The CIO’s Perfect Storm

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The CIO’s Perfect Storm

6/22/2006

By Mary Grush

Disaster recovery and business continuity can easily preoccupy today’s CIOs, but this Louisianan is making sure the whirlwind of survival issues d'esn’t overshadow other key IT needs in higher ed.

Brian Voss, after his first year as LSU’s
CIO: “If the CIO’s focus moves almost
exclusively into one area—the “perfect
storm” issues— you will start to see
diminishing focus in other critical areas.”

Brian Voss became CIO at Louisiana State University in April 2005. Four months later, in the grip of Hurricane Katrina, he and his Gulf Coast colleagues experienced one of the greatest disasters in history. In the wake of the storm, Voss has been active on the national scene discussing—in terms of disaster recovery and business continuity planning for IT—the lessons of Katrina for CIOs. But he’s now seeing a different “storm” approaching higher education IT leaders; one that threatens to alter their roles and the value IT delivers to their institutions.

In your first year as a CIO, with the additional burdens brought to you by Katrina, you’ve had to face some harsh realities about priorities. What are some of the issues now competing for your attention, and how do you determine your focus? At this moment in time, CIOs are facing critical housekeeping and survival issues—disaster recovery and business continuity planning, IT security and data integrity, and ERP systems—all very hot topics that we’ve got to deal with; they’re right in front of us and converged into an almost “perfect storm” that could easily command all of our attention for the next several years. But a big concern I have as a CIO, as my energy g'es into these very survivalist kinds of things, is that this will draw our focus away from all of the other issues that we need to face in terms of higher ed IT.

We’re just completing our strategic information technology plan—our Flagship IT Strategy—and only two of its 10 recommendations address these survivalist issues. There are eight other recommendations! They include building a solid foundation of IT infrastructure, making significant strides in increasing the accessibility of the campus community to that infrastructure, developing a robust and multi-tiered support enterprise, paying attention to our fiscal planning, developing plentiful resources for research, providing abundant resources to enable faculty teaching and student learning, supporting the use of IT in the student living environment, and developing our own advisory and communication structures to keep everything moving forward in a sound and collaborative way. All these things are going to be fighting with the first two for resources. So I’m very concerned that we are headed into an age in which CIOs deal only with survival and are not able to focus on the other broad elements inherent in our portfolios.