April 2025 A&F Times

I began my tenure as Chief Information Officer at Sonoma State in December 2024 and, although I am relatively new, I have quickly come to appreciate the campus's resilience and determination, particularly in response to recent challenges. The welcoming community has been exceptionally supportive of both me and my staff as we have navigated significant changes over the past few months. 

My main objective as CIO is to advance campus technology with a focus on student success, efficiency, innovation, and collaboration. In IT, this means working to shift our focus from simply maintaining technology, to helping you succeed with it. Our aim is to move beyond just helping you procure and set up your technology or business improvement processes, to one that provides consultation, facilitates positive and impactful change, and is with you throughout your journey, from inception through future iterations. Change like this doesn’t happen overnight, however. Over the coming months, our team will be working on restructuring, training, and modernizing the current technology on campus. This will include simplifying and reducing our technology footprint in lieu of modern, leading-edge platforms and services that allow for agile incremental improvements over time. Additionally, through the deployment of leading tools common within most industries, we can create experiential learning opportunities for student interns and others in a way we could not before. 

Some of our current change-focused activities include: 

• Creating a "Partner Network", where we assign every department a dedicated thought partner, to help you through your planning, decision-making, purchasing, and deployment of processes and technologies. 
• Replacing our legacy, custom-built identity management systems, password/auth platforms, DNS, and other technologies, with cloud native platforms, with the potential to reduce our on-premises server footprint by well over 65% this year alone, reducing complexity and effort, costs, and on-premise energy usage. 
• Creating a special internal team that is focused on training, reinventing and rebranding IT, developing customer service strategies, and other activities that often go by the wayside when things get busy (and they will always be busy!). 
• Partnering with other campuses to take on the back-end administration and hosting of core platforms, freeing our staff to manage the customer engagements with these platforms vs. maintaining them. 
• Revamping our wireless infrastructure to provide better security, student self-service for their devices, providing a campus-wide self-service guest network, and other benefits. 
• Creating training opportunities in new and emerging technologies for students, faculty, and staff across the campus, to include AI, to foster learning and ideation across the campus. 

From a technology and organizational growth perspective, today is an exciting time to try new methodologies, experiment with emerging technology and new ways of working, and use the successes from those efforts to continue to move the campus forward. The trick is to keep the momentum going, and to do that requires tenacity and, above all, support from your friends and colleagues around you. I am grateful to be here at SSU and am eager to collaborate with and continue to get to know colleagues across campus. Together, we can develop innovative ideas to enhance the student experience and ultimately support their success in the workforce after graduation.