Annie Stunden Heads Towards Retirement

The University of Wisconsin-Madison’s outspoken, energetic, and “bionic” CIO and Director of the Division of Information Technology (DoIT) is looking forward to retirement this coming summer. Anne E. Stunden (Annie) joined UW-Madison in 2000, having held previous higher ed IT appointments at Cornell University (NY), Northwestern University (IL), and the University of Rochester (NY).

Her career began as a developer for the Strategic Air and Ground Environment (SAGE) in 1959. Having worked in computer technology since, she considers herself “grandmothered” in the field – a rare claim, evidenced by the fact that she was the only woman out of 22 people pictured in a 1970 IBM Customer Executive Program class photo. Stunden is well known and active in the profession, with a record of service on boards and committees for organizations such as Educause (and its progenitors EDUCOM and CAUSE), the Seminars on Academic Computing (SAC), and before its closure, the Corporation for Research and Educational Networking (CREN). Her speaking and writing contributions have spanned topics from technology infrastructure to organizational issues.

In a July 2001 presentation at ACUTA, the Association for Communications Technology Professionals in Higher Education, titled “Inheriting an Organization,” she said: “When you leave an organization, you leave all of that behind, and the ghosts and goblins you have been feeding in your closets start pounding on those doors in the offices of the new leadership.” But we’re sure all her ghosts will be friendly ones.