Driving IT Innovation and Network Innovation

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Driving IT Innovation and Network Innovation

7/21/2005

By Mary Grush

From early mobility projects to high-bandwidth research networks, IT--and Tracy Futhey--move the campus forward at Duke.

As CIO and vice president for Information Technology at Duke University (NC), Tracy Futhey oversees technology projects that have far-reaching impact on instruction, research, and the way people live and work on campus. While recently she is most often cited for her work with Duke’s iPod project (www.duke.edu/ipod), dubbed the iPod First Year Initiative, Futhey’s professional interests have spanned a range of innovative technologies, especially networked and mobile technologies. At Carnegie Mellon University (PA) in the ’90s, her projects included work on Wireless Andrew, an early campuswide wireless deployment, and on Handheld Andrew, which foreshadowed some of today’s emerging network and location-based services. Today, in addition to her role at Duke, she is board chair for National LambdaRail (www.nlr.net), the national optical research network. Her overall goal to “create dynamic research and learning environments” is met by innovation and enthusiasm both at Duke and at peer institutions across the country.

How have networked environments at colleges and universities changed over the years, and what are some of the biggest opportunities that have opened up? The biggest opportunity relates to broad access to these networks and the experimentation that has become possible as the networks have moved from being specialized—only available to a few— to true commodity networks. I was involved in the Wireless Andrew project at Carnegie Mellon University [nearly 10 years ago]. At that time, the idea of 802.11 wireless and what one would now consider to be broadband wireless access, was something that people in the mainstream simply didn’t recognize as having the potential that it eventually turned out to have. Then, it was really a tough sell to get people outside of the research community, and outside of some of the student community at CMU, to realize that being able to walk around with your laptop and be connected by the network was extremely powerful. Many had been using computers in a network desktop environment and thought that was perfectly adequate.

So the networked environment itself encourages experiment? The networked environment is an enabling capability that pushes people to try new things. There are new things that one might be compelled to do because of that mobility. I think of location-based services and context-aware applications—an entire applications area only emerging as a result of the mobility that’s being created by networked environments and the pervasiveness of networking. The more you’ve got broad access and experimentation through this commodity network—be it 802.11 wireless, or cellular and wide-area networking—and the fact that so many people are being connected so easily and inexpensively, without much effort, leads to a lot of individual situations where we can try new applications. These new uses are being tried by individuals who are not necessarily developers, but may be people who have a different perspective and a great idea worth trying. So, many of the changes I see relate not only to expanding access, but also to expanding the base of people who are trying to do different things because they are now enabled through the networked environment.