As chief information officer and associate provost at UGA, Barbara White is well connected to both the technology-and teaching-related sides of life at the university. Columns recently sat down with her to discuss what her job entails, how she handles keeping up with technology and her prediction about what may be coming down the pipeline for campus computers.
Columns: First of all, you’re the chief information officer and associate provost at UGA. What does that mean?
White: My role is really two phased: One is the strategic, which includes the long-term planning and enterprise investment for the core infrastructure, networks, our architecture and systems such as the online course management e-Learning Commons, and our administrative applications. A major focus for the strategic role is also continued planning to move off our legacy systems onto more modern, Web-based systems particularly in the administrative area.
The other hat I wear is the associate provost role. I have responsibility for Enterprise Information Technology Services or EITS as you probably know it. This is the organization that provides services to the campus through units such as client services, application development and data management, system provisioning and maintenance, and information security. These units and others support the data center, our core administrative management systems, e-mail-all the systems that our campus uses on a daily basis.
Columns: What did you do before this?
White: I was the vice president for information technology and chief information officer at Utah State University. And before that I was with the federal government in Washington, D.C., in the Senior Executive Service again heading up IT-related projects.
Columns: Information technology seems like a male-dominated field. What drew you to this line of work?
White: I have one of the most unusual backgrounds of anybody you could talk to in this role. My interest into what evolved into this role came out of opportunities in the area of distance education. I am not a programmer. I have never been a programmer. I came out of a background using technology on the educational side in teaching and learning. My real interest and expertise are in the pedagogical side, although I have spent a great deal of time focused on the positioning of systems to support the mission of the institution including those systems you have to have to register students and pay people, so in that sense it became administrative also.
I have a master’s in textile science, but when I went back to school for my doctorate, I had some opportunities to engage in distance learning, and I enjoyed working with technology. From there, it just kind of evolved into all the issues of what we do with technology in higher education.
Many years ago, the role of CIO was very much technical, but in the last decade, the role has become one that’s strategic. You have to know how faculty use technology and what the administrative side requires. I bring a blend. I’ve got experience on both sides of the house-I’m a full professor here, and I used to teach in both the undergraduate and graduate program at Utah State as well as working in the outreach component via the Cooperative Extension as a program specialist. I have a sense of the expectations of both the technology and its applications.
Columns: Can you tell me about Georgia’s Administrative Committee on Information Technology and what you’re doing as the chairperson of that organization?
White: It’s the professional organization for all the CIOs in the 35 institutions in the University System of Georgia. What we’re looking at this year are those strategic agenda items affecting all the institutions. Systems that all of us are using like GALILEO or WebCT, and most recently Blackboard, are technologies we are all using. We also give advice to the chancellor’s office and to the board of regents, and I’m the liaison between ACIT and those groups. My term is for a year. It’s a great opportunity to learn about what’s going on in all the institutions and to get to know the other CIOs. This is a way to learn about their ideas.
Columns: Technology seems to move at an exponential rate. How do you keep up?
White: I can’t. Someone once said to me, “You shouldn’t say that.” But I as an individual cannot possibly keep up. So what I have done is to put a team together that knows something about forecasting, about the needs of the users and about technology.
We have to be able to forecast, to put together business models and know what our users will need. I put together a team that knows technology and knows higher ed. They help me in my role in working with the central administration to be prepared and to look ahead.
Columns: What can we expect in the future as far as technology at UGA is concerned?
White: The idea of independent access on communication devices the size of your finger is big. There’s also the issue of understanding the needed functionality and what’s going to be out there against what the institution can do to be ready. The whole issue of security is huge. The more independent devices we have connecting to our network, the greater the risk. We have to be on top of security all the time. So we’re moving into teaching and educating our faculty and staff about their role in protecting institutional data through awareness programs such as SecureUGA.
If you look at teaching and learning-which is the reason we’re here-we have faculty who want to teach online and those who are more comfortable with the traditional approach. And our students are coming in ready for iTunes University and expecting us to offer them some options like that, so we have to provide those opportunities for faculty to engage in the use of that technology to enhance their teaching to meet the needs of their learners while at the same time staying true to the level of teaching they can provide.
There’s a worry that you do lose something in the teaching and learning experience when you use a lot of technology. I do not believe that technology makes learning less effective. I believe it can enhance teaching and learning, but it’s only as good as the lesson behind it. So it’s very important that we implement sound instructional design methodologies and implement access to technology that enables high quality teaching and learning that also meets the needs of the faculty and students regardless of place or time.
