First Year Shock and Awe

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Your Career :: The New CIO

First Year Shock and Awe

1/1/2008

By Dian Schaffhauser

How one new CIO faced the challenges of his first year on the job.

PATRICK MASSON remembers clearly that moment during the first full round of interviews for the CIO position at the State University of New York-Delhi when he thought to himself, "How long do I have to be here before I no longer have to be polite?"

He'd already met earlier that day with the search committee, where he'd shared his excitement about the work he'd been involved with at the SUNY Learning Network, the online learning arm for the 64-institution, state university system. But now he was having lunch with members of the IT staff he'd potentially be at least indirectly managing as CIO. "I was going on and on about something IMS [IMS Global Learning Consortium] had just come out with," recalls Masson, "when one guy looked at me and said, 'I don't know what you're talking about. And no one else here knows what you're talking about either.'"

That's when Masson questioned how committed he was to becoming a CIO for the first time-particularly for a campus that had never had one before. "I understand that there are always different operational aspects," he now concedes, "but I was interested in finding a place where the staff had an interest in exploring. If there's one department on campus filled with people always tweaking stuff, that should be the IT department."

Fortunately, another IT staffer at the table spoke up. "It's true," he told Masson. "We don't know what you're talking about. But we all want to. The scary thing is, what happens if we don't understand it; if we can't do it?" Masson then realized that two critical admissions had just taken place. One staff member had been brave enough to admit that no one knew what the new CIO candidate was talking about, and another had confessed a basic fear: "What if we fail?"

Suddenly, the position was back in play for Masson. "This is really a good group," he told himself. "A group that recognizes it has deficiencies-not with its members personally, but in the fact that the IT department just was not where it should have been."

After another set of interviews, Masson accepted the post. That was a little over a year ago.

Minting a New CIO

Masson believes that few would have predicted he would eventually end up as a CIO anywhere. After all, he launched his professional career as a medical illustrator for UCLA in 1992. But as faculty and students at UCLA began asking for visualization of medical data, he audited programming classes to learn how to generate images. He set up the department's first FTP and websites in 1993, so that faculty could access the images, and then in 2000 expanded that into an early learning management system by adding supplemental information, including case studies and radiographs.