The Wild West of Information Technology
Dan Terrio ’90 feels privileged to have gotten his start in IT at Augsburg in the early ‘90s, when he managed what was then called the Academic Computing department. Since those days, however, electronic devices have become ever more prevalent in all aspects of college life, to the point where an IT staff is expected to support a BYOD (bring your own device) environment—less controlled and more “wild West.”
Now, as chief information officer at Whitman College, a position he has held since May 2011, Terrio is committed to collaborating with all of the college’s constituents in order to understand their “business” and needs more fully, and acquire devices that help them do their work. In addition to the interpersonal and communication skills required to do this, he knows the IT staff must also be able to influence some decisions up-front. Of course, balancing security and privacy issues with a traditional culture of openness is always a challenge in IT.
Terrio has taken steps at Whitman to enable IT to work in partnership with faculty to identify innovative ways to tap into the potential that technology has to enhance teaching and learning. Though he may see himself as a technology skeptic, believing that education is at its best when it is done in face-to-face faculty-student interactions in a small residential environment, he knows full well that technology will need to promote those interactions. And who knows what devices we’ll see in the next 5–10 years to help keep IT departments on their toes?