If you’re not involved in of Art University the dialogue about how the firm creates value and how information and technology affects that, you will not consistently win!

ERIK VIENS
CIO and EVP of Technology
Academy If you’re not involved in of Art University

Erik is CIO and EVP of Technology for Academy of Art University, the largest Art & Design University in the country. Prior to 2009, Erik was CIO for INVISTA S.A.R.L. and led all IT activities in more than 90 sites worldwide. Erik has spent almost a third of his career living outside the United States, including Asia where he served for four years as the Chief Information Officer , and Business Consulting Services for DuPont for the region.

Challenges in technology to meet enterprise needs in 2013 and expectations.
The most important challenge is to at all times have a full understand of our students’ needs at all points in their lifecycle with us, from prospective students to alumni. We want every member of our team that is serving the student to benefit from the knowledge that one of our other team members has so that no opportunities are missed in terms of helping students prepare for the workforce.

Wish List for 2013:
Continued progress in integrating across legacy platforms and reducing the technology barriers, effort and costs. Amazingly, desktop procurement, deployment and support are time draining activities that keep us away from students. And the cost productivity for utility services (wireless, bandwidth and storage) aren’t keeping track with increased demand from a base of digital native creative. Since I am wishing, I would wish for the technology providers and journalists to reach a greater audience on how information & technology is changing
business practice.

Technology Trends Impacting Enterprise Business Environment

Instrumentation and Personalization are two of those trends. I know “Big Data” is buzzy, but to me the collection of data is fundamentally principle to any attempt to infer fact by processing big data. The chemical engineer in me loves the idea that instruments are being deployed to measure anything (and everything) anywhere, and that we can have access to process and result metrics that have never been thinkable before. Very rich! Personalization; adding the social information that the culture has evolved is allowing huge impact on process effectiveness and commercial success. Better yet, we all now expect this level of service from vendors and reward it consistently.

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.

Every technology leader is challenged by the burden of support vs. the benefits of processes & functionality creating new values. Investment is limited, so this boring old issue remains. Protecting proprietary information has grown well beyond trade secrets into student protection and privacy and we must constantly be vigilant. It is a constant battle that requires a serious investment , but that is a CIO’s reality.

My roles and responsibilities as a CIO

The operational excellence part of the CIO’s job has grown in scale and scope because the technology has become more mission critical; but I believe the strategic relevance of the role has increased more so due to the changing competitive environment. Tighter margins create more stress on limited project budgets. Responding to the changing consumer nature and expectations quickly changes the playing field. And technology complexity and change management is also greater than ever – and I believe today’s CIOs are more relevant to the success of the enterprise than at any time before.

Lessons I learned as a CIO that can help you
Short and sweet- truly know the way your business creates value. Not the way they currently make money, but how value is created and sustained. If you’re not involved in the dialogue about how the firm creates value and how information and technology affects that, you will not consistently win. This isn’t the “seat at the table” issue we all know of.