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Your Career :: The New CIO
First Year Shock and Awe
1/1/2008
Along the way, in 1996, his job was reclassified as a programmer analyst. And by 2004, Masson had risen to the position of director of the UCLA media lab. "We provided a variety of services," he explains: "programming, software development, graphic design, medical illustration, custom printing for large posters, and photography. We ran the website and a lot of systems."Then, late in 2004, Masson accepted a position as director of technology for SUNY Learning Environments in Albany, where a major effort was underway to migrate the distance learning system off of IBM/Lotus Notes and Domino. "The project we were working on received quite a bit of national and international attention," he says. "Unfortunately, it didn't receive much support from the [SUNY] system itself. Our plan wasn't readily understood; it didn't fit into the norm of what distance learning was at the time."
Disillusioned, several project participants, including Masson, looked around for new jobs. Masson's hope was to find a post that emphasized his newly gained skills as a systems architect experienced in service-oriented architecture and agile software development, particularly using open source tools and platforms.
Culture Shock
Masson found the SUNY-Delhi CIO job posted on HigherEdJobs.com. One of the things that struck him about the ad was that it spelled out little about what the applicant was expected to have in the way of experience. His impression after talking with the campus executives, however, was that they were seeking a candidate who could take "down-in-the-weeds technical explanations and translate them into something that can be understood by non-technical staff." In addition, there was a desire to know "what it's going to cost next year, what our annual expenses are...and on top of that, projections for growth." In other words, there was little appreciation of his enthusiasm for topics such as open source, tool integration, and system interoperability.
The gap between everyone's expectations for the job and what could actually be achieved hit home, says Masson, shortly after taking the job, when he sat in on a discussion about some phone issues-which fell into the domain of IT. "The manager of one IT unit said, 'OK, so I talked to the [telecommunications] company and so-and-so is coming out and doing that on Wednesday.' Another IT staffer said, 'Well, I talked to another person [at the company], and we're not going to do that.' A third said, 'So-and-so from that company was here last week and already did it.'"
The new CIO quickly dampened any expectations campus administrators had that he would conduct a major shake-up during his first year on the job. "I think they thought, 'Oh, this new guy is going to come and do all these things.' But I told them, 'We're not going to do anything for a year.' That was a bit of a shock to the school." What Masson had come to realize was that he and everyone else involved needed to understand precisely where the IT department was in terms of organizational structure, staff abilities, and campus IT priorities. "We weren't in position yet to enact things I had in my initial vision," he recalls.
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