Written by: Jackie Lallo
A team of four Management Information Systems majors from the College of Business’s Department of Management at The University of Akron took a trip to Ball State University to participate in the first-ever Information Systems Project and Case Competition. The team took first place in the project category, first place in the presentation category and third place overall.
Management Information Systems professionals focus on technology-based activities within companies. They often perform a variety of duties that include creating plans to manage Internet and networking operations, defining the technical goals of a company and plans to achieve those goals. Among many other tasks, MIS professionals are a vital partner in any company looking to better it in this technology based world.
The team consisted of UA students Iulian Arsene, team captain and chief engineer, Derek Lippert, chief product designer and Gary Ward and Ben Gump, business analysts.
Treating their project as new product development, the team created a USB device with a small screen that transfers files wirelessly to a similar device (with blue tooth capabilities) without having to go through a computer, ultimately saving time.
On top of creating this concept, the team chose a software platform and hardware, as well as investigated the capabilities of the chip that would be responsible for the main function of the device.
“A couple of the other teams wrote mobile phone apps or did some programming, but no one took on anything close to the scope of this project,” said the team’s coach, Dr. McHenry. “One of the judges told us privately that he has judged many student presentations at Ball State over the years, and this was the best single student presentation he has ever seen.”
The team worked throughout the semester to put together this project and did all of the work to include the conceptualization of the device and all engineering.
During their 20-minute presentation, they explained everything they had done as well as a short demonstration of the files being transferred from the device to an Android-powered smartphone.
“We learned a lot about systems development life cycle and how to implement it into business,” Gump said on the experience of the competition. “We bonded really well as a team and made good friends in [the] process.”
