Q&A: Erin Griffin, CIO of Loyola Marymount University

Erin Griffin, the CIO of Loyola Marymount University knows a thing or two about transitions. She and her IT staff of 65 are helping to transform the university from being primarily an undergraduate institution to a university that is research-focused and engaged in global collaboration initiatives. To support this transition, Griffin has kicked off a series of initiatives, including identity management, analytic software, data warehousing, business intelligence and building out the university’s portal. She spent some time with Patricia Brown discussing her priorities and some of the trends she’s seeing in the industry.

Q: You have a pretty extensive identity management initiative. What are some of the benefits you expect from your identity management?

Identity management allows us to develop a much larger database of names that have access to systems and tools and resources that are specific and proprietary to our campus, and can be securely created and deleted as needed. This allows us to streamline our IT operations and at the same time extend our outreach.
Here is an example of what I mean. When a person starts a job they are often granted access to several systems over the course of time. But when the person leaves and moves on to another organization, it is often difficult to grasp all the places that person has had access to during that period of employment. The enterprise system has not really been good at removing privileges based on the identity of a person. An identity management system allows us to control identity access.

Q: You are transitioning to more of a research-focused university. How does this impact your job in IT?

LMU was for a long time, an undergraduate and liberal arts focused university. As we extend our reach further into graduate level education, and increase the talent and range of knowledge, and work to attract appropriate faculty to the university, we have had to engage more in research.

Research can entail a pretty broad spectrum of activities, but no matter what type of research you do, it starts to put more stress on the technology requirements of your operations. For example, it increases your need for better communications with colleagues at other institutions and expands the ability to reach out and collaborate by sharing files. Other types of communication, such as web file sharing and visual capabilities become important in this context as well. Another area where research impacts us is in the data storage and server space that we need.

As researchers become more active, there are two different things we need to think about:

1: The security of the information. A lot of the time when people do research they’re using human subjects so they have to be careful with the data, which must be secure.

2: The increase in data volume. There are more servers and more storage space that are necessary.
To that end, we’re moving to a blade and VMware-focused environment so that we are able to quickly respond to research requirements and provision virtual servers and storage space.

Q: With so many changes going on in IT, how are you able to motivate your staff?

It is a challenge. In terms of what I do to motivate IT, I focus a tremendous amount on the development of each individual. I do this from several perspectives. I spend a lot of money on training, education and conferences. I also encourage and require my staff to keep up certifications, participate in toastmasters and other areas where they are developing their business and professional acumen in concert with developing their technical expertise.
This has been very positive for our environments because people feel they are growing. If you feel that you’re growing, then the pace of change is less threatening because you’re paralleling that change.

Q: Do you have any Web 2.0 initiatives underway?
Yes, for the past two years, I’ve been cooperating with another institution on developing a collocation hot spot for disaster recovery, we host their emergency communications and critical apps and they host ours. We update regularly and we’ve put together a fairly elegant program but one of the challenges is the communication piece between tools and institutions.

For the past over two years, we have been using a Wiki as one of our key tools in this collaboration as well as using other document sharing and collaboration technologies. In order to effect this collaboration, we’ve had to use web 2.0 tools and it’s been great.

Throughout the university, social networking is important. We’ve jumped onto Facebook, in that we have established a presence for our IT organization on this site so that people can communicate with us that way. We have our own blogs and our own wikis, we do all of our internal communications on a wiki – everyone in the IT department does their weekly reports in a wiki environment.

This is a challenge for some. I see my peers in the business world just barely waking up to the fact that these students -- our customers now -- are going to be their employees and their customers very soon. All of these tools and technologies are so critical to the students’ existence that they don’t think about these tools as technology.

It feels to me that the sooner corporate CIOs get using these web 2.0 tools, the better. It’s really more the concept of participatory work. Whatever the tool is, from XML to Wikis to blogs, to even beyond different web 2.0 services, all of that does not matter. What matters is thinking about the fact that it’s a two-way street, these people are growing up believing that their contribution is as important and valuable as anyone else’s.

Q: How is the role of the CIO changing?
It depends. I think the role of the CIO is probably changing less rapidly than most CIOs would like it to. I think there are CIOs who wants to be more broadly focused in an organization and take more of a strategic role.

But then there is the CIO who is really a CTO, who is very downwardly focused, very technology focused. I think that these are two different jobs and I think we are trying to put the same hat on two very different focuses.

We as CIOs need to start thinking about what and who we really are? We’ve been talking about the business strategist, the transformational leader, but where do we fall on this continuum. Is there a gap between our expectations and our organization’s expectations. The fact is, different organizations need different things. We’re not all the same, we’re not all cookie cutters and we’re certainly not all interchangeable, the position is not clear and codified enough that you could just swap us out from one business to another.

There are some organizations that need a leader who is technically focused and there are other organizations that see CIOs as a strategic part of their efforts and need IT to be at the table when they make strategic decisions. Personally, that’s where I want to be, but I really get it that there are people for whom the other situation is best.