March 31, 2009
After careful thought, we have determined our current IT organizational structures do not sufficiently enable us to address the rapid changes in technology, learning, and science. Some of the trends driving changes in our approach to pedagogy, curriculum and research include technology advances in social networking, streaming media, virtual universities, and mobile and cloud computing. In order to transform our IT services to better meet the new needs of today's digital students and to offer the high-performance computing we need to recruit and retain the very best faculty and staff, we will take the following steps, effective April 20:
Merge ITCS, ITSS and MAIS to create a new organization under the leadership of Laura Patterson, Associate Vice President;
John King, will continue as Vice Provost for Information Technology, but ITCS will no longer report to him. We want to thank John for his significant contributions towards advancing the University's IT vision and look forward to his continued collaboration;
Under Laura's direction, the respective leadership teams from the three departments will work together to help design the new organization. While this effort will take time, we anticipate they will have a high-level organizational structure in place by July 1.
IT has always been associated with change. IT organizations must continually evolve, learn and adapt to remain efficient and effective. It is essential that the University optimize its IT resources in order to offer our students, staff, faculty and researchers the most technologically sophisticated services, applications and infrastructure possible. To the extent that this reorganization identifies efficiencies such as reducing redundant services, our goal is to leverage these resources to meet our cyberinfrastructure needs.
MAIS, ITSS and ITCS have a long history marked by excellent collaboration, which we believe will be significantly enhanced by bringing them together. We are confident the leadership, with your support, will develop a great new organization.
Terry Sullivan
Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs
Tim Slottow
Executive Vice President and CFO
