Career

Thus far I have provided information-technology leadership at MIT, the University of Chicago, and the San Diego Community College District; done teaching and research as a faculty member in management, social policy, and research methodology at Stanford and Harvard; undertaken formal and informal consulting with a broad diversity of campuses and organizations; and been involved extensively with diverse research and IT associations and collaboratives including NSF and EDUCAUSE. In the latter part of my career I’ve focused not just on technology itself, important as that is, but as much on the strategy, practice, assessment, analytics, collaborations, and policy that enable, inhibit, and/or require its effects.

Work

For over a decade I oversaw information technology at The University of Chicago, initially as Associate Provost and then as Vice President and CIO. I managed the central IT organization, hundreds of staff, and a $70-million annual budget. I was a member of the President’s cabinet, the Provost’s Staff, the University Budget Committee, the Intellectual Property Committee, the two statutory Boards overseeing Libraries and IT, and various ad hoc groups. My organization was responsible for data and voice networking campus-wide, the data center and IT architecture, most user support, academic computing (in close collaboration with the Libraries), web services, computer procurement (including a $15-million computer store), and administrative computing.

After leaving UChicago, I served as Vice President and a member of the executive team at EDUCAUSE, the principal information-technology organization in higher education. I oversaw, inter alia, the various groups that track, address, or interpret current and emerging policy and security issues for colleges and universities; EDUCAUSE’s interactions with the various agencies whose policies affect higher-education IT; the Advanced Core Technologies Initiative and most other activities focused on enterprise technologies; and the .edu top-level Internet domain.

Most recently, under Fortium’s auspices (see Consulting, below) I provided interim leadership for the system-wide IT organization at the San Diego Community College District, whose 100,000 students span three two-year campuses and a score of continuing-education centers.

My pre-UChicago curriculum vitae includes serving as Director of Academic Computing at MIT, where I was responsible for general oversight and coordination of the Athena Computing Environment and other central academic computing. This came after work for the Dean of Undergraduate Education, first managing a faculty review of the then-experimental Project Athena, and then directing diverse research and policy studies related to the Institute’s core curriculum. At MIT I also taught a freshman seminar called The Murder Mystery: Science and Art.

As I’ve written about elsewhere, for two years I served as Vice President for University Outreach at NBCUniversal, the Comcast-owned corporate umbrella for the score of NBC and Universal companies. This entailed collaboration with a range of stakeholders in the entertainment and higher-education communities to help both campuses and content providers set policies and implement practices more productively and consistently with regard to intellectual property — be that their own, or that of others.

Before coming to MIT, I was a faculty member at Stanford and Harvard . My teaching centered on statistics and other quantitative social-science research methods, higher-education policy, and institutional management; my pedagogy included seminars, case-study discussions, simulation exercises, and lectures. My research focused on how financial aid influences college choice and on organizational cultures and on university decision making. My undergraduate degree is from MIT, and my doctorate is from Harvard.

Community Service

I’ve been active in numerous information-technology efforts nationally, including the Seminars on Academic Computing, EDUCAUSE, the Common Solutions Group, the CIO groups from Ivy+ universities and and the CIC, Internet2, National LambdaRail, and numerous corporate advisory bodies. I served on and co-chaired the Advisory Committee for Business and Operations (BOAC) at the National Science Foundation. I helped found the Research University CIO Conclave (RUCC), the principal organization of research-university chief information officers.

Before moving from faculty to IT administration, I was active in the American Educational Research Association, the Association for the Study of Higher Education, and the now-defunct American Association for Higher Education. As a result of these activities and my past and current jobs, I’ve always traveled too much, but only rarely to interesting places.

I currently serve as a Trustee of the La Jolla Community Planning Association, and an Educational Counselor at MIT.

Consulting

I enjoy providing advice, guidance, and other consulting for organizations including campuses, associations, corporations, and other organizations whose needs align well with my experience and skills. Some of this has been pro bono, especially while I worked for organizations that forbade outside paid work, but most of it hasn’t. It has involved short and long projects, some solo and some with others, for a variety of clients. (I recently wrote in a blog post about how higher education uses consultants in IT.)

Seeking somewhat more structure for these efforts, and to broaden their scope, I joined Fortium Partners, a co-op partnership of individuals who, like me, “…have 25 or more years of technology experience, most recently in a senior leadership role.”

Among the organizations I have worked with are these:

For the most part these engagements have focused on the diverse roles information technologies play. I have consulted both on the specific applications of information technologies, and on their strategic, organizational, financial, policy, and human-resources requirements and consequences.