 The 11 o'clock clock on Think Tech, I'm Jay Feidell. This is Think Tech Tech Talks, because we're going to talk about tech today. And we have Randy Minas, he's on the faculty of the Schuyler College of Business, but better yet, even better than that, he's into information technology. Welcome to the show, Randy. Hi, thanks for having me Jay. Absolutely, absolutely. I'm so interested in this. This is why I love my job, such as it is. So first of all, your specialty is information technology, and that is so important. It's important for business, but it's also important for everybody about everything, because we are living immersed in a world of information technology and we'd better get to learn it. And so I guess, you know, there's two sides of that question. If you could speak about it on one side, the technical side, how do we make this happen? How do we make it work? The second side is, how does it affect us? How should we deal with it as a, say, a consumer of information technology? Am I right? Do you break it down that way? Yeah, yeah, I think that that's a good way to break it down. There's one, how do we use the technology on the other side of it, is how do we use it responsibly? How do we use it in a way that betters our interactions with each other, and how do we use it, and not use it in a way that is detrimental to the interactions with each other. And you have, you have, you have degrees in what? Information technology, in business, in both? Yeah, my PhD is in information systems with a minor in neuroimaging, and I have an MBA, and then my undergraduate degree is in neuroscience. So neuroscience, that really adds a special dimension. It's interesting, yeah. So my research focuses on connecting neuroscience with IT. How does, how does the information that we process today, and the technology that we use today, affect our processing of information, and does it, does it have good effect on that effect? I find that fascinating. Yeah, we have a lab at UH that looks at that. Has it ever occurred to you that the neuroscience of the brain is just a computer anyway? It is, yeah, it is. It's like a computer with a heck of a lot of connections, right? At the end of the day, we're all mammals and can, can never forget. Right, and so we created a system that is that, you know, IT systems reflect how our brain actually operates. So let's talk about the program. You guys have devised a program in Shidler. Really fabulous to have this at the university. It's a masters of science program. Can you talk about it? Yeah, so we have been working for a few years on developing the masters of science and information systems or MSIS program at Shidler. And this is a 30 credit hour program. It's a very common degree on the mainland. It's actually one of the best masters degrees that you can get on the mainland. We're bringing it out here to Shidler and we're really excited to start it starts fall 2020. We've extended the application deadline because of the COVID-19 situation, lots of things happened in the spring. So the degree is focused on getting the technical aspects of information technology as and parent and also with the managerial aspects of it as any like an undergraduate MIS management information systems degree would do. This is taking it up a notch to the more technical and managerial aspects of it. So who would be interested in this or who is it tailored for? Who does it want to attract? That's actually an interesting question, but it was originally designed as a bachelor and accelerated master's degree and that's just academic terms for what we call a four plus one program. So for our undergraduates are getting MIS degrees. They can double count three courses that they take their senior year as for the master's program. So it reduces it to a 21 credit hour program for them. But then when we were talking with industries and CIOs and everybody out there, they were like, there's a there's a huge market demand in industry for this as well. So there's the full time program, which is, which is alongside that too. So initially it was designed for the undergraduate that was getting MIS degree to stay on an extra year and then get that extra level of learning so that they could enter the job market that much more competitive. But now it's also there's been a huge demand also from the industry wanting to come back in and get the degree as well. Oh, I would imagine. I would imagine because it's a it's a wave of the future. It seems that every day it becomes more important, especially with the advent of all the social media other communication programs. I mean, I mean, I get these newsletters. It seems like every day that somebody inventing some of the kind of communication system that will rule your life or at least enable you to do all kinds of things you couldn't do yesterday. Yeah, exactly. And, you know, I was actually teaching a digital transformation course in the spring to MBA students when we had to go through a huge digital transformation from a meeting in class to meeting online. And we all in various ways were thrust into that. And that was that was an interesting process to go through. And so I think a lot of us relate to that right now and how we manage that process is really important to understand. And that's what our master's degree, you know, kind of we have a way of strategy of how to how to manage that transformation as part of the curriculum. Yeah, it sounds like it borders on the whole communication field and like, you know, think tech we do videos, but we also do data processing. And, you know, we have lots of technologies that support our video mission. And I suppose it's connected. And so you, it's not you can't be alone on information technology. You're going to be, you know, able to touch those other fields and help them or use that. So, when I mean, go ahead, go ahead. Well, I mean, when I haven't used this analogy for a really long time, but when I was in the PhD program, I would always argue that it's almost like like studying psychology psychology affects every single aspect of other other areas that we study. IT has become a similar way where IT affects every single field that we're in as well in every single industry in the business environment. I remember, you know, this is 15 or 20 years ago at UH, a lot of the departments, a lot of the researchers, PhD were devising their own programming. They were going beyond the spreadsheet. They had lots of data, they had to manipulate and analyze and they were doing it themselves. And I would say to them, why don't you go to the computer science department? Why don't you go to, you know, some central, highly expert group. Do that. And I said, no, we just do it in our own department and we do it just as we need it no further than that. It's not really efficient. You have to have, you have to have experts who can reach out to other disciplines and help other disciplines. Which side of the fence would you be on on that issue? Well, I think interdisciplinary work is critical. The lab that I that I have at UH is with the Information and Computer Science Department as well. So it's the two of us collaborating. And, you know, the, the highly technical side and when we put it up with with the more of the business or social science side of it as well. So if I go into this program, God's very tantalizing. Do I program? Do I actually code? Or do I learn about all the, you know, various programs that are coming down the bike and being established either commercially or by open source? How, how deep is the drive? Yeah, that's, yeah. So the, the aspect of the technical side of it. One of the really important things that a lot of our undergraduates end up going into and I would imagine, you know, at a higher level, the MSI students would be like a data analytics or data scientists or eventually managing a team like that. So for that, you need to know how to manipulate data. You need to know how to work with big data sets. But in terms of like the programming or highly, highly technical aspects of it, you'll be exposed to it. But, and, and you'll understand it, but the majority of it is how do we manage it? How do we put, how do we put this into the organization in an efficient and effective manner? And how do I know enough about it to manage a team that is going to be working on this, this very project? So, so that's kind of where we're geared. It's kind of like if you have, you know, the completely managerial side of it and the completely technical side of it, how do we pitch right down the middle on it? Yeah, and say, okay, we give you enough technical, we give you enough managerial and you can be that manager. I have to do both. It's about business management at the end. Yeah, exactly. So what kind of classes? Can you identify some of the subjects that are in the classes offered in the program? Yeah, yeah. So we, we have some classes that will focus on like data analytics and business intelligence and abstracting up from data to information to creating knowledge for the organization that's valuable. We have advanced cybersecurity course that gives you more cybersecurity training. So that's another aspect that's a really hot area right now. And then data management and enterprise data management as well as just data management, data governance in general, enterprise resource systems, those types of things. So those are, those are the, those are kind of the core courses that we focused on initially. And then we also have digital transformation, which is more of a strategy oriented course on how to take a business that is trying to implement a new business process or something that needs to be digitized. And so that's, that's getting back to the systems analysis and design. And that's true a couple of thoughts on that as so many times you see that somebody comes in and we're going to, we're going to upgrade our system, we're going to digitize our system, we're going to put it in a database somewhere. And people think, well, okay, at the end of the day, I'll be able to find things easier. It's much more than that. Because in order to make the analysis to create the database, you have to, you have to examine your whole business. You have to find up reorganizing your whole business and coming out to a whole new level. You thought it was just a matter of record keeping wrong. It's a matter of re-examining, re-imagining your whole business operation, isn't it? Yeah, or sometimes just like you're thinking just of tracking out one system, putting another system in its place and, and really if you, if you look at the capabilities of the new system, you can really reimagine how it's going to affect your organization. So that, yeah, that course in particular tries to pair like, okay, what's our strategy of the firm with what's our IT strategy of the firm and make sure those two things align before you just start to haphazardly implementing technology that you think is cool. Yeah, the other reaction I have is that, is that, you know, out there in the business community, even now, even with the advent of Zoom, there are people who are self-admitted, who might be contrite loveites. They seem to be everywhere, and they are at all levels of management. It's very interesting, you know, I would say that a person who has reached high levels of management probably has a better understanding. But there are a lot of people who have reached relatively high levels of management that have no understanding. Okay, so when you say that you're going to offer this program as a separate offering to people out there in the field and business, it's extremely valuable because it will raise all boats and it will do away with many loveites that we have today. It will give them management skills that can leverage their whole company. And we need to reimagine a lot of companies now in COVID. We have to get them back into the marketplace, but much more efficient than they were. Because this is, you know, much more than it seems to be. I don't think this program is limited in any way to Manoa. I mean, to the market in Manoa, the academic market. I absolutely agree. And I mean, it's serendipitous, right? In a bad way, I guess, maybe. But the pandemic situation is happening, but it right when we launched the program and you know, there's a lot of like, you know, worry about contraction and budget and everything. But this is one of the programs that really would help make sense of what is going on to industry and how we manage all of the changes that we're going to have happen. And the other thing that I'll just say for people that are watching that are considering the program is that when I went back to get my MBA was during the 2008 recession. So also during recessions, it's a good time to go and go back and get a master's degree and improve your education on any variety of fronts. Sure. Or watch Think Tech and learn so much. Absolutely. So, when does it start and how does it start and how are you dealing with COVID and organizing, you know, the material in the classes, the interaction with the students. Right, right. So the fall 2020 right now we're still following UH guidelines as we have to. And we're planning to be in person in the fall. One of the things about the program that I didn't mention at the beginning was that it is geared towards allowing you to have a full time job or a part time job so the classes are taught at night from six to nine o'clock at night. So you can have that full time job right now or have it we're hoping that they're going to be in person classes in the fall if they turn out to be online, we'll be ready for that adaptation as well. But right now we're going forward with the plan of being in person for the fall semester. Great, great. So, if I am watching and I want to know more about this, where do I go get a website. Yeah, so I can, I can send you guys the the website information. If you go to the Shidler.Hawaii.edu there's a MS information systems link there. If you're interested in learning more about the program. I'm also willing to meet with students MSIS at Hawaii.edu. And we'll make sure you get we get you that information. And so the applications we're doing, rolling applications probably through at least the beginning of July. And there's $100 application fee. And the, oh, and the tuition is $887 per credit hour just so. So what's the prerequisite? The prerequisite we'd be looking for business business experience and and some technical experience. It doesn't have to be exactly like you've taken you have deep understanding of networking or whatever the working with in a business with it people for people that are coming back in a managerial and more of a managerial role. And work with the IT department that might that will be enough for you to just start. You know, if if you're undergraduates in in English and you've kind of been working, you know, in hospitality job or something like that, we might want you to take a course or two to get the technical prerequisites that you need. And the managerial prerequisites you might need to get to get to the level of the master's program. So you'll help me tailor it to my own situation and my own expectations, I guess. Yeah, I mean we're in Hawaii we're in a community where we want to try to help as much as as possible and help each of the students kind of achieve what they want to achieve while keeping you know standards and everything in place as well. And one thought we've heard this many times in the last few weeks is that the people don't want to return to a mono economy with the hotels. They want to have a more diversified economy and we've been having this conversation since David, and it never really got traction look at us now and have a mono economy. You know, they, when they talk about reinvention, they talk about technology they talk about getting back to you know the dream of the 80s 90s to have a technology sector that really makes money. And it seems to me that what you're offering does feed into that, because an executive entrepreneur that has this kind of managerial view of technology is, is more likely to be able to succeed at an entrepreneurial attempt. Using the skills in this program. Yeah, I think absolutely for for small and mid sized businesses this is this is critical information to to help give your business a leg up, especially if you know, we have to go back to the social distancing and isolation you know having that e commerce side of your business and in some way shape or form and having the ability to get that up and running or promoted. That's important, but just in general having a small business person with the knowledge of how to promote your business through technical means it's just as just as important as the brick and mortar store and likely to become more important. Let's flip to the thing you and I were discussing before the show, which I enjoyed our conversation so much. And this is the ordinary Schmoe, you know, who's out there in a world of digital media and, you know, high high speed communication, all around him where he is drawn to it because he feels that or she feels that he has to watch out for every email every message because any one of them could bite him. And so he's working around the state of anxiety all day. And, you know, chasing the information that's in there that directly affects him. And thus he gets married to it, and he gets dependent on it. And maybe he's unable, you know, in a biochemical wave, a psychological way unable to probably process this. Maybe he accepts things that are not true. Can we talk about that for a minute, because I think that's the mammalian fall in the ointment that here we have this high science, and then we have we're emotional we're biochemical individuals. Can we handle it yet. I think that's what you've been studying and thinking about for a long time. Yeah, yeah. So with the with the work that I've done in cognition and kind of marrying that to how we respond to it systems. There's the Daniel Kahneman, a very prominent economist, it has has written a book called thinking fast and slow. And it's about how the mind works and then it works in two different ways. There's what we call system one thing, which is really, really fast automatic thinking so you know things that you do that you don't even think about like, you know, when you're when you're driving to work, you're not thinking about everything you're doing to, you know, in the car necessarily unless that your attention has to be focused on it because there's some danger in front of you. And then there's system to cognition which is the deliberative cognitive thought that the cognition that we're using to have this conversation essentially. So a lot of like the ways that we process information online is the system one like automatic responses. I believe that I don't believe that I think about this in a certain way so I'm just going to and we just move on and we just scroll through that Instagram feed we scroll through that Instagram feed, and we have these instant kind of reactions to them without thinking deeply or stopping to to deliberately think about it. And so what you know it's it's called confirmation bias where we believe what we want to believe. And we believe what we believe in the past and what has shown us to be true in the past, and we see something that contradicts it we tend to divert back to what we already believe. And so that's, that creates this this bubble of information that you, that you are doing that we all do then we've done since the, you know, what we were worried about tigers attacking us right which we were talking about before. Now you have algorithmic algorithmic bubbles that are put on top of that that we're not even sure, you know, unless you're really tech savvy of what they're doing so I call it the bubble times to in Facebook right so they're giving you what they want you to see. So you are seeing and interpreting that through your own information bias lens as well and that's so that's like the bubble times to and so those are doubly insulated bubbles and what it does is it really makes us start to drift off of what the ground truth is. And, and that happens in a variety of different ways and so when you become so insulated. It's really hard to pierce that bubble. So you have to really be conscious about getting outside of any one social network or anything seeking out information from other sources. And that's, and that's exhausting sometimes because you know who's got time to do that. I'd rather just scroll through my news feed or my or my Facebook feed and just react to it. But, but it's vitally important as we're seeing in society. Well, you know, it floods up a whole bunch of thoughts in my mind. I've been working for the paper one time and, and I could never control my headline, never. There were people hired in the newspaper in every newspaper, they write the headlines. And that's like what you're talking about with the feed. When you go through the feed really quickly now, you're reading the headlines. You know, unless it really touches you, you're not likely to click into it. You don't have the time. You gain this kind of official layer of information and the guy who writes the headlines has enormous influence on you. The headline can be twisted this way that way anyway. And so, you know, you have disinformation is so easy. And it's so it's ubiquitous. Now, in the case of the newspaper with the headline, you're going to have two guys sitting on an approach with rocking chairs. And one guy is reading the paper sees the headlines and he reposted to his friend that his friend says, that's poppycock. That's not true. So you get, right, you get a kind of a control mechanism, just in the human interaction and a little time and space to think about it. When you're there with your phone flipping through all the stuff, you don't have that. There's nobody saying it's poppycock, you have to make the poppycock decision yourself. Right. And you've got to be disciplined about saying that is that is poppycock or that's not. And yeah, and what we were talking about before was that the flags are flagging information is true and false. There was a lot of hope that that would that would help. So Facebook initiated the fake news flag essentially that was that only existed for like six or nine months. And we had done a research study on it that showed that if you believe the information that was presented to you and there was a fake news flag associated with it. It made you one angry and two it made you just discount the flag completely and move on. How dare they are. They're going to challenge me. It's not your friend that's going to like come over and be like, you got to get in, you know, your right mind again. You agree with Zuckerberg's decision not to flag anything. I. Well, I mean in the political situation or just in general, the political in the political situation, I think that there's much more responsible actions he could be taking on it. The flagging the information that that Twitter is doing, while it is serving a some purpose, I'm glad they're trying to do something it's not likely to is likely to result in the same. The same thing that we found our study that people that believe the tweet are going to believe it and say okay Twitter I'm mad at you for putting that there and people that didn't believe it were like oh I'm glad that Twitter put that there I don't believe that in any way it's not going to move anybody from the discourse, but getting that information, allowing that information to come out there and kind of percolate through society is what the real danger and problem is. And so as much as we can create interrupts on some of that where we stop and think. I mean that's the poppycock thing that you were talking about your friend, you know, saying you're reading something that's that's clearly not true. We just study we're working on getting published right now but we looked at if we had people rate the credibility of the news source almost like a Yelp rating while they were going through their Facebook feed. And it just had them stop and consider whether they knew it was true, or whether they've had personal knowledge of the situation, and the credibility of the news source that created them to think more deeply and be more critically more critically You know, Randy, I've been thinking about that for years. I think you're totally correct on that. I think I was going to ask you and you know the remaining time. What is the solution here is it comes at you faster. You're more suggestible. It happens more quickly to more people. It can redirect and you know have a negative effect on huge multimillion populations in instance and seconds. How do you control that. And I think I think what you just, you know, described may be a real solution. We got we got to save ourselves from this. It's not healthy. There's got to be a solution. And it's got to come from the people who understand what happens in information technology. So the rating system would be very influential on me. If I saw that this source was, you know, a negative source, I would take that different. Even if I even if I otherwise like the, you know, the media. So I hope this can happen. How, how can it happen on a large scale. I mean, we've got to get policymakers somehow involved or we have to get the organizations themselves Facebook, Twitter, the social media giants to be willing to make some sort of strides in that in that area. And I don't think all of them are all the social media giants are unwilling to step into the area. I just think that they've gone a little bit into it and and see and have seen some things that haven't worked. And so they're kind of more reticent now to try to put other things into place, even though right now is when we critically need some of that in place. Well, you know, this could come out of your program, it could come out of the Schuyler school. It could be a system of ratings where you have multiple sources of ratings on a given author or publication. It's like like eBay, you know, I'm, I'm surprised that PR media hasn't done this for eBay. Well, for civil beat, which is a, you know, this is one of his companies or although it's a nonprofit he started it. And the idea would be is that the reader writes the writer, the reader writes the right rates the writer, the all kinds of media, all kinds of data interpretations go in there at the end of the day, you have a metric and the metric is very influential and how you take this, this particular. And the other part that's really, really key is just getting the person that's doing the rating to stop and think for a second to so if you're, you know, going through Facebook and they say, you know, can you please rate this, this headline that you are scrolling past, if that gets the person out of this automatic except and just kind of let the information come in, then that's going to create some difference to and these little changes add up to big changes in our behavior in the long run. Yeah. There's no reason why something like this couldn't be done I think and it would have a, I think it would catch. It's very valuable. And so your program is very valuable your whole area of examination is, I really appreciate it appreciate you're coming on the show. I hope we can get to talk again soon Randy and I wish you well on the program and on dealing with coven and developing the program. Yeah, well, well thank you very much and thank you for the opportunity to come on here and and chat about the program and and the other stuff I love doing it. And I hope we can get to talk more too. So, I'll send some information, a program information packet that you guys can put online or something. Thank you, Randy. Randy. All right, thank you. School of business. Thank you so much.