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“Hitting the Ground Walking”
By Brian D. Voss,
CIO,
Louisiana State University
I joined the ranks of CIOs in April of this year, taking up my first
CIO appointment here at LSU after nearly 20 years in IT at Indiana
University. After my first two months in the role – yes, all
of two months! – I’d like to offer a perspective to those of my colleagues
to whom this might be useful. For those ‘more seasoned’ CIOs perhaps
this will offer you a bit of nostalgic entertainment. Or a chance to
chuckle, “Hey, look at the newbie talking the talk!”
I assure you that I have been – quite literally! – trying to walk the
walk. As I parted company from my former CIO, and as he quickly made
the transition from on-a-pedestal-boss to mentor, he offered to me a
great piece of advice: “Brian, walk about the campus and meet everyone
you can before you do much of anything else.” While this thought didn’t
seem at all revolutionary to me, turns out it was the most sound and
concise counsel I’ve ever received.
Having just completed that initial walkabout, I see first and foremost
that his advice provided the impetus for me to meet, face-to-face, with
a significant portion of the community here on my new campus home. It’s
one thing to meet people in the course of business over your first months
on the job, or to see them in the audience of an auditorium as you’re
giving a talk. And it’s quite another thing to walk across campus to
their offices, visiting them in their “homes,” and getting acquainted
over a cup of coffee or a bottle of water (a staple in every accommodating
Louisiana campus office suite!).
You learn a lot this way. And people are genuinely impressed that you’ve
reached out to them first. And, of course, it provides the exercise
the doctor is always ordering. But aside from the benefits of making
a good first impression, seeing things for myself, and sweating off
a few pounds, I also extracted a great metaphor for a broader paradigm
I should consider as a new CIO: Walk, Don’t Run. Let me elaborate with
some anecdotes.
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Need to Know
A Virtual Locker?
Higher education IT pioneer Annie Stunden is seeing her visions as
a CIO becoming realities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison:
Everyone should have a Web space for file storage, sharing, and collaboration.
This fall, as a new crop of freshmen enter the university they’ll have,
along with their My UW-Madison Web portal, better access and storage
for digital files than ever. My WebSpace, a system for Web-accessible
file storage, retrieval, and sharing, debuted last year and proved so
popular that the university plans to ratchet up service to accommodate
10,000 new users this fall. (Add that to last year’s level of 19,000,
with close to a million files and folders.) With more than 40,000 students
attending the university and over 13,000 faculty, the content management
and file sharing system is poised for even more expansion. But Madison’s
DoIT staff is confident that the Xythos-based system will be scalable
enough to handle the expected growth.
eProcurement for the Rest of Us
Larger institutions such as Penn State, the University
of New Mexico
, and University of Michigan
have led the charge in higher education eProcurement, tackling issues
like supplier enablement, user education, and integration with the ERP.
They’re set up, running, and even sharing benchmark data through efforts
like SciQuest’s Innovators Circle. But what about mid-tier and smaller
colleges and universities waiting in the wings for a chance to take
advantage of the electronic procurement technology? Yesterday at NACUBO,
SciQuest launched Express, a new eProcurement product line designed
specifically to address the market demand from mid-sized organizations.
The tool they unveiled for higher ed is called HigherMarkets Express,
a Web-based supplier management tool that is preconfigured and intended
for easy implementation with minimal support.
Institutions should not expect to integrate these tools with an ERP
system—you need the more complex solutions, like HigherMarkets, for
that. But it d'es give mid-tiers an entry point. As Gail Bliven, director
of procurement at the College of St. Catherine in Saint
Paul, MN says, “About a year and a half to two years ago I first found
out about SciQuest at a national conference. And I was very interested,
but the solution for the larger schools was too expensive for what we
could handle here. I think a lot of people [hoped], ‘If only they could
do this for a mid-sized or smaller-sized school.’ … I’ve been keeping
my eye on this, and talking to SciQuest off and on.” The college is
now evaluating the Express solution.
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Who's Where
The Search Is On
Larry R. Faulkner’s announced resignation from his post as president
of the University of Texas-Austin targets March 1,
2006 as a potential date for his tenure to end, with some flexibility
based on the search process as well as on how Faulkner’s own future
plans unfold. By March, Faulkner will have served close to eight years
in office—one of the longest terms in the university’s history. More
information on the search can be found at http://www.utexas.edu/news/faulkner/search.html.
New CIO
Cal Poly San Luis Obispo has announced that Timothy
J. Kearns, an associate professor and chair of the Computer Science
Department, will become the university’s new vice provost for information
technology and CIO on August 1.
We hope he, like Brian Voss, will "Walk the Walk!"
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