Category: CITe News

When: Tue, February 19, 2013, 09:00 AM – 01:00 PM

The Timken Co. is sponsoring IT shadow day for UA undergraduate and graduate IS Students. The University is observing President’s Day on February 19th and classes will not be held.

Students will be divided into groups based on their interest (Database Management, Data Analytics, OS Administration, Information Security, Testing Services, etc) and will be put into one-on-one shadowing sessions with Timken’s employees. The day ends with a networking luncheon. This is a great opportunity for students to learn more about the local company, practice their networking skills, and potentially set up an interview for an internship or full-time position.

Address:

The Timken Company
1835 Dueber Ave. SW
Canton,OH 44706-0932
(P) (330) 438-3000
(F) (330) 458-6006

Directions:

Take ramp onto OH 8 South
merge on to I77S
take exit 103
Keep left at the fork
follow signs for Cleveland Ave/Timken Pl/Shepler Church Ave
Continue straight onto 891
891 turns right and becomes Dueber Ave Sw
Destination will be on the right.

The CITe Board is excited to welcome the two newest members Fred Franks and Jim Anich

Fred Franks is the Chief Information Officer (CIO) at FIT Technologies and has been part of the organization for six years.  Fred brings both strategic and tactical experience to the organization, and to the clients.  His primary focus is on business development and client solution design.

Fred was honored as a Crain’s “20 in their 20s” and upped his hipster status by being named on Inside Business’ “Powerful Techies” list a couple years ago.  This year, he was honoured as a NEOSA CIO of the Year.  Fred has also led FIT to earning Best IT Services Organization from NEOSA.  Fred loves working at FIT because of the culture that has been created here and the really talented, smart people that are part of the team.

Prior to joining FIT, Fred worked in IT at Sherwin Williams for 5-years. He has an MBA from the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University, and a BS in Management Information Systems(MIS) from College of Business Administration, The University of Akron.

Jim Anich Is currently the Data Center Manager at Allstate Insurance. He has a BSBA of Finance from the University of Akron and more than twenty years of experience leading line managers and technicians in multiple data centers. He works to lead operational organizations and align individual contribution with the businesses goals. He has worked in Datacenter construction and helped teach a senior level Large Systems Class at Kent State for three years.

A team of four MIS majors won first place at the first ever Information Systems Project and Case Competition hosted by Ball State University in Muncie Indiana.

A team of four students majoring in Information Systems at the College of Business Administration took FIRST PLACE in the PROJECT CATEGORY, FIRST PLACE in the PRESENTATION CATEGORY, and THIRD PLACE OVERALL. Congratulations to the four senior MIS Majors who independently conceived of their project, developed it on their own during the spring semester, and successfully presented and defended it against 11 other teams. They are (see picture below):

Iulian Arsene, team captain and Chief Engineer (right)

Derek Lippert, taking on the role of Chief Product Designer (middle)

Gary Ward and Ben Gump, talking on the role of Business Analysts (left and second from left)

Dr. Bill McHenry, Professor of MIS and coach (second from right)

THE IDEA!

In a nutshell, the team took on the idea of developing a USB device with a small screen that can transfer files wirelessly to a similar (or other Bluetooth-enabled) device without having to go through the intermediary of a computer. The team treated this as a new product development, selected a hardware and software platform, investigated and understood the capabilities of a small chip that would be at the heart of the system, wrote code to implement several classes needed to make the transfers work, documented their developed in a UML diagram, developed a 3-D model and animation to go with the presentation, created a lively and informative poster board that blew all the other teams away, analyzed the market position of their product using a SWOT and Five-forces analysis, priced what it would take for an initial proof of concept batch to allow them to move on to seek further funding, and explained all of this in a 20 minute presentation/Q&A session, including a small demo of bits being transferred from the development environment/chip (“the device” as we fondly called it) to an iPhone. 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. 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! Congratulations again to our most successful team!