 
When Teresa Iannaconi, MBA ’78, spoke at Smith’s Fall
2006 Business Ethics Lecture Series, she brought 40 years of
experience in regulation and compliance to the podium.
Iannaconi started her career with four years in public
accounting before accepting a position with the Securities
and Exchange Commission (SEC) and where she worked for six
years before coming to the Smith School for her MBA. She
even started a PhD, but when her husband was offered a
posting in Italy she left cheerfully, and on her return to
the United States was eagerly welcomed back to the SEC. In
1995 she moved on to KPMG, one of the Big Four accounting
firms, where she was the partner in charge of the SEC and
practice advisory group, responsible for overseeing
inquiries from KPMG client engagement teams about technical
accounting matters and SEC compliance. Iannaconi was
responsible for technical consultations in connection with
the national-level reviews and audits of public companies of
all kinds, from General Electric to small biotech companies.
Technology is one of the strategically important aspects
of accounting, says Iannaconi. It allows for timely
aggregation and reporting of information—a boon to markets
and to investors. It also makes it possible for information
to be quickly shared between divisions of multinational
corporations. “When I was fresh out of school in the 1960s,
there was no way to have timely reporting from international
companies,” says Iannaconi. “It would be months before you
could find out what your Singapore subsidiary was doing.
Because of the Internet, today you can find out what is
going on in Singapore more or less instantly.”
 The
speed at which business is conducted can be beneficial,
because it enables companies to see trends and respond on a
timely basis, says Iannaconi. But it is not always a boon
for workers. “There’s no such thing as a nine-to-five
workday anymore, because it is always the workday somewhere
in the world. I field calls from all around the world well
into the night. There’s an international timelessness to
business now. It’s exciting, but it can be hard to have
boundaries on your day,” says Iannaconi.
Iannaconi is transitioning into a new position within
KPMG, organizing programs to provide technical updates and
presentations to faculty and students at business schools as
well as client and non-client groups. It is a
knowledge-sharing program that aims to bring the most
up-to-date information to a broad audience that includes
students and faculty. “I have found that accounting programs
are really eager for contact with accounting practitioners,”
says Iannaconi.
She is also getting more involved with the Smith School,
first helping to raise money for a KPMG endowed faculty
position, and now serving on the Board of Visitors. |
 
Juanita Russell ’95 knows that technology has had a
transformative effect on the business world. Her company
wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for electronic data transfers,
secure online transactions, and of course, the Internet.
MERSCORP, Inc. (MERS) is a utility for the mortgage
banking industry that streamlines the process of doing
business by eliminating many of the industry’s manual
practices. By creating an electronic registry of mortgage
originators and servicers, the company has saved its
customers millions of dollars.
The Internet in particular has had a strong impact.
Russell, who remembers the days of dial-up, says that using
a browser-based system improved the company’s processes and
made it easier for customers to access the system. Those
customers include almost all of the nation’s largest
mortgage companies.
“More than half of all new residential loans originated
in the United States are registered on our system,” says
Russell. “We ultimately envision ourselves as the first step
in a completely paperless mortgage.” Russell has been with
the company since 1997, and has been involved since its
inception when she was a financial analyst with EDS, the
company that designed MERS’ technology platform.
As controller and vice president of MERS, Russell is
responsible for the company’s accounting functions. When she
joined the start-up, it had yet to acquire any customers.
Russell established all of its accounting policies and
procedures. She also developed the financial controls and
reporting protocols.
It’s a job she loves, and one she never could have gotten
without her Smith School experience. Russell returned to
college in her mid-twenties as a wife and mother of two
small children. “I came with a different frame of reference
than the other undergraduates,” she laughs. “But the Smith
School was a very supportive environment. Everyone wanted
you to succeed. Coming here was one of the best decisions I
ever made.”
After a number of years focusing on her family and
career, Russell has become more involved with the alumni
community. Last fall she served as a round one judge at the
2006 MBA Case Competition, letting her give feedback to
teams preparing to enter the competition’s semi-final round.
“Serving as a judge allowed me to give back to my school
and to impart some of my real-world experience to the next
generation of professionals,” Russell says. “It was an honor
and a pleasure for me to participate.”
Russell lives in Leesburg, VA, with her husband and two
children. |
 Gaurav
Pal, MBA ’02, worked for a large government contractor,
but he had a hard time finding information about federal
contracts. And if he was having a problem, Pal figured that
other people were running into a similar roadblock. It was a
problem worth solving, and Pal thought he might be the one
to do it. That epiphany led to a new product, the launch of
a business, and a very busy and exciting year for Pal.
Pal’s product, fedXccel, is an online database that
contains a universe of information on the purchasing habits
of the federal government. In the Washington, D.C., area, it
is almost impossible to be out of the federal government’s
sphere of influence; it spends nearly $300 billion a year,
about $70 billion with small and emerging companies. Many
companies are eager to capture federal business, but lack
the information they need. Pal developed fedXccel to meet
that need, based on his own hard-won experience pursuing
federal contracts.
Pal launched his company, netxccel, in January 2006 and
rolled out the first version of fedXccel in February.
Customers started signing up immediately. The company
received its first round of funding through the Dingman
Center for Entrepreneurship’s Capital Access Network (CAN)
of angel investors, and the Smith School has been an
important resource for Pal in many ways.
“The Smith network has been just phenomenal for my
company,” says Pal. “We recently signed up IBM as a customer
and partner due to connections I was able to make through
Smith alumni.” The Smith network has helped Pal find
customers, business partners, investors, and employees, he
says. Charles Olson, visiting associate professor of
logistics, sits on the company’s Board of Directors.
Pal has also internalized the Smith School’s viewpoint on
the relationship of business and technology. “My company
isn’t really about technology,” he explains. “If you look at
Google, technology underpins their business, but the
technology isn’t what made Google. They had a vision to
organize the world of information. Our vision is slightly
smaller—to help the government organize procurement
information. Technology is our lever to do that, but I also
needed all the other stuff they taught me in business school
to develop the insight to understand the business problem
and engineer the solution.” |
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