The CIO’s Perfect Storm
Disaster recovery and business continuity can easily preoccupy today’s
CIOs, but this Louisianan is making sure the whirlwind of survival issues
d'esn’t overshadow other key IT needs in higher ed.
Brian Voss, after his first year as
LSU’s
CIO: “If the CIO’s focus
moves almost
exclusively into one
area—the “perfect
storm” issues—
you will start to see
diminishing
focus in other critical areas.”
Brian Voss became CIO at Louisiana State
University in April 2005. Four months later,
in the grip of Hurricane Katrina, he and his
Gulf Coast colleagues experienced one of
the greatest disasters in history. In the wake
of the storm, Voss has been active on the
national scene discussing—in terms of disaster
recovery and business continuity planning
for IT—the lessons of Katrina for CIOs.
But he’s now seeing a different “storm” approaching higher
education IT leaders; one that threatens to alter their
roles and the value IT delivers to their institutions.
In your first year as a CIO, with the additional burdens
brought to you by Katrina, you’ve had to face some harsh
realities about priorities. What are some of the issues
now competing for your attention, and how do you determine
your focus? At this moment in time, CIOs are facing
critical housekeeping and survival issues—disaster recovery
and business continuity planning, IT security and data integrity,
and ERP systems—all very hot topics that we’ve got to
deal with; they’re right in front of us and converged into an
almost “perfect storm” that could easily command all of our
attention for the next several years. But a big concern I have
as a CIO, as my energy g'es into these very survivalist kinds
of things, is that this will draw our focus away from all of the
other issues that we need to face in terms of higher ed IT.
We’re just completing our strategic information technology
plan—our Flagship IT Strategy—and
only two of its 10 recommendations address these survivalist
issues. There are eight other recommendations! They
include building a solid foundation of IT infrastructure, making
significant strides in increasing the accessibility of the
campus community to that infrastructure, developing a
robust and multi-tiered support enterprise, paying attention
to our fiscal planning, developing plentiful resources for research, providing abundant resources to enable faculty
teaching and student learning, supporting the use of IT in
the student living environment, and developing our own advisory
and communication structures to keep everything moving
forward in a sound and collaborative way. All these things
are going to be fighting with the first two for resources. So
I’m very concerned that we are headed into an age in which
CIOs deal only with survival and are not able to focus on the
other broad elements inherent in our portfolios.