From Slosh Zones to Process Diagrams

Satisficing provides a solution which, though not the absolute best, is good enough.  According to the Chief Information Officers who evaluated the year long information technology management field projects, our students far exceeded expectations. They more than “satificed,” a term known to every student who has set foot in Associate Professor Lakshmi Mohan’s classroom. 

On hand to evaluate the students work were three accomplished alumni recruited by Dr. Mohan, including Tony McCarthy ‘84, recently named CIO of the year by the Financial Times magazine The Banker. McCarthy, the Global CIO in Investment Banking Technology for Deutsche Bank said that the students competently responded to questions about context and goal. “They showed a good business purpose.  That’s what they’ll face once they leave school.”

McCarthy and fellow alums, John Tobison’77, ‘90, the Chief Information Officer for CommerceHub, and David Adkins ’91, Director of Information Technology for New York State United Teachers, deliberated and selected the top project: a decision support system for the New York State Department of Health emergency preparedness program.

Tobison said, “You can execute the right methodology but have to understand the business driver to be successful. The winning project coordinated information about multiple organizations and did a great job within the limits of time.  They took asset data across hospitals from various data bases and created a record of consolidated information. They figured out how to structure the data.  They had a meaty problem with an obvious business benefit and solved it.”

The students noted that though the current system collects a large amount of information, the data is not easily manipulated. For instance, nursing homes must identify evacuation locations in the event of a flood. Patients need to leave the “slosh zone,” where flooding is most likely. Using the old system, multiple nursing homes had planned to converge on locations that do not have extra beds or are further into the slosh zone.   The students created a decision support system integrating key emergency data, rerouting patients away from areas likely to flood, and to places that have enough beds to accommodate them.

An alum served as field project advisor for the winning team. Matthew Pelish ’95, ’97 has taught at the School of Business and worked with many student teams but this was the first time he advised students on a project for his own workplace, the Department of Health.  The project not only provided the students with experience but also paid off for his employer. He said, “We can take the final project to management and say, ‘this is what we can do.’  The biggest value of the project for us was that the students highlighted and documented the issues.”

Dr. Pelish added, “I was very impressed with all of them. The students were credible, a testament to the program. Everyone had tied the key topics together.  The best compliment is that I learned something.”

He wasn’t the only one who took something away from the presentations. Dr. Adkins said, “Students are fresher at applying principles.  I took notes as they presented and came up with six things to take back to my job.”  He added, “It’s easy to throw together an access database but the students went past that. They cleansed the data and left the organization with a process that could be replicated.”

Tobison, who earned his undergraduate degree in biology and philosophy at UAlbany and returned for his MBA, appreciated the chance to get a peek at current students.
“These folks will be the talent to companies like mine. This is an opportunity for me to see the talent coming through.”

The members of the premier 2007-2008 Information Technology Management field project team:
Kyle Collins ‘08
Michelle Cuchelo ‘08
Michal Jacyna ‘08
Uday Ranganathan ‘08

The fulltime MBA curriculum features a yearlong field project in which students act as consultants to business. Groups of two to five students work with their professors to solve a real problem of the host company.   The projects are geared towards the concentration chosen in the second year of the program: Human Resource Information Systems, Information Technology Management or Information Assurance.