Dodds

Ted Dodds became Cornell's chief information officer and vice president for information technology in January 2011. Previously, he was the University of British Columbia's chief information officer (1997-2009) and its vice provost. He has a bachelor's in computer science and psychology from the University of Guelph and an MBA from the University of Windsor, and has been active in leadership roles in EDUCAUSE and the Kuali Foundation.

After his first year on the job, the Chronicle sat down with him to talk about information technology at Cornell.

What made you decide to come to Cornell?

I perceived in Cornell a high alignment with vision and values that are important to me. I felt very confident that this would make the inevitable problems and frustrations that any job has worthwhile.

What were your first impressions of Cornell IT?

On a lighthearted note, I received more paper correspondence in my first two weeks here than in the last 10 years. Who sends memos any more? I put out the word and that stopped.

More seriously, I saw a ton of opportunities. Cornell has thought through the role it wants for IT more than most other institutions, and that meant there was an opportunity to make positive changes. I continue to see good will from the academic and administrative sides that we want these things to happen.

So what did you first set out to do?

To make CIT a trusted and effective partner to the campus community, and thereby to enable IT service groups [the local IT managers in colleges and departments] to focus on the specialized needs of the people in their units. By providing commonly required services we free up the local units to provide specialized services to their community.

One of your first tasks was to cut $15 million from the IT budget. How's that going?

We've cut $8 million across all units in the last couple of years. A further $3 million will be cut this year. We have three initiatives that are addressing the need for IT infrastructure and services to be more efficient, delivered differently or discontinued entirely.

Those include infrastructure virtualization -- consolidating physical servers, storage and some of the related management software in the data center rather than everyone continuing to buy and maintain their own machines; streamlining IT service management -- desktop support, HelpDesk, etc. -- through industry-standard tools; and reducing the amount of duplication in software applications. Increasingly, we are turning to cloud-based solutions in each of these areas.

Last year you brought in IT directors from other universities to conduct a review of Cornell IT. What was the result?

Their report contained seven thoughtful recommendations that were largely in line with the path of change we are on, but which also suggested some shifting of priorities. It was good advice and I've followed it. The report is posted on the IT website and is an important input to the IT strategic planning process that is underway now.

With what we are calling "IT@Cornell" we are trying to make it so that CIT is not the center vs. everything else. There are some 750 IT workers across the campus, a large and happily diverse enterprise.

So, what comes next?

Developing an IT strategic plan to see what kind of IT environment we want in 2015. My vision is to see IT@Cornell focus more attention, contribute more resources and collaborate more energetically on improvements that really make a difference to our core academic functions as expressed in the student experience, student learning outcomes and scholarship. Personally, I would like to see a broader emphasis on academic technology, to more directly support the academic enterprise. After all, these are the reasons the institution exists.

I find it inspiring to contemplate the distinctive role IT can play in Cornell achieving even greater levels of excellence in the future. But the path to this vision stands in stark contrast to where much of IT has been in the past.