MIS Bridge Team & History

The MIS Bridge would not exist without the dedicated efforts of faculty, staff, students, alumni, and industry volunteers. Conceived in summer 2000 by Dr. Prabhudev Konana, it took three semesters of collaborative work to create. During this process, people have spent heroic amounts of time mentoring student teams to help them build a real-time, multi-functional, living website.

Prabhudev Konana's intial concept of the MIS Bridge.

We are deeply grateful also to the Cargill Higher Education Initiative, whose support enabled us to buy the MIS Bridge servers in fall 2000.

Some people who deserve recognition in the ongoing MIS Bridge effort include (but are truly not limited to) Wade McElroy, who created the graphic design for the home page; Abel Banda, who built out the infrastructure; Tom Keney, Danny Chen, Lee Falkenhagen, Chris Mankle, Scott Artman, Nancy Sun, Jerry Malcolm, and Chris Walk, who worked for many semesters doing things like laying out the directory structure, coaching teams, and serving as alumni and industry mentors for students taking the Advanced e-Business Topics and Projects classes.

And speaking of those classes, alum Scott Campbell guest taught the Projects class--for two semesters!--at the same time that he was taking on the reorganization and presidency of his company, Momentum Software. His contribution cannot be measured.

McCombs Computer Services Director (and MIS alum) Tim Matthews must be thanked as well. He hired Lynn Hartley upon her MIS graduation in 2001, and part of her work in Computer Services has been managing projects and generally trouble-shooting everything on the back-end of the MIS Bridge.  On the front end of the Bridge, PPA major (and Elota Patton's TA) Tiff Ting rewrote include files, designed graphics, edited photos, and added visual appeal to liteally hundreds of pages of content written by MIS Bridge owner Elota Patton.

MIS grad Kara Foster (2003) was not only a president of MISA, she also spent a significant part of her senior year coding the database that managed the application process for the MIS BBA Case Competition, leaving a legacy of functionality in place that will serve the MIS Case Competition into the future.

When Linda Bailey took on teaching MIS374 after Eleanor Jordan's retirement, she laid out detailed, screen-shot by screen-shot specifications for the MIS Bridge Project Application portal, and Lynn Hartley began building it out.  When Lynn presented the portal concept to Professor Tim Ruefli, he got so excited about web-managing IROM BBA and MBA student/client projects that he hired MBA student Tracy Bazzell to work on the deep coding to make the site functional for both programs. 

As the Projects Portal neared completion in spring 2003, we realized that it would need top-level security to manage its three levels of functionality: the client application process, the faculty review process, and the student team application process.  As the content of the project applications would be material for several classes, students and faculty would need UT EID level security to access the data.  This was a job for Academic Computing Services, who jumped in to move that portion of the MIS Bridge to a secure, UT-wide server.  Not only did they faciltate the portal's evolution, they also saw the possiblity of rolling out the application--as originally envisioned by Professor Konana--to any other college or department that uses live clients for student projects.  It will be very interesting to see if this supremely collaborative effort--uniting the work of UT students, faculty, staff and alumni as well as interested industry volunteers--will serve as a model for other programs at the University of Texas. 

Industry Scott Artman Abel Banda Danny Chen Lee Falkenhagen Juan Garcia Larry Gross Scott Hemsell Brian Howell Tom Keney David Kriedler Chris Mankle Alan Stalcup Chris Walk Kit Webster

Faculty Linda Bailey Scott Campbell Eleanor Jordan Prabhudev Konana Elota Patton Hugh Poynor Tim Ruefli Bill Wade Larry Wright

Staff J.B. Bird Ed Davison Linda Fay Lynn Hartley Sharon Lutz Tim Matthews Stephen Shortnacy

Students
Fall 2002 - Summer 2003 Tracy Bazzell Kara Foster Tiff Ting	Spring 2002 Vanessa Allie Erwin Beckman Matt Berg Phillip Boyum John Brown Adam Burke Brad Bush Deborah Chen Charles Cheung Dana Chi Kwan Chow Raj Dave Brett Estell Ryan Grosskopf Kirsche Heins Isaac Hsiung Jennifer Kattner Scott Linville Brad Litteken Cullen McMahon Luisa Munoz Justin Myers Michelle Nguyen Ben Richie Jenna Rosenthal John Paul Seve Tiff Ting Kuang-Hao Tsan Pierre Tournois Carlos Tovar John Turner Claudia Villa Pablo Villegas Billy Zahn	Fall 2001 Danny Aga Sam Chheng Andy Conover Bridget Christopher Megan Clark Courtney Gibbs Jan Javurek Sarah Malik Wade McElroy Siddarth Ranganathan Amanda Sammons Angie Senchak Emily Tcheung Asa Trull Tara Tembe Edwin Woo	Spring 2001 Christy Allen Jon Wesley Calendar Jenny Colton Andy Conover Michael Costello Jennifer Fayfich David Glueck Chris Hall Jamison Hardigree Lynn Hartley Diana Xi Huang Matthew Klein Michael Klug Geoff Kruml Rose Kwok Richard Steven Lyons Michael Riginio Neal Silverwise Jae Song Krista Taskinen Drew Thornton Karen White Tiffany Young Bruce Zarate	Summer 2001 Lillian Chau Nils Marchand Lijay Shih Meiliany Soenaryo Cui Zhang Fall 2000 Zaid Alasad Jennifer Hill David Laves David Nachtigall Vaishali Soni