For many years, campus CIOs argued that our contribution to the leadership of the university was limited by the fact that we were the new players in the president’s cabinet. Well, as a profession we’ve been at it for about 30 years now. We appear to be rather routinely “only one technology implementation away” from a bigger leadership role on the campus.

It is time to ask some important questions and try to chart a path to a different level of discourse on the campus. Years ago fast networks and services like e-mail were things you could only experience on the campus. As members of the campus community have become accustomed to robust and reliable consumer-technology experiences outside the university, the self-image of the IT leader providing special-enterprise network services is no longer consistent with the experience of most people on the campus — and in most cases not the basis for a call to a leadership role at the university.

Here are four brief examples of new leadership opportunities that I think contribute to the overall portfolio of the campus CIO:

The future of science and discovery is intimately connected to computational research activities. High-performance computing, analytical services, and visualization tools are at the heart of the enterprise. Most universities can no longer afford a highly distributed set of redundant investments across the campus. We can and should support models of centralized services to support the research enterprise

Second, almost every campus needs a blueprint for greening the university. This is both to better link services across campus and to save money through energy efficiency. In addition, many students see our green initiatives as being every bit as important as our network and course-management services.

Third, over the next 25 years many universities will attempt to create international initiatives — whether off-site campuses or hybrid offerings that join the main campus with satellite and distributed campus environments. The technology community can and should play a key role in drawing up the blueprints for these efforts.

Fourth, after all the investments made in enterprise-resource planning—or ERP—systems, most campuses understand that their business culture represents the most important set of “next challenges” beyond implementation and updates of the software. CIOs and their technology colleagues have a real opportunity to work with business officers to involve key personnel in using as-yet-untapped features of our ERP systems.

I think we need to find provocative ways to lead the university. In my next blog entry, I’ll address the opportunity we have to use open educational resources to extend our contributions to our campuses, the communities we live in, and the general challenges facing the human condition. —Lev Gonick

Lev Gonick, this month’s guest blogger, is CIO at Case Western Reserve University.

Categories: Leadership