Booz Allen Hamilton Case Competition Winners
On Friday, November 3, first-year MBAs Daniel Bresette, Eric Olesh, Ray Wang, and Sam Tang won the Booz Allen Hamilton OCT Case Challenge. The win was the culmination of a week of teamwork and good thinking.
Reserved for first-year students, the case competition results in internship offers for the winning team. The winning team also will go on to compete at the national finals at Booz Allen’s McLean, Va., offices on Friday, November 17.

“On behalf of the Smith MBA Consulting Association, we were honored to have been invited to participate in this year's Booz Allen Hamiliton OCT Case Challenge,” said Chirag Metre, President of the Smith MBA Consulting Association. “Our participation is a testament to the caliber of the students we have here at the Smith School, further strengthening our ongoing relationship with Booz Allen Hamilton, the premier global strategy and technology consulting firm.”

This year’s case focused on IT transformation in the federal sector. The premise was fictional, but the challenge posed was how to handle to the formation of a new federal department created through the consolidation of three former federal agencies. The new department required new IT systems and human capital structure. The team’s job was to develop an implementation plan.

“For my team, I think time management presented us with our biggest challenge. We were given less than a week to turn a wide-ranging, complicated case into a concise presentation. We had to figure out very quickly where to begin and how to prioritize our tasks,” said team member Daniel Bresette. While he doesn’t want to jinx it, Bresette hopes he and his teammates can build on this experience and pull together a national win later this month.

Helping them as they head to nationals? Team work. Notes team member Sam Tang: “Not only does every member bring something to the table, as a team we are able to capitalize on our difference by creating and managing a very dynamic team process. Everybody kept an open mind toward different ideas. We argued a lot while doing the project. We challenged each other. We were also willing to be challenged by other members. As such, we were able to constantly develop our ideas to make them better as a team. The process let us feel that the team is more than just the sum of the four of us.”

Booz Allen Judges were Alan Potter, Sanjay Purohit and Tiffany Whitton, two of whom were Smith School graduates. For more information on the challenge, contact Chirag Metre at chirag.metre@rhsmith.umd.edu.

Carly Fiorina Book Signing & Networking Event Attracts 300
Monday night was an extraordinary night for the Smith School community. Nearly 300 alumni, students, faculty, administrators, staff, and friends gathered for a book signing and networking event featuring former HP CEO Carly Fiorina, MBA '80. The event took place at The Ritz Carlton in Tysons Corner and was considered by many attendees -- even first-timers to an alumni event -- to be one of the best ever. Tom McMillen '74, former Maryland basketball player and congressman, and Mary Kane, Maryland secretary of state, were both in attendance.

Fiorina, MBA '80,  signed copies of her new book, Tough Choices: A Memoir, and gave a talk about the book and her time at Smith. To the delight of the crowd, she came down from the podium and stage to interact with the audience. She described in more detail than is in the book her connections to Professors Rudy Lamone, Ed Locke and Bill Nickels. When she spotted Nickels in the audience, she ran over to give him a big hug.  "I'm tremendously proud to be one among many of the great representatives of this school," said Fiorina.  After an enlightening Q&A session, the crowd gave her a standing ovation, and Dean Howard Frank declared that one future position for her could be dean of the Robert H. Smith School of Business.
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Faculty Up Front

Congratulations to the following (categories are noted after the department name):

Technology@Smith

Many of you are (and should be) suspicious of e-mail asking you to change your passwords. The message from OIT is genuine – they have in fact changed their policy, and if you have not changed your password since August 16, you will need to change your password to continue accessing systems such as Blackboard, the eSmith portal, ARES, Testudo, and the campus wireless network. In addition, from now on passwords will expire on University systems every 180 days.

We urge everyone who has received a message about their University Directory password expiring to go to the university’s password site at http://password.umd.edu well in advance of the deadline. The servers handling the password rotation have shown signs of overloading, and you don’t want to get caught in the rush on the last day. There are two upcoming dates for these changes - November 8th and November 15th. The notification e-mail you receive from OIT will indicate which expiration date your account will be assigned – you cannot choose or change this date.

If you have not already done so, when you go to their site to reset your password you will be prompted to enter the answers to a set of security questions. This set of questions will be used to validate your identity in the future should you ever forget your password. With these questions, users will be able to reset their own passwords without having to contact the OIT help desk.

We know that many will find getting used to the new password policy to be painful, but this change of policy is an important step in securing computer resources at the University. State auditors created the password quality and rotation policy in alignment with state and industry best practices. Smith will be matching the policy to protect our own systems using the same standard in the near future. In fact, in an independent security penetration audit contracted by Smith IT, the only breech of Smith system security was through a low-quality password. It is vital we protect our systems and data from attack.

Questions with Answers
Q: Can I be exempt from the new policy?
A: We are unaware of anyone being granted an exemption by the University’s Office of Information Technology.

Q: Why is such a difficult policy in effect? What’s the point?
A: Security breeches at universities have made big headlines over the past few years. Because university networks (and UM is no exception) are so open on the Internet, they are especially susceptible to attack. It’s important that we follow industry best practices to protect all of our systems. It is often very easy for one compromise in one seemingly unimportant system to lead to other systems being compromised.

There are widely available programs that guess passwords. The site http://www.lockdown.co.uk/?pg=combi lists the time required for these programs to correctly guess passwords of different compositions. For example, a single typical desktop computer can guess an eight-letter password using just lower case letters in a maximum of 348 minutes, but the same length password using a mixture of upper and lower case letters plus numbers and symbols would take 23 years!

Q: What is Smith going to do to make this easier?
A: While the campus is providing no support to departments and colleges to implement their own security improvements, the Smith School is taking the lead in helping its users secure their systems. This summer we installed a new password change utility that will allow you to change the passwords for all of your Smith accounts (Netware, Lotus Notes client, and Lotus Notes internet) on one Web page. This system was rolled out to the incoming graduate students this fall, and based on the experience gained from that rollout we are developing a rollout plan for the rest of the school. The current plan is that we will call for Smith users to change their passwords to be compliant with the new policy in February, after we have fully deployed the tool. 
More detail on the password synchronization tool will come in a future message.

New Smith IT Web Site
Over the last several months, the Smith IT Staff have been working on a new look for their Web site. On October 19th, our new Web site went live. Please visit our new site at http://www.rhsmith.umd.edu/smithit and send any comments or suggestions to helpme@rhsmith.umd.edu.

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Smith School History


As enrollment skyrockets after the end of World War II, faculty also increases from 18-76. The first MBA degrees are granted to five students of Dr. John Frederick, who joined the faculty in 1946 from the University of Texas and brought his graduate students with him.

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