Observer & Eccentric Newspapers, January 30, 2005

MSU students help develop Internet forms

Students from Michigan State University's Broad College of Business got the opportunity to step out of the minor league late last year when they helped Oakland County put together the framework for its electronic government services.

The students, working with the Information Technology department at the county, helped refine a search for companies to establish an e-forms program.  Once implemented, the program will allow county residents to do more business via the Internet.

Michael Cover, 22, of Bloomfield Hills, is a finance major in his final year at MSY.  He and a team of other students from the school worked with Network Technology Chief Jim Taylor to update the county's IT systems.

They started in September by talking to the industry's major players (IBM, Adobe) about what they could offer Oakland County.

"We held vendor interviews with the companies to see what they could offer in digital postmarks, digital signatures and e-postmarks," Cover said.

The idea was to set up a system where county residents can file their taxes and reserve facilities without coming into an office, picking up papers and sending them through the mail.  When everything is in place, residents will be able to perform those functions online from their home.

Cover and his team collected requests for proposals from 25 companies and did the work of winnowing their proposals down to a short list for county officials to peruse.  In short, they did the heavy lifting for the county's IT department.

"After we were done, all the county had to do was evaluate our scorecards and pick the vendors they wanted," he said.

The county got some very cheap labor, certainly, but the students got an unprecedented look into the nuts and bolts of their chosen fields.  It was more than practical experience, it gave them something concrete to put on their resumes.

"It was a great experience," Cover said.  "It's not what you get in a regular college class, it puts you in the real world.  It's going to be a fabulous resume builder and reference."

Quan Lam is a supply chain management major in the MSU IT program from Sterling Heights.  He said the experience was fantastic because of its rigid and exacting strictures.

"It's good to work on a real, live project," he said.  "But this was a government job.  There were strict guidelines and real expectations.  There was a deadline and you had to make it."

Brian Pentland, a professor of accounting and information systems at MSU, said in a press release that the project was a great fit for his students.

"I hope our students will have more opportunities like this when we do the course again next fall," he said.

News article by Alex Lundberg, Observer & Eccentric Newspapers, www.hometownlife.com.