small Business and Non-Profit Digital Transformation program launched with a small group of companies. To date, more than 65 businesses and non-profits have been transformed across industries as diverse as food service, fitness, and fashion.

For example, fitness trainer Saul Benamy, owner of Best Bodies Inc., needed to pivot to an online model. Even as people transition back to in-person fitness, Best Bodies continues to benefit from the tech upgrades Benamy got through the program.

These changes will make an impact going forward by enabling me to use the tools of blogging and social media to drive customers toward my new website, says Benamy.

Eileen Teti, owner of Hair Way to Beauty, needed a way to stay connected to her clients during the pandemic. Temple students swooped in to create a new website for her that’s easy to navigate.

My social media now includes an Instagram presence and a nicer-looking Facebook page, says Teti. These marketing channels will continue drawing new customers to her salon.

Small businesses like Best Bodies and Hair Way to Beauty are vital to the local economy. They also make an important social impact: Of the companies helped so far by the Small Business and Non-Profit Digital Transformation project, 74% have been woman-owned or led and 46% are led or owned by people of color.

Over time, the process has been refined into a 2-week agile-sprint model. A pair of students whose interests align with the selected firm work with an advisor on a bespoke digital transformation, including website development, ecommerce, search engine optimization (SEO), advertising, and in some cases, new digital business models.

By helping companies transform to meet today’s needs, the Small Business and Non-Profit Digital Transformation program offers a low-risk way for businesses to accelerate their post-pandemic economic recovery. The program is no less necessary today than when it launched. Given the way the crisis accelerated digitization across the board, it’s more needed by small businesses than ever.

In June 2021, the program received the Fox School’s IMPACT award for community engagement.

Mentoring program matches executives with 38 students

Mentoring Program 2020-2021

The goal of the IBIT mentoring program is to match experienced executives with students. The senior executives are members of the IT advisory board, employees of IBIT member firms or alumni.

The role of the mentor is to provide guidance and coaching to students augmenting the existing professional development resources, which includes providing ideas/feedback and serving as a sounding board for challenges and problems.

The benefit for mentors is the opportunity to engage with students, and the benefit for students is to leverage the experience of senior executives.

The IBIT mentoring program is chaired by Sondra Barbour, member of the IT advisory board.

In 2020-2021, the program matched 38 students to 17 mentors.

A post pandemic outlook

Business and industry as we once knew it has changed. What was their “normal” is likely not coming back either.

As we move past the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s imperative that the many affected industries find a way to move forward too. But how do they do that?

That’s the question explored in “An industry perspective on major post-pandemic issues,” a new article that was recently published in MIS Quarterly Executive. The piece outlines seven practical recommendations for industry to consider in the wake of the pandemic.

The co-authors include Dinesh Desai, executive chairman and founder of Emtec, Inc., an IT consultancy firm; Linda Descano, executive vice president at Red Havas; Larry Dignan, editor in chief of ZDNet and editorial director of ZDNet’s sister site TechRepublic; Chris Kearns, senior vice president in Operations and Technology at NBCUniversal; Raghu Sankaran, chief information officer (CIO) and chief information security officer (CISO) at Scholastic, and IBIT executive director and Fox School Professor, Munir Mandviwalla.

The recommendations include:

  1. Digital transformation must remain a priority
  2. Business valuation of IT must shift assumptions
  3. Data is now even more central to business models
  4. Business continuity and operations planning require a fresh approach
  5. Remote work is a reality but management and tech need improvement
  6. Workforce recruitment and development face new challenges and requirements
  7. IT must play a central role in enabling societal and local responsibilities

The recommendations made in the article are far reaching. For instance, the co-authors argue that remote work should now be used as a recruiting tool and note that this could be especially impactful when it comes to acquiring and retaining IT talent. They also suggest that productivity and innovation could be increased by sharing critical performance data regularly with all employees.

“A lot of these topics came from our Digital Fireside Chats, which IBIT has been hosting since the pandemic started, Mandviwalla says.

“There are several things that make this article unique,” Mandviwalla says. “First, the recommendations reflect the experience and expertise of my co-authors. Typically, industry avoids getting involved in academic knowledge creation, yet this group was willing to take the leap. Second, the speed at which this article was completed and published was just not normal. Typically, these types of things take multiple years, but we all worked on it rapidly including the editor-in-chief and reviewers. The article was fast tracked for publication, going from conception to publication in less than 3 months. Lightning had to strike multiple times for this to work, and it did.”

Since its launch in March 2021, the article is one of the most-downloaded at MIS Quarterly Executive.

Raghu Sankaran joins IBIT Advisory Board

Scholastic Inc. CIO and CISO Raghu Sankaran joins IBIT Advisory Board.

Raghu Sankaran is passionate about using technology to improve business outcomes. He brings this energy to the dual roles of Chief Information Officer and Chief Information Security Officer at Scholastic Inc., where he’s held executive and leadership roles for more than six years. He came into Scholastic with 20 years of industry experience under his belt.

Now, he brings the full range of his expertise to the IBIT Advisory Board as its newest member. Sankaran joins a board made up of 14 other industry leaders across a diverse range of fields, including technology, finance, entertainment, healthcare, and retail commerce. Sankaran is most looking forward to mentoring students.

I can give them a sense of what it’s like in the real world and prepare them to join the workforce when they’re done with school, he says. He also anticipates the benefits of these relationships flowing both ways.

As board members, we can share actual business challenges with them. Students can be much savvier with some of the latest and greatest technology. They bring fresh thinking to challenges that might be steeped in legacy technology, he says. He even imagines students might tackle some of these problems in their projects.

Scholastic Inc., is a venerable multinational publishing, media, and education firm. It’s the largest publisher of children’s books in the world. Sankaran’s work there centers on shaping the vision for the future of technology at the company.

My focus is to bring technology solutions that serve the needs of the business, solutions that scale and perform. I make sure the technology delivers on the business objectives. Otherwise, technology is just a research project, says Sankaran.

Before his arrival at Scholastic, Sankaran was in charge of the Healthcare Enterprise Platform team at Siemens Healthcare. Other past roles include Director of Technology at Sapient and leader of Intuit’s Enterprise Commerce Platform and Enterprise Order System Middleware groups.

Sankaran graduated with his BS in engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. He earned his Master’s degree in engineering from the University of Maryland.