The Grizzlies have won their first national championship – not in athletics, but in academics.

Members of the Georgia Gwinnett College student chapter of the Association of Information Technology Professionals (AITP) recently brought home the institution’s first national championship from the 2013 AITP National Collegiate Conference in Database Design, held in St. Louis, Mo.

The annual conference features a range of competitions. About 700 attendees represented 70 colleges and universities, including Purdue University, Brigham Young University, Texas State University and many more of the finest schools in the country. Student teams vie for 42 trophies in 14 categories, meaning that many of the competing institution’s teams go home empty-handed.

To prepare for the stiff competition, faculty advisors Dr. Lissa Pollacia, professor of information technology, and Dr. Evelyn Brannock, assistant professor of information technology, along with other dedicated faculty in the School of Science and Technology (SST), mentored GGC’s AITP members in the evenings and on weekends. Timed, four-hour practice sessions enabled the students to perfect their strategies under the same parameters as the conference challenges.

America loves an American success story and “rural outsourcing” is certainly one of them.  Bringing lower cost IT development alternatives back on shore is a trend that is now picking up speed across the United States.  Monty Hamilton, CEO of Rural Sourcing Inc., an Atlanta Ga. based IT process outsourcing firm, presented an overview of the  $300 billion IT outsourcing industry, a look at the history of RSI, Inc., and the drivers that are now bringing IT jobs to many mid-sized (2nd and 3rd tier) US cities. 

“The cost of living” said Hamilton, “is simply lower in rural America.”  “In many of these places, we’ve found pockets of IT talent at the recent graduate level as well as mid and senior management,” he said.  Hamilton points to client dissatisfaction with overseas outsourcing as a major driver for domestic sourcing.   "This is a large industry with a lot of unhappy customers,” said Hamilton.  “Many don’t want to go off shore due to the risk and quality issues,” he said.

Through our ongoing Chapter Dinner and Presentations, the Atlanta Chapter of the AITP strives to provide fresh and informative educational experiences that can help our members make better informed decisions in their jobs.  Last month, our speakers provided attendees with strategic level perspectives for two constantly evolving areas within the IT mobility space: application development and enterprise mobility deployment.

Our first speaker, Akshay Shrivastava, Director of Mobile and Connected Devices at Turner Broadcasting provided some building blocks of mobile strategy.  He described methods for connecting mobile strategy with broader business strategies and choices for product development.
 
Shrivastava emphasized that, “on the continuum of cost of development and richness of user experience, you have more than two choices.  You have multiple options to choose from and each has implications from a business standpoint”.  He is a strong proponent of using HTML 5 to build cost effective cross platform web applications.  “I think we are at a point now where in the next two to three years HTML 5 will be the de facto standard for mobile development.  It is cost efficient, it is a standard, and I think will pick up a lot of steam in the next couple of years,” he said.  “The key for businesses is that they have a strategy that accommodates both mobile web and app,” said Shrivastava.  “The huge span of mobile screen sizes now means that responsive design is becoming a way to keep down costs of building for lots of different platforms, and delivering a single-minded user experiences across multiple devices/screens.”
 
Our second speaker, George Mashini of Cataval Inc. spoke about how to capture audiences within your own organization and put them to work in more efficient ways.  His presentation focused on the challenges IT professionals will face in planning and implementing enterprise mobility.  He shared his experiences and “the ups and downs of deploying a lot of mobile devices in a lot of hands”.
 
“We’ve seen mobile really be a driver for increasing productivity and achieving better customer service - better ability to answer questions,” said Mashini. He recommended using a process approach to ensure user adoption.  “If users have to go from system to system, they are not likely to accept it, “he says.   His presentation highlighted new ways of using cloud, SaaS, and multi-channeling to introduce mobility to existing systems.  “The executing challenge is that the data for the business process is actually locked into different silos that have been built over the last 20 years,” he said.  “The promise of the cloud is to build new apps that you don’t have to babysit,” said Mashini.  “The key, “he said,  “is that you can’t short cut security.  MDM was your first layer.  But as you open up the business process with ERP and CRM systems, you have to start thinking about your back end security and hacking.”