Bringing a University, a State, and a Region Into the Networking Era

Bonnie Neas put North Dakota State -- and the Great Plains -- on the map in technology

By FLORENCE OLSEN

Bonnie M. Neas describes herself as a visual person, so it's not surprising that she thinks of her job's challenges in visual terms. A blue tidal wave she sketched during a staff meeting fills the center of a whiteboard in her small office at North Dakota State University, where she was until recently the long-time director of information-technology services. The tidal wave represents new information technology.

As each new wave of technology appears, Ms. Neas asks herself and her staff members -- she is now the university's head of Internet research -- the same two questions: Will this technology benefit our users enough to deserve our attention now? And what process should we use to decide?

Ms. Neas says both are hard questions to answer, but she likes the constant changes in her field. Campus networks were in their infancy when she got her first job at the university, in 1984, but now North Dakota State is an active member of the Internet2 consortium, a group of universities building Abilene, a high-speed research network. She divides her days between tracking new directions in federally funded research programs and keeping up with trends in such areas as videoconferencing protocols and multicast technology.

North Dakota State is a land-grant college with fewer than 10,000 students in a town of only 74,000 people, but Ms. Neas has put it on the map -- technology-wise -- through a combination of expertise, hard work, and deft public relations. "She's got a unique ability to understand the technology issues but also to provide, in layman's terms, an understanding of what's at stake for states like North Dakota," says Douglas E. Van Houweling, the president and chief executive officer of the University Corporation for Advanced Internet Development, which manages Internet2.

People who have worked with Ms. Neas also praise her leadership style. "She's got a kind of comfortableness in her approach that humanizes ... a highly abstract and technical field," says Diane P. Balestri, the vice president for computing and information services at Vassar College, who worked with Ms. Neas on the Educause 2000 conference's program committee.

Ms. Neas is an expert in advanced networking technologies -- a field in which most of the jobs are held by men. But she is not someone who gets excited about technology for technology's sake. High-performance networks become most interesting to her when they are used for collaboration and for sharing data and other scarce or costly things, like supercomputer time or visualization-software licenses.

Unlike most campus I.T. officials, Ms. Neas looks beyond her own institution, working with and on behalf of other networks. She does this, she says, because she wants "a place around the table" for her university, her state, and the Great Plains region. She is especially interested in Internet2, which promises to facilitate new experiences of multimedia collaboration in the sciences and humanities.

"She's the perfect contributor to the Internet2 initiative, because the essence of that initiative is collaboration," says Ms. Balestri, of Vassar.

To colleagues here, Ms. Neas is not only part of the North Dakota State family. She is Bonnie the "rainmaker" -- the person who knows where to get federal money for obscure but critical campus-network improvements. Those improvements don't come cheaply, but Ms. Neas knows the right people in Bismarck, and in Washington. "She's held in high regard because of her knowledge and experience -- as well as her tenacity," says State Senator Tony S. Grindberg.

She doesn't say so, but she is clearly proud that North Dakota State, through its membership in Internet2, is among the first universities participating in access-grid research. Unlike traditional point-to-point videoconferencing, access-grid technology will be used for broadcasting or multicasting a video stream simultaneously to 100 or more different laboratories, conference rooms, or desktop computers in people's homes.

North Dakota State spends close to $1.2-million a year on its advanced network-computing infrastructure, including its wide-area network and Internet2 circuits. It's an unusual commitment for a small state institution, but it's the cost of staying current -- or even a little ahead -- with technology, Ms. Neas says.

This month, the university system will ask for $1.8-million from the state legislature to upgrade the network infrastructure further. The improvements will double the speed of North Dakota State's access to the Internet2 backbone. In a separate project, the campus network will be upgraded to single-mode fiber, putting the university a step closer to having an all-optical network, Ms. Neas says. Future networks with optical rather than electronic switches will, for all practical purposes, have unlimited capacity.

Now 57, Ms. Neas was 33 when she went to work for Mayville State University. Before that, she had been a stay-at-home mom for her three children, the first of whom was born when she was 20.

After starting as a punch-card operator in Mayville State's computer-data center, she became a Cobol programmer, then realized that she was not cut out for programming. "I tried it -- it was too confining," she says. "I like interacting with people." Over a six-year period, while she completed her bachelor's degree in business administration and data processing at Mayville State, she earned successive promotions in the university data center until she became its director.

North Dakota State hired her as manager of academic-user services, and she has remained here ever since, in positions that have included assistant to the president, I.T. director, and her current job.

When she started working, she says, information technology was "a very male-oriented environment" -- as networking still is. Ms. Neas insists that she has always been treated fairly, and even adds, "I don't mind doing some of the things that are stereotyped as women's work, because I think I do a good job at them." She recalls the time a male colleague once literally pulled her arm down in a meeting to prevent her from volunteering to be secretary.

Now Ms. Neas gets so busy some days that she forgets about lunch -- her husband, who is the financial-aid officer at the university, occasionally asks Ms. Neas's assistant to remind her to eat. Sometimes, she says, even a small university where she knows practically everyone and practically everyone knows her "can be as pressure-packed as anyplace else."

Her fondness for collaboration and cooperation spring from her roots in North Dakota, she says. She grew up on a farm near Egeland (population 100), where her family raised cattle and wheat. People had to get along to get things done.

When Ms. Neas was hired by North Dakota State to be manager of academic-user services, her job entailed managing technology-staff members and preparing the budget, policies, and future plans for academic-computing services for the entire North Dakota University System of 11 institutions. Ms. Neas soon began paying attention to BITNET, a research and education network that predated the Internet. For places as far off the beaten path as North Dakota State, regional and state networks seemed as promising, and as threatening, as the Interstate Highway System had seemed several decades earlier: The choice was to get connected or disappear off the map.

"I saw what they could do for us here in North Dakota," Ms. Neas says. Within a few years, she was collaborating with others on a proposal for a statewide network financed by the National Science Foundation. During the same period, she spent one winter session in the state capital, successfully lobbying legislators to pay for a new computer-science and computer-services facility for North Dakota State.

Building on what she refers to as her "public relations" success, Ms. Neas became the North Dakota project leader for two broadband-networking proposals for the region -- the Great Plains Network and the Dakota Link. In 1997, broadband-communications providers had written off the upper-Midwestern states, Ms. Neas says. But the Great Plains alliance provided a new financial incentive for the companies to provide broadband service.

In 1998, N.S.F. awarded $1.5-million in matching funds to the six-state alliance for the Great Plains Network, and $2.4-million for the Dakota Link. The two networks gave North Dakota State high-speed connections to all research universities in the Dakotas and to the emerging national research networks -- Internet2's Abilene and N.S.F.'s very-high-performance Backbone Network Service. Ms. Neas has stayed involved with the Great Plains Network and is now the chairman of its board of directors, which sets policies for the network.

In 1997, Ms. Neas was put in charge of the university's first federal-relations team. In November of last year, the university's president, Joseph A. Chapman, decided that it was about time Ms. Neas's title reflected what she actually does. But what she does turned out to require a title nearly as long as a fiber-optic link to Fargo: assistant vice president for federal-government relations and director of Internet research in the office of the vice president for research, creative activities, and technology transfer.

Today, Ms. Neas concentrates on expanding the university's Internet research programs. She uses her knowledge of advanced networking to achieve both that aim and the university's goal of reaching the highest Carnegie classification level. The university -- currently a doctoral/research intensive institution -- is not that far away from the next level. It needs only to turn out about 11 more Ph.D. graduates each year than it does now, and to make sure that its levels of outside financing meet the standard set by the Carnegie foundation. "It's a challenge," Ms. Neas says, but she likes challenges. And she has an affinity for research -- for "new knowledge and discovery," she says.

Some of Ms. Neas's favorite colleagues are those professors who have jumped on the opportunity to make advanced networking the foundation of their research. Indeed, she is far more eager to talk about their achievements than her own, and insists on taking a visitor to meet one professor after another. They could not do the type of research they do without the infrastructure that Ms. Neas, in her various roles, was instrumental in providing.

William K. Perrizo, her colleague across the hall in the new computer-science and computer-services building, conducts experiments with Internet2 partners in active networking -- a research technology that makes use of the unused capacity of gigabit routers and switches on high-speed, wide-area networks. Active networking finds the unused processors in the network and uses them "on the fly" to reduce the time it would otherwise take to process gigabytes of data needed for the latest kinds of research. In this case, the data is from satellites and the research is in agriculture.

Ms. Neas heads to the next doorway to introduce a few members of a group of professors who call themselves the World Wide Web Instructional Committee (http://www.ndsu.nodak.edu/wwwic). They are creating virtual-reality instructional software for the Web and conducting large-scale experiments to measure the effectiveness of advanced networks for team-oriented learning activities. The professors have just won a $1.94-million information-technology-research grant from N.S.F. to continue their research and keep their graduate students busy programming.

In her old department Ms. Neas introduces Johannes Grosen, the associate director for network services. Encouraged by Ms. Neas to pursue research, he says, Mr. Grosen and members of his network-services group used open-source software to develop a secure system for managing user identification, authentication, and authorization. "We're trying to be good stewards of what we have" while also looking ahead, he says.

When she directed technology services, Ms. Neas managed a $6.5-million budget that supported research and academic computing for the entire 11-institution university system. The 70 technology-staff members run the software site-licensing program for the university system and provide Internet access, network, and e-mail services for all elementary and secondary schools in the state.

While it is unusual for a university to provide network services to elementary and secondary schools, Ms. Neas says, the university can offer networking expertise that is not found anywhere else in North Dakota.

It's a reflection of Ms. Neas's broad networking interests that she also serves on the executive committee of North Dakota's Higher Education Computer Network.

And Ms. Neas is frequently invited to fill policy and advisory roles, including as a member of the prestigious Internet2 Network Planning and Policy Advisory Council. When Internet2 advisers debated recently how to change the consortium's policies to permit sponsored state education networks to connect to the consortium's high-speed Abilene network, it was Ms. Neas who offered a way to resolve a potentially divisive policy conflict.

Steven Corbato, the director of backbone-network infrastructure for Internet2, says Ms. Neas's suggestions helped balance the educational interests of state education networks and the research interests of universities that are the charter members of Internet2. "I think we'll see more pedagogical applications, student-to-student collaboration, curriculum exchanges, things like that," he says.

"She was able to help define a process that would allow for broader access," says Mr. Van Houweling, of Internet2. The new policy, which takes effect January 15, will permit Internet2 members like North Dakota State to sponsor nonresearch use of the network by elementary- and secondary-school users as well as by other colleges and universities.

Ms. Neas says she isn't always working on advanced networking -- or even thinking about it. Sometimes she actually enjoys thinking of retirement, still off in the future -- she might change gears altogether, she says, and perhaps do hospital-volunteer work. "I could do that -- I could rock AIDS babies. But who knows?" she says. She has worked for so many years "in this environment of constant challenge" that she is not so sure that she could step outside of it.

She is a lot like her dad, Ms. Neas says. He's 81, a retired farmer. He tells her she works too hard. And she answers him, "Dad, I work just like you did."

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