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Interview
The Successful CIO: Vision, Focus, and Execution
2/28/2007
An interview with John Camp, Wayne State University (ret.)
Retired this last January, John Camp was deputy CIO or CIO at Wayne State University (MI) for the last 10 years and in IT leadership positions there since 1985. Active professionally and now chair of the Educause Current Issues committee, Camp thinks hard about the leadership role of the CIO and the strategic impact CIOs can have at their institutions. CT interviews this 22-year veteran CIO about his career and perspectives on leadership…
CT: What brought you to your career in IT?
CAMP: I did my degree work at Columbia University (NY) in the '60s, where I was interested in experimenting with how computing technology could promote the learning of mathematics. An interesting phenomenon was that people who had to write computer simulations for mathematics learned the mathematics better. I was recruited to Wayne State where I worked for 14 years on how computing technology could impact the learning of mathematics and science, then in 1985 left my faculty role to promote the growth of academic computing at the university. I never went back to the faculty role because IT was so interesting.
CT: What was the most significant change that took place within IT during your 22 years in IT leadership?
CAMP: Beginning in the mid-'80s, with the growth of personal computing, desktop computing, and then local area networks, we moved from having a single, large data center as the "center of the universe" to the rapid expansion of computing resources almost everywhere. This was a pendulum swing from a monolithic computing environment to a distribution of computing power--a quantum change that introduced a lot of complexity.
We had at one time a central organization managing and providing computing resources, and that changed for a time to just about everyone "doing it for themselves" in small constellations of local networks. That progressed for not quite a decade. Then, the realization struck that we had all of these islands and had to bring order to that. The pendulum began to swing back. We'll never go back to a completely centralized data center environment again, but we now realize that the network infrastructure that brings distributed resources together is the enabling foundation for all of what we do.
CT: What do you see as the biggest opportunity for your successor at Wayne State in the next five to 10 years?
CAMP: This continues to be a very exciting time for IT leaders. Information technology really is a leadership opportunity. IT is so pervasive: It touches everything that happens in higher education in teaching, learning, and research. You can't have downtime any more; people don't tolerate it. So in terms of opportunity--and to put this in context, I like being in places where we have to be really smart because we don't have buckets of gold--the question becomes, "How do you continue to deploy the technology solutions that are needed to advance higher education in ways that are very highly reliable and cost-effective as well?"
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