Yale creates new leadership role to oversee information technology

Yale has proven a new management posture to oversee information and facts engineering techniques, underscoring the essential job they engage in in the university’s mission of education and learning, study, scholarship, preservation, and exercise, as well as the price to campus functions of at any time higher interconnectivity.

In a June 24 message, President Peter Salovey and Senior Vice President for Functions Jack Callahan Jr. announced that Yale has elevated Chief Facts Officer John Barden’s situation to the level of university officer. Barden will be Yale’s vice president for data technologies, effective July 1, 2022.

The Yale Corporation authorized the marketing at its meeting earlier this thirty day period.

“As a global research college, Yale has a longstanding duty to develop understanding that improves the planet for this and future generations,” Salovey and Callahan wrote. “Essential to this mission is excellent facts technology that supports students, college customers, and personnel.”

The pandemic, they claimed, strengthened the worth of evolving Yale’s IT devices for “unprecedented interconnectivity.”

“As an establishment, Yale will have to permanently make ‘bits and bytes’ as important as ‘bricks and mortar,’” Callahan reported, noting that the CIO is a cupboard-stage posture at a lot of of Yale’s peer establishments.

Salovey and Callahan explained Barden is beautifully suited to the occupation.

He has been Yale’s CIO due to the fact 2017. Prior to coming to Yale, he was deputy CIO at the College of Rochester and a expert with Arthur Andersen and BearingPoint.

At the College of Rochester, Barden assisted launch the university’s initially establishment-broad mastering administration method, deployed an built-in details warehouse, finished quite a few significant administrative devices transitions, set up an built-in research computing corporation, and aided in refining information and facts technological innovation governance and operational practices.

On arriving at Yale, Barden and his Facts Technological know-how Providers staff conducted a sweeping evaluation and overhaul of IT on campus, work that proved crucial in 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic forced Yale to go most training on-line briefly.

Performing with associates across the college, Barden oversaw an effort to extend community ability, permitting Yale to give know-how and IT steering for college students all-around the globe and a school largely teaching remotely. Below his leadership, Yale IT has also actively labored to boost IT assistance via a few strategic priorities: improved coordination throughout all campus IT units, enabling apparent and accessible solutions for the complete university enhanced consistency and trustworthiness of all solutions and new office culture initiatives created to aid IT pros have interaction with the local community and do their finest perform. These initiatives, Barden suggests, have propelled Yale It is organizational ability.

“Our institutional infrastructure anticipations keep on to evolve swiftly,” he said. “Perhaps by no means has that been clearer than by way of the pandemic, where so much of our campus had to use new approaches of continuing our missions through new, know-how-enabled signifies.

“Progressively, our faculty, workers, and college students are reliant on numerous kinds of info technology and engineering gurus to do their do the job,” he additional. “Sometimes that is in the history, this kind of as networking and data facilities. Other occasions, it visibly enables refreshing opportunities by high efficiency computing, understanding administration systems, collaboration resources, or the numerous specialised apps and crew users that perform with school, learners, and employees.”

Outside of ITS’s pandemic-connected attempts, Barden has aided in the advancement of the Program Management and Operations Excellence Workforce, which supports IT and other functions-wide initiatives. His skills will be vital as Yale continues to maximize its technological innovation methods in the yrs forward, Salovey and Callahan explained.

The elevation of the CIO job puts it on equal footing with other roles that report immediately to Yale’s functions division, these types of as the vice presidents for amenities, finance, and human methods. It also will complement the realignment of Yale’s public protection management announced before this week.

“Whilst we have made great development in increasing facts technological innovation governance and collaboration, this modify will assist alignment in between our institutional plans and the technological innovation means that so frequently aid those goals,” Barden explained. “I appear forward to working with our dedicated IT experts and the overall campus group to further evolve Yale’s electronic infrastructure.”