OPIM

Celebrating SAS/OPIM Partnering and JMP Starting the Future of Analytics

Posted on by Claire Hall

The challenge was set. What could one analyst do with a laptop, 123,000,000 observations, and JMP pro software? The answer, provided by SAS co-founder and JMP guru, John Sall, was “just about any known statistical analysis” and all in a matter of seconds!

On Friday, April 6th, SAS and UConn’s Department of Operations and Information Management (OPIM) jointly hosted a gathering of local business executives and academic researchers. The focus was on the growing importance of analytics in the business world. But the spotlight was on how a partnership between SAS and OPIM has supported the successful development and launch of the new MS in Business Analytics and Project Management (MS-BAPM) and has helped demonstrate the business value in deep data analytics.

Following an interactive and lively lunch, Ram Gopal, Head of the Department of Operations and Information Management, kicked off Friday afternoon’s program with welcoming remarks, expressions of gratitude for all those in attendance, and a brief summary of the SAS/OPIM partnership and details on the new MS-BAPM program. Ram’s remarks were followed by a presentation from Peter Bothwell, Senior VP at the Travelers and a Founding Member of the MS-BAPM Advisory Board, who spotlighted the business value of competing on analytics using a compelling array of examples in the property and casualty industry. Pete also highlighted the growing partnership between The Travelers and the new MS-BAPM, emphasizing the mutual benefits of such public/private partnering.

After being introduced by Zhongju Zhang, Director of the MS-BAPM program, John Sall, or “Mr. JMP”, then took the podium for a live and real time demonstration of how a slightly souped-up (added memory) laptop could do deep analytics in seconds either on a 123,000,000 record data set or on a broad, flat data set involving hundreds of variables and millions of records. The demonstration of the power of JMP Pro was evident but what caught the attention of all was the sheer enjoyment John was getting out of this very powerful demonstration. He demonstrated and emphasized the growing power and speed of deep data analytics – most importantly, he caught the attention of Connecticut’s business community.

Radhika Kulkarni, VP R&D Analytics at SAS, noted how difficult it was to be the speaker following John Sall, but Radhika’s knowledge and presentation made it evident she was John’s parallel as the “analytics genius of SAS”. Emphasizing the enterprise-wide focus of SAS, Radhika walked us through the challenges facing the analytics community and advancements in enterprise analytics from SAS in responding to those challenges. Radhika’s clarity of examples and ability to demonstrate high-value analytics’ links across the enterprise gave the audience a variety of possible analytics use-paths to think about in their own business settings.

While the business attendees headed home after the early evening networking reception, UConn faculty and students along with our SAS visitors prepared for a full day of workshops on JMP 10 Pro and SAS Rapid Predictive Modeling (RPM) that took place on Saturday. JMP’s Mia Stephens handled the JMP 10 Pro hands-on workshop, while SAS’ Andre de Waal took our faculty and students through a journey on the RPM highway where traditional statistics and analytics collides with the need for virtually instantaneous model development and implementation in today’s e-world.

The two-day event gave all of us an exposure to the power of analytics and to how powerful new tools capable of rapidly analyzing massive amount of data are emerging. The two days gave us much to ponder, but one thing is clear. The SAS/OPIM-UConn partnership is yielding large benefits. Our students are being educated at the forefront of methods and analytics platforms. Our faculty have the benefit and power of tools that support innovative teaching and frontier research. The Connecticut business community continues to see the value of programs such as MS-BAPM, including interactive experiential learning projects and a growing high-quality job candidate pool. SAS has the opportunity to enhance use of its tools along with feedback that helps them continue to expand and enhance the analytics support tool set.

A great two-days – a great continuing partnership!

Photo: Ram Gopal, Head of the Department of OPIM & John Sall, SAS Co-founder and JMP Guru

UConn MIS Team Wins Inaugural CoMIS Case Competition

Posted on by Claire Hall

On April 4-7, University of Minnesota hosted the first of hopefully many undergraduate case competitions in the area of Management Information Systems. This event is named CoMIS and provided the students to test their business skills and information systems knowledge against an elite group of competitors from all around the USA. Ten leading universities sent their representatives to compete, including Arizona, Arizona State, Texas-Austin, Texas-Dallas, Minnesota, Minnesota State, Indiana, Maryland, Utah and UConn.

UConn team was represented by Sebastian Guzera(MIS Senior), Walid Namane(MIS Junior) and Michael Whiteman(MIS Junior). Dmitry  Zhdanov served as the team’s coach. It is my great pleasure to inform you that UConn team became the winners of this inaugural competition.

Teams were given 24 hours to analyze a case and prepare their presentations. Case sponsor and topic were not known in advance; to everyone’s surprise and excitement, the case was about Minnesota Wild – a professional hockey team playing in the NHL. Students were asked to identify the best way for the team to boost its social media presence and turn it into revenue. As part of the case, students were given a wealth of data collected from the Wild’s Facebook page (data known as Facebook Insight). Students had to prepare a 20-minute presentation followed by an intensive Q&A session from the judges.

A panel of industry experts judged students’ performance, including two members of the Minnesota Wild front office, as well as executives from 3M, Medtronic, Ernst and Young and others. To preserve competition integrity, university affiliations were not available to the judging panel. UConn team went as Team Apollo.

The teams were broken down into three groups for the first round of the presentations. Group winners went on to the finals to give their talk one more time. UConn was matched with UT-Austin and Arizona State in group B. After winning the group, UConn’s Team Apollo went on to the final to face Utah Cyber Snipers and Maryland’s Dream Team. Utah finished second and Maryland third.

This was a fun an exciting event, many new friendships were made. The fact that our team ended up as the winners makes it even more exciting and speaks highly of the quality and dedication of our students and MIS program. We’ve set a high bar for ourselves going forward.

Pictured left to right: Jan DeGross (of MIS Quarterly) presents the CoMIS 1st place award to UConn Team – Walid Namane, Michael Whiteman, Sebastian Guzera and Dmitry Zhdanov (Coach)

Paper Received Best IS Publication of the Year Award 2010

Posted on by Claire Hall

A paper co-written by faculty members of the University of Connecticut School of Business Department of Operations and Information Management has been nominated as the best ACM TMIS paper of 2010 and is also one out of five recipients of the Best IS Publications of the Year Awards 2010.  The paper, titled “Why Give Away Something for Nothing? Investigating Virtual Goods Pricing and Permission Strategies,” was co-written in December 2010 by Dr. Sulin Ba, Professor; Dr. Dan Ke; Dr. Jan Stallaert, Associate Professor; and Zhongju Zhang, Associate Professor.

The Best Publications Awards were established to recognize the breadth of high quality work that is being published in the Information Systems discipline. This award was designed to bring outstanding papers across a range of journals to the attention of the IS community, and to give due credit to the journals in which they are published. Each year journal editors nominate the best paper published in their journal in the preceding year. A committee composed of Senior Scholars reviews the nominations from journal editors and selects five papers as the recipients of this prestigious award.

“Why Give Away Something for Nothing? Investigating Virtual Goods Pricing and Permission Strategies” is about the world of virtual goods.  The question of how a creator sets prices for a virtual good, as to maximize their profit, is discussed.  The major difference with virtual goods is that many times consumers will want to use multiple copies of the same good, which results in an increase in the consumer’s utility.  The focus of the research is on the copy permission of virtual goods.  An economic model is developed and examined under different conditions, to find which setting is best for the copy permission that leads to the highest profit, as well as how subsequent pricing strategies are affected.  Both theoretical and practical implications of researched are discussed within the paper.

Future Potential in IT Careers

Posted on by Claire Hall

Sponsored by: Department of Operations and Information Management, and Central CT Chapter of the Society of Information Management

University of Connecticut students were given the opportunity to ask career questions and prod the minds of senior IT leaders at a special presentation in the Rome Commons Ballroom at South Campus on Thursday, October 20th, 2011. This presentation, titled, “Future Potential in IT” was sponsored by the Department of Operations and Information Management (OPIM) and the Central CT Chapter of the Society for Information Management (SIM). It was a unique occasion for students to talk to senior IT leaders and recent graduates in the field. Continue Reading

UConn MIS student wins an information systems security scholarship from ISACA

Posted on by Claire Hall

In Fall 2010, students from the University Of Connecticut School of Business participated in an opportunity to compete for a $500 scholarship sponsored by the Greater Hartford Chapter of ISACA. ISACA is a leading independent, nonprofit, global association for the promotion of information, guidance and certifications in the field of auditing security controls for computer systems. The competition was held in conjunction with the undergraduate elective course IT Security, Governance, and Audit, offered by Professor Dmitry Zhdanov of the Department of Operations and Information Management (OPIM).

Student presentations were evaluated based on the following criteria:

Relevance of the presentation to the audit and risk management profession

  • The extent of the student’s work including depth of research, ability to communicate and synthesize the materials, approach taken and completeness of the subject matter
  • Delivery of the presentation.

This year’s award was presented to Bryan Sovinsky (pictured), a senior in Management Information Systems (MIS).  His project presentation covered the topic of Steganography, the art of concealing secret messages within ordinary computer documents, akin to writing in invisible ink. The Chapter also awarded five other participants – Gregory Coppola (MIS), Daniel Turcotte (MIS), Juan Ramos (ACES), Pathik Patel (Accounting) and Lori Gupta (Finance) – an annual membership in ISACA for their presentations which covered a wide range of topics on computer security.

The awards were presented and their achievements celebrated at a February 16, 2011 chapter meeting.

ISACA is a leading non-profit global provider of knowledge, certifications, and education on information systems (IS) assurance and security, enterprise governance and management of IT, and IT-related risk and compliance.  ISACA hosts international conferences, publishes the ISACA Journal, and develops international IS auditing and control standards, which help its constituents ensure trust in, and value from, information systems. ISACA also advances and attests IT skills and knowledge through the globally respected Certified Information Systems Auditor™ (CISA®), Certified Information Security Manager® (CISM®), Certified in the Governance of Enterprise IT® (CGEIT®) and Certified in Risk and Information Systems Control™ (CRISC™) designations.

From 1978, the Greater Hartford Chapter of ISACA has promoted the professional education and development of its members in the field of technology auditing and risk management.  For more information, visit .

The Department of Operations and Information Management (OPIM), which offers the highly acclaimed Management Information Systems (MIS) undergraduate program, is consistently ranked in the top 25 in information systems graduate education (US News) and among the most productive and impactful research departments in the world (OR/MS Today, Communications of the ACM, Communications of the AIS, and AISNET). For more information, visit http://www.business.uconn.edu/opim/

UConn Announces MSBAPM Program

Posted on by Claire Hall

The University of Connecticut School Of Business is pleased to announce a new and innovative master’s degree program from the Department of Operations and Information Management (OPIM).  The Master of Science in Business Analytics and Project Management (MSBAPM) is designed to meet the growing demand for professionals who can analyze, organize and manage high-value business solutions in today’s complex business environments. This 33-credit program, offered in Hartford, Connecticut, allows students to pursue the program either full or part-time beginning in any regular semester.  Applications are now being accepted for the program kickoff in Fall 2011. Continue Reading