UA Students Make MyBiz Stronger

TUSCALOOSA – Students digging up ways to spur entrepreneurship in Alabama’s Black Belt unearthed the MyBiz Entrepreneur Network.   From this fortunate convergence, MyBiz is becoming a robust virtual tool for both of Alabama and Mississippi.   

“Our students were able to get a system in place by implementing new resources not on hand to the MyBiz development team, “ explains Josh Spraggins, a University of

Alabama graduate student and project director.  “This project also enhanced the business knowledge skills of the participating students.”

In the fall of 2007 three juniors, six seniors, and Spraggins – students in Alabama’s Management Information Systems (MIS) Program – began to research ways to develop a virtual business incubator for the Black Belt.  Part of this research included a benchmarking process to measure their performance against others trying to reach the same goal.  One of the students located information about MyBiz and began a dialogue Chris Reed, MyBiz project manager for the West Alabama – East Mississippi (WAEM) WIRED Initiative. 

The MyBiz program was building a system that ties communities, service providers, and an innovative entrepreneur website to promising entrepreneurs.   The students realized an opportunity existed in partnering with the MyBiz team to aid in new and existing expansion projects. 

“We were not being viewed as competitors,” Spraggins said, “but as business partners.   We realized MyBiz was a good product and setting up this partnership would allow both parties to learn from one another.” 

“Collaboration with partners like the University of Alabama is critical,” said Chris Reed.  “Teamwork will help us respond quicker and more effectively to the need of our customers – rural entrepreneurs.  We want to provide the best resources rural entrepreneurs can find in getting their enterprises up and running.”

The MIS program at UA is different from other programs in that students work on real world projects.  Instead of having fictional scenarios to solve, the MIS Program strives to find existing problems for the students to engage in and find solutions for.  This is how the group came to work with the MyBiz website.   Alabama’s MIS Program seeks to prepare students to become information technology solution providers, meaning students will utilize their knowledge of computerized information systems to make business organizations more effective.

The MIS students focused their talents on the MyBiz.am website.  In January of 2008 they tasked themselves in two different areas:  1) website development; and 2) marketing.  Students devised a registration and log-in system for the website and created a process for user feedback.  They also began work on a database of users for reporting purposes.   For marketing the students were tasked with creating a three year strategic marketing plan.