Smith MSIS & AI Students Deliver Real World Systems Overhauls for State Agencies and Industry Partners

A guided maintenance-request flow lets State employees report issues, attach photos, and set severity from their phones.

An early prototype of the DGS mobile app: a single entry point to services across the department's eight divisions.

DGS Project Delivery Manager Ram Konda commended the students for “their ability to synthesize complex requirements into a cohesive, actionable prototype supported by detailed data‑flow diagrams and Figma designs.” They have done a great job this semester and will work toward integration and implementation when they return in the Fall semester, he added. “They delivered a functional blueprint for our digital infrastructure.”

Spotlight: Impact‑Investing Due Diligence Platform

Another student team (David Binigbolo, Mahad Khan, Kayli Malone-Senea, Navya Narasimha, Weirong Peng, Sameer Saxena) in the Systems Analysis and Design course built WorkOS, a prototype diligence platform for The Super Crowd, Inc., a public benefit corporation supporting mission‑driven entrepreneurs and retail investors.

The firm’s existing process relied on manual reviews of SEC Form C filings and inconsistent access to EDGAR data. The WorkOS prototype consolidates these steps into a unified system that automates filing retrieval, enables rapid preliminary analysis, supports public-source verification, and provides centralized reporting. Students delivered system models, architecture recommendations, and implementation plans, along with performance benchmarks demonstrating faster processing and improved data accuracy.

CEO Devin Thorpe praised the team’s professionalism and noted the platform’s potential to enhance operational efficiency and investor decision-making significantly.

Student Reflections

The capstone, said several of the participants, deepened their understanding of real-world systems design, describing the system-design phase as "a valuable learning experience" and, for one student, "one of the most fulfilling experiences of my academic career."

That growth was driven by being pushed into unfamiliar territory and learning to navigate it with confidence. Fikreab Mezgebu, whose team worked with Web Traits, said he "gained many valuable skills" and grew "more comfortable in many of the areas that were unfamiliar and challenging at the beginning of the semester."

For others, the lesson was about how real systems hold together. Adith Kannan of The W2 Group came away with "a much better appreciation for why structured systems analysis exists," adding that it is "not busywork — it's the thing that keeps a complex design from falling apart."

Cloudforce's Venkata Sai Krishna found that breaking down a live analytics platform "made the theory from class actually click.”

For CTIS's Anirudh Patil, the takeaway was the teamwork itself: through regular discussion and shared ownership, his team "strengthened team cohesion and gained confidence in our ability to successfully execute the project together." The mix of client engagement, collaborative design, and structured analysis, he said, "reinforced the importance of clear requirement gathering, effective communication and cross-functional teamwork in delivering successful information systems solutions."

“These projects show how our students are translating complex organizational needs into scalable, AI‑enabled systems, said Associate Clinical Professor of Information Systems Minoo Modaresnezhad. “The partners trusted them with real problems, and the students delivered solutions that meaningfully improve how these organizations operate.”

Read more about the MSIS & AI Industry Capstone.