Ted Dodds, Cornell's new chief information officer (CIO) and vice president for information technology, has a formidable challenge: cutting costs while maintaining and improving services. The "Reimagining IT" initiative calls for cutting the annual budget for information technologies by $10 million to $15 million over the next five years.

As one of his first moves after arriving on campus in January, Dodds invited a committee of his peers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Carnegie Mellon and New York universities, and the University of California-Berkeley to evaluate Cornell's IT operations. The committee visited campus in June for extensive interviews with faculty, staff, students and IT staff throughout the university. Their report is available on the CIO's website at http://cio.cornell.edu/.

Their fundamental recommendation: Move from "IT by CIT" to "IT@Cornell," with Cornell Information Technologies (CIT) as an enabler for a collaborative technology community. "Over the years," they said, "CIT has acquired the reputation of having an internal focus and myopia with respect to the needs of the faculty, students and staff." CIT staff must become better communicators, they said, and change behaviors that "perpetuate a historical culture less suited to collaboration."

The Reimagining IT initiative created several "IT service groups" that bring together IT professionals in many small units to work together across one or more colleges or administrative units on end-user support, software development and hardware management. These groups report both to the CIO and their own administrative heads. There are seven pilot groups, still in need of some refinement, the committee found. They recommended moving slowly, getting the existing groups working smoothly before creating any more.

The committee called for a strong staff development program across Cornell IT, including technology training and formalized mentoring and leadership development programs.

They found wide variation in the quality of IT infrastructure across campus, for example in classroom technology, and recommended significant investments, painful as that might be in tough financial times.

Speaking of money, Cornell's cost accounting for IT is far too complex, the committee said. The university needs to simplify the systems of charging for services and evaluating the costs of capital expenditures in collaboration with university financial experts, they recommended.

The reviewers emphasized the importance of the newly formed Information Technology Governance Committee -- composed of Cornell's provost, the vice president for finance and chief financial officer, the dean of the Faculty of Computing and Information Science and the CIO -- in coordinating efforts inside and outside CIT. But, they said, all deans, associate provosts and vice presidents must show their commitment as well. Based on their interviews, the committee said that academic and administrative leaders appear ready to do so.

"It is only with this type of active partnership that IT@Cornell will achieve the success that all at Cornell desire," they concluded.

The committee members were Marilyn A. McMillan, vice president for information technology and chief information technology officer, New York University; Joel Smith, vice provost and chief information officer, Carnegie Mellon University; Shelton Waggener, associate vice chancellor for information technology and chief information officer, University of California-Berkeley; and Jerrold Grochow, retired vice president for information services and technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.