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The CIO’s Perfect Storm
6/22/2006
These types of initiatives, where you are making real strides, are what you live for, right? Right. This is why I wanted to be a CIO. I wanted to be a CIO because I want to work with all of these things, not just some. I truly believe that IT can advance an institution to national prominence. I believe that when you look at the usual measures of an institution—the quality of the teaching, research, learning environment, and the student experience—you see that IT really enables all these things. So our goal is not necessarily to become the best in IT; it’s to be the best in IT enablement, because that will help us to be the best and achieve national prominence in those areas that are associated with the broad role of our university.
After all, universities do two things: they create new knowledge, and they share information. And in the 21st century, IT is critical to both of those things. And that’s why I get so anxious about this current turn of events, because I have a feeling that if we don’t address this challenge to our focus, we’re going to lose our capability to do these other interesting and critical things. And not only will a given, particular institution suffer, but the nation will suffer as well. Moreover, higher ed will suffer. If you don’t have advanced research, advanced computation, and advanced learning environments that are developed locally, regionally, nationally, and globally to take advantage of the fact that this is a very interconnected world, and if instead what you’re doing is only managing your institution as a business, and protecting yourself from that globally connected world, I fear it’s going to slow the advance of the US in the world’s future.
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