UMass Chooses a CIO

UMass has just completed interviewing five candidates for the position of Chief Information Officer. The Rules Committee was invited to meet with each of the candidates for an hour. We constructed a set of questions to ask all of the candidates:

1. What do you find attractive about this position?
2. What do you see as the main challenges facing public research universities seeking to maintain effective IT systems for research, teaching, and administration in a time of tight finances?
3. UMass IT support is currently highly distributed with some departments and colleges managing their own servers, services, networks, and wiring plants. In addition, administrative (and online educational) IT support is divided between the campus and the system office. How might you approach this? If you think greater centralization would be useful, explain how you might structure to attain it, and what incentives you might put in place to encourage it.
4. Much of the work involves teams, and even well-functioning teams have bad days. Can you give us an example of how you've led a team of your own or helped another team leader lead their team through bad days?
5. The UMass Amherst campus uses Free Software in many key functions and commercial software in others. How would you deal with the different demands posed by operating each type and balance managing both?
6. What has been your experience in working with faculty governance on the selection and deployment of a large-scale infrastructure change? What do you regard as the key aspects of working with faculty governance effectively?
7. What do you see as the most significant challenges likely to arise in the next five years for people running university IT operations? If resources were insufficient to do everything, what would be your priorities?
8. How do you deal with keeping up with all the technical and organizational changes that seem to characterize the world of IT today?
9. Do you have any questions for us?

It was illuminating to see the perspectives of the different candidates.

UMass looks attractive in part due to the ongoing strategic planning and the obvious role that IT will need to play as a partner in reaching those goals. And, probably also because, to people elsewhere, it looks like there is a lot of obvious low-hanging fruit here, that can be leveraged to build the organization the way they want.

I was encouraged to see that most of the candidates expressed a commitment to building strong partnerships with units of the campus. Some expressed genuine delight at the notion of working collaboratively with researchers to figure out how to support their enterprise most effectively — and not just looking for how to sell their particular vision.

I was a bit disappointed to see that none of the candidates had what I would consider a really nuanced perspective regarding Free Software. We had written the question in an intentionally vague way to see what we got. They mostly heard "free software" rather than "Free Software". (If you're not clear on the distinction I'm making, read the Wikipedia article on Free Software which summarizes the issues.) Some, after a bit of prompting, indicated they liked Open Source… Sigh… Thanks, ESR. Some recognized the importance of participating in the software development community, if you were going to play in that sphere. But for many the question is moot, because…

We were asking about software, when it's clear that, increasingly, all enterprises are being pushed to buy software-as-a-service. Office 365 backed up by Exchange, Abobe's Creative Cloud, Google Apps, etc. The question is becoming no longer what "software" the campus will run, but rather, what services (if any) will be provided locally. Personally, this is one of my greatest concerns: being able to provide services is intimately tied up with the ability to innovate. I see these as further steps toward the commoditization of technology: turning software into opaque services that people can't inspect, modify, or remix.

The candidates that I liked best acknowledged that a research institution will inevitably have units that need to support their own enterprises. The ones I liked least focused on the idea that there needed to be a "transition" while units that used anything other than mainstream software and services were brought to heel.

A key theme among the candidates was the need to build trust that institutional services would be both adequate and accountable. You create a false economy when you try to economize in providing services: people create their own which, in the end, costs the institution more.

I want to believe. I really do. But the single biggest thing I learned from the experience was what a tough job this person is stepping into. The different stakeholders for a CIO, both above and below, all have wildly different expectations — and there isn't going to be anywhere near enough money to satisfy all of them. It's not a position I would want to be in. In fact, you have a wonder a bit about someone who would intentionally put themselves into a spot like that. We have words for people like that in the English language…