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Atish Banerjea appointed 2015 Executive-in-Residence

AtishTemple University’s Institute for Business and Information Technology (IBIT) has appointed NBCUniversal executive and Temple alumnus Atish Banerjea as its newest Executive in Residence.

Banerjea serves as Executive Vice President and Chief Information Officer for NBCUniversal, where he is responsible for global technology strategy, applications, infrastructure and operations for the company’s worldwide media portfolio, and is part of the company’s Operations and Technical Services organization.

An alumnus of Temple University’s Fox School of Business, Banerjea attained a Master of Science degree in Management Information Systems (MIS) in 1991.

I am honored to give back to my alma mater, Banerjea said. After I first arrived in the U.S., it was my Temple education that provided the basis for starting a successful career focused on transformative technologies that help drive innovation and revenue across the enterprise.

Atish Banerjea 2015Banerjea’s commitment to his alma mater includes his recent appointment to the Fox IT Advisory Board, through which he works with the MIS department toward designing curriculum updates, tailoring it to the industry’s current employment climate. Banerjea, widely considered a top innovator and technology strategist, recently was selected as one of Computerworld’s Premier 100 IT Leaders for 2015. The distinction recognizes the best technology and business leaders from a variety of organizations.

Prior to joining NBCUniversal, Banerjea had most recently served as Chief Technology Officer for Dex One Corporation. He led a redesign of the company’s IT functions and helped transform Dex One from a print-centric business into a digital media marketing company. He also served as Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer for international media group Pearson, and held top roles at Maurices, Inc., and Simon & Schuster.

The IBIT Executive in Residence program facilitates interaction among Fox School faculty, students and industry leaders. In his role as IBIT’s Executive in Residence, Banerjea will engage with faculty and students on topics and projects of mutual interest, promote the activities of IBIT, the MIS department and the Fox School of Business.

Atish is a visionary and innovator who is a perfect role model for Fox MIS students, said IBIT Director Laurel Miller. As part of his executive-in-residence responsibilities, Atish will also help update the MIS curriculum.

Banerjea began his residency February 9, 2015.

Art student makes sense of data to win Temple Analytics Challenge

Analytics Challenge 2014Admittedly, Cassandra Reffner said she might not know the difference between average and median. And she said she only understands the most basic functions of Microsoft Excel. What Reffner does know, however, is how to analyze data and display it in a creative, understandable manner. A junior graphic design student from the Tyler School of Art, Reffner won the $2,500 grand prize at the second annual Temple Analytics Challenge.

The month-long competition, organized by the Institute for Business and Information Technology (IBIT) at the Fox School of Business, culminated Nov. 17 in finalist presentations at Alter Hall. The challenge tasks students from all of Temple University’s schools and colleges with making sense of data through visualizations and info graphics. The Temple Analytics Challenge awarded 10 prizes totaling $10,000, from corporate members of IBIT and the Office of the Senior Vice Provost for Undergraduate Studies at Temple University.

In its second year, the Temple Analytics Challenge received 130 submissions from more than 300 participants. The finalists came from both undergraduate and graduate programs across the University, including the College of Engineering, the Tyler School of Art, and the Fox School of Business.

Analytics Challenge 2014Reffner used a test tube illustration to demonstrate the residual impact felt by employees following the proposed relocation of Merck’s corporate headquarters. Judges reflected favorably upon Reffner’s infographic, which displayed the raw number of employees whose commutes would be negatively affected by 30 or more minutes. (Other Merck Challenge finalists opted to use percentages.) To circumvent the issue, Reffner offered what she called “prescriptions,” using a medicine-bottle design to provide Merck with alternatives like incentivizing carpools or public transit usage, or implementing break time for employees who make longer commutes.

“I think the judges liked how I gave solutions, or as I called them ‘prescriptions,’ to help benefit those employees and to look at this in a less-negative term,” Reffner said.

Corporate partners of the Temple Analytics Challenge provided data sets and specific problems from which the students had to create an original visualization that also provided clear and meaningful insight. The NBCUniversal Challenge pertained to the allocation of advertising dollars for midterm elections; the Lockheed Martin Challenge focused on employee behaviors predicting security threats; and the aforementioned Merck Challenge centered around the overall impact of a corporate site’s relocation. The 20 finalists presented their work before a panel of professional judges, including representatives from QVC, Campbell Soup Company, and RJMetrics.

“The breadth of majors and students that excelled in the competition was really impressive. Analytics and the ability to interpret and visualize complex data is such an important skill, it’s exciting to so many students get involved and the final presentations were outstanding,” said Nicholas Piergallini, Program Manager at Lockheed Martin and a judge for the competition.

“We’re proud to once again see such a great set of entries from students across the University,” said Dr. David Schuff, Associate Professor of Management Information Systems and organizer of the challenge, “A key goal of the challenge is to encourage students from different disciplines to build their data analysis and communication skills, and to see how these skills apply to their careers.”

Reffner and five fellow Tyler students were among the competition’s 20 finalists, and she was one of three from Tyler to win one of the Temple Analytics Challenge’s 10 cash prizes. Encouraged to enter the competition by Tyler professor Abby Guido, Reffner said she hopes her grand-prize win helps push other students at Temple University to compete next year.

“Being a graphic design student, it was difficult to figure out what the data was and what we had to look at, what we had to analyze, and how to design it in a way people would understand,” Reffner said. “Most of my class doesn’t know Excel. “But the Temple Analytics Challenge was an innovative way to bring students from around campus together and show we can translate what we do know to a broader spectrum. It was that multidisciplinary aspect of the competition that, I think, was the most fun.”

Doug Seiwert echoed Reffner’s point. Seiwert, the Vice President of Information Technology and Enterprise Applications Development at QVC, said the popular home-shopping network produces one terabyte of data every month. “For those of you who don’t know, that’s a lot of data,” said Seiwert, the event’s keynote speaker, “and it can be daunting when you’re processing this much data. Our challenge, and (the students’) challenge in this competition, was finding ways to make the data widely consumable, and I think you all did an outstanding job.”

Click here to see all the entries and winners.

Training in analytics, IT value, and cyber-security are a hit with NBCUniversal

It’s not often that a day-long class about data analytics is called “action packed,” but that’s exactly what one NBCUniversal employee called their experience.

For the past year, Temple University, Fox School of Business’ Institute for Business and Information Technology (IBIT) and NBCUniversal have been partners in corporate training. Three different training sessions, taught by Temple University’s Management Information Systems faculty, were offered to NBCUniversal employees and the data collected suggests that the results are great.

Based on a survey of attendees, more than 84 percent said they were “satisfied” or “very satisfied” with the class, “Managing in the Age of Data Analytics.”

Nearly 87 percent agreed or strongly agreed that the course was relevant to their work.

This from a group of people who’s technical and management backgrounds were varied, and whose jobs diverse.

Dr. David Schuff, Associate Professor, Management Information Systems, taught a specifically focused version of “Managing in the Age of Data Analytics.” The concept behind the class was that data is a core building block of modern organizations and that transforming data into information and knowledge enables firms to compete effectively. The workshop taught students the principles of data strategy– including best practices for acquiring, assessing, and analyzing data to solve problems encountered in the real world of businesses.

“Business Value from IT” was a one-day interactive workshop for information technology professionals who wanted to learn about the business side of companies. Topics covered, included accounting, business models, marketing, sales, and supply chain practices. It was taught by Dr. Richard Flanagan, Assistant Professor(practice), Management Information Systems– who’s run this workshop many times.

“Our Technology (a.k.a. IT) group has been undergoing quite a change over the last two years to focus less on corporate/internal initiatives and more on our customer relationships to be truly aligned with the various NBCUniversal businesses that we as an organization support.” Amouri Burger, Sr. Director, Film Technical Solutions & Business Development, NBCUniversal, said.

Burger attended a full day of “Business Value from IT” session entitled “IT Value- MBA for Techies,” in March.

“It’s easy to underestimate the potential value from a one day session but the required reading in preparation for the day along with the hands-on way of how the session was presented made this a very fruitful day.”

Burger was particularly pleased with the emphasis on business modeling and real world use cases from NBCUniversal’s own businesses which helped the group, “develop the functional skills to better understand and support our business partners.”

Brittany Wallace, Sr. Director, Digital Sales Technology, NBCUniversal, also liked the way the courses were customized for her industry.  “I attended the “Managing in the Age of Data Analytics” seminar in which Temple applied key concepts from the course to real media industry business cases which made the course relevant for NBCU.” She said.

The most technical seminar, the three day long, hands on workshop, “Secure Digital Infrastructure,” taught by Dr. Li Bai, Associate Professor, Electrical & Computer Engineering (primary), Management Information Systems (secondary) addressed the technical challenges and solutions for infrastructure security. Issues surrounding data protection, encryption and decryption, public and private key and digital certificates were covered.

“The partnership between NBCU and Temple to offer corporate training presents a tremendous opportunity for NBCU’s IT professionals to continue to expand their expertise through onsite graduate level instruction.” Wallace said.

Whether it was one day of “action packed” data analytics or three full days spent scrutinizing security concerns, based on the feedback the attendees all went away educated, engaged and with new skills to use at their “day job.”

Learn more at: http://ibit.temple.edu/programs/professional-training/

Lockheed Martin, Merck, NBCUniversal, and QVC in Computerworld’s 2015 Premier 100

Institute for Business and Information Technology (IBIT) partners Lockheed Martin, Merck, NBCUniversal, and QVC will receive Computerworld’s 2015 Premier 100 Award. The award recognizes exceptional technology executives that are leading digital transformation and will be presented at a special ceremony in March, 2015. Recipients include:

  • Stephanie C. Hill, Vice President and General Manager, Information Systems & Global Solutions-Civil, Lockheed Martin
  • Clark Golestani, Executive Vice President and CIO, Merck & Co.
  • Atish Banerjea, Executive Vice President and CIO, NBCUniversal Inc.
  • Linda Dillman, CIO, QVC

Munir Mandviwalla, Executive Director, said “It is our privilege to be associated with such exceptional firms who engage with us at multiple levels including curriculum, student mentoring, and research.”