"IT leaders are better positioned now to be a top level partner in the business"

DR. JOHN ISENHOUR
Associate CIO and CTO
Kennesaw State University

Dr. John has over 28 years of experience in Information Technology, Networking, Information Security, large scale system design and Library automation. His experience was gained hrough his association with five diverse Higher Education institutions, from the National Particle Accelerator Laboratory (including starting very early web services in the USA) to Kenyon College, as well as research at a medical school and other R1 Environments. He has a BA in Psychology from the University of Louisville, a MS, and a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois.

Challenges in technology to meet enterprise needs in 2013 and expectations.
Security continues to be a major problem. The increasing risk constantly drives up costs. In the 1980’s, we were not supporting a security department working with firewall, AV, IDS, and IPS systems. There was hacking but it was of a different nature. As profiteering, global politics, and hacktivism evolve it is glaring that systems were not designed for security. Mobile devices carry more and more targetable information with inadequate controls.We really need to look at building security in from the ground up, from the OS, application and network layers. Any solutions along this vector would have my attention.

The areas in business environment where solutions do not yet exist or not up to the mark, and which if existed, would've made job easier.
Managing identities and provisioning proper access (IAM) is still in its infancy. From the users perspective we're not delivering an optimized experience, and from a management standpoint, for instance redeploying access as roles change is always belated. IAM needs to expand to a national level and we need to move in that direction, not with just one solution but with inter-operable standards. It’s complex, but initiatives like NSTIC www.nist.gov/nstic/ seem promising. Being in the Higher Ed sector, I see that edutainment is a valuable tool for our students. Using that development model to ensure the staff remains engaged and learning new technologies via online educational entertainment could be optimized, these alternatives are important when travel funding is limited.

Technology Trends Impacting Enterprise Business Environment
I see a cluster of: Cloud; Big Data; Mobile; Social; and Unified Communications (w/video) that are all critical elements of maintaining relevance. Taking these on in prioritized clusters that can be deeply integrated into our infrastructure is essential. Currently, Unified Communications is in process, as is a one-stop mobile portal, and we’re also analyzing our own Big Data.

My roles and responsibilities as a CIO
In the “old days” I.T. seemed aloof and even shamanistic, but was also more or less confined to keeping the trains running, which is still important. The “New CIO” needs to focus less on the technicalities of IT and more on ensuring its capabilities are relevant to business processes and supporting the organizations strategy. IT leaders are better positioned now to be a top level partner in the business.

Lessons I learned as a CIO that can help you
With any large project the technology is the easy part of implementation. The difficult parts are the social aspects. You want your constituents as well as your staff to be your best advocates, and this can be an artful dance when there are conflicting motivations. As a leader you have to develop the internal strength to accept that all types of problems are going to occur, the most painful of which will be social and not related to your character or behavior. You can’t let it affect you internally or your performance will suffer. There are some good tools for developing this; a web search on “inner strength leaders” will open a variety of doors to explore.