Yale has proven a new leadership place to oversee info technological innovation systems, underscoring the vital part they participate in in the university’s mission of schooling, investigation, scholarship, preservation, and exercise, as properly as the worth to campus functions of ever greater interconnectivity.
In a June 24 concept, President Peter Salovey and Senior Vice President for Functions Jack Callahan Jr. introduced that Yale has elevated Chief Details Officer John Barden’s placement to the level of university officer. Barden will be Yale’s vice president for information and facts engineering, productive July 1, 2022.
The Yale Corporation accredited the promotion at its meeting earlier this thirty day period.
“As a world-wide exploration university, Yale has a longstanding accountability to build information that increases the earth for this and long term generations,” Salovey and Callahan wrote. “Essential to this mission is superior data technologies that supports students, faculty users, and team.”
The pandemic, they said, reinforced the importance of evolving Yale’s IT units for “unprecedented interconnectivity.”
“As an establishment, Yale will have to forever make ‘bits and bytes’ as essential as ‘bricks and mortar,’” Callahan mentioned, noting that the CIO is a cabinet-level placement at several of Yale’s peer institutions.
Salovey and Callahan claimed Barden is correctly suited to the position.
He has been Yale’s CIO since 2017. Prior to coming to Yale, he was deputy CIO at the University of Rochester and a specialist with Arthur Andersen and BearingPoint.
At the University of Rochester, Barden assisted start the university’s first establishment-broad learning management system, deployed an integrated information warehouse, finished a number of important administrative systems transitions, founded an integrated investigation computing business, and aided in refining info technologies governance and operational practices.
Upon arriving at Yale, Barden and his Details Technological innovation Expert services staff conducted a sweeping evaluation and overhaul of IT on campus, get the job done that proved necessary in 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic forced Yale to shift most instructing on the web temporarily.
Operating with associates throughout the college, Barden oversaw an exertion to develop community potential, letting Yale to present technological innovation and IT direction for pupils around the globe and a faculty mainly training remotely. Underneath his management, Yale IT has also actively labored to increase IT guidance via 3 strategic priorities: greater coordination across all campus IT models, enabling crystal clear and obtainable companies for the entire university enhanced consistency and dependability of all services and new office society initiatives built to help IT professionals have interaction with the community and do their very best do the job. These initiatives, Barden suggests, have propelled Yale It is organizational capacity.
“Our institutional infrastructure anticipations keep on to evolve fast,” he claimed. “Perhaps hardly ever has that been clearer than as a result of the pandemic, where by so a lot of our campus had to use new methods of continuing our missions as a result of new, technological know-how-enabled implies.
“Increasingly, our college, staff members, and pupils are reliant on lots of types of details technological innovation and technology industry experts to do their do the job,” he added. “Sometimes that is in the qualifications, such as networking and information centers. Other moments, it visibly allows new choices as a result of high functionality computing, understanding management methods, collaboration applications, or the lots of specialised purposes and workforce associates that perform with college, students, and staff members.”
Beyond ITS’s pandemic-associated endeavours, Barden has aided in the progress of the Method Administration and Operations Excellence Workforce, which supports IT and other functions-wide initiatives. His expertise will be important as Yale proceeds to optimize its technologies means in the yrs ahead, Salovey and Callahan reported.
The elevation of the CIO role places it on equal footing with other roles that report straight to Yale’s operations division, this sort of as the vice presidents for services, finance, and human means. It also will complement the realignment of Yale’s community basic safety management declared previously this 7 days.
“Whilst we have made wonderful progress in enhancing information and facts engineering governance and collaboration, this improve will help alignment between our institutional aims and the technology means that so generally aid those people goals,” Barden stated. “I appear ahead to doing the job with our fully commited IT gurus and the whole campus group to even further evolve Yale’s electronic infrastructure.”