Todd Shechter

Balancing Diverse Technological Needs

The University of Wisconsin–Madison is vast and multifaceted, and with IT decisions made at various levels, my role is to weave a cohesive thread through these diverse groups. I often need to reflect on the perspectives of our faculty and grad students because one of my primary goals is to simplify the university’s intricate IT landscape for them. The idea is that they shouldn’t have to grapple with the university’s complexities when they need resources for their research. By understanding the common and unique needs of our researchers, we aim to provide infrastructure that caters to most of their requirements. A significant part of this strategy is fostering communication among different IT groups, ensuring we’re all aligned in serving our faculty, staff, and students.

Drawing from Past Experiences

Before joining UW–Madison, I spent over two decades at Oregon State University, serving as the IT Director in the College of Engineering. That role taught me the importance of trust relationships. At Madison, I’ve been able to apply the insights I gained from being in close proximity to faculty and grad students daily. We’ve initiated a new advisory committee for research computing, ensuring representation from every major college and school. This committee advises our CIO and Vice-Chancellor for Research on pertinent research computing topics. While we do cater to those with significant research computing needs, I also advocate for those without large grants or IT staff, ensuring their voices are heard and needs are met.

Technical Initiatives and Advancements

On the technical front, we’ve made strides in data storage. Again, this gets back to listening to the needs of our researchers because we now provide research data storage without cost, offering sizable quotas. This includes both traditional file-system-based storage and S3-based storage at reasonable costs. Such initiatives encourage the use of central services, which we’ve integrated with various research computing groups on our campus. We’ve also partnered with Globus for data movement, and I’m excited to see this service grow exponentially.

The Intersection of AI and Cybersecurity

In my view, the two biggest challenges and opportunities in higher education IT right now are artificial intelligence and cybersecurity. We hosted a series of webinars this past summer to elevate the campus’s understanding of AI. The webinars touched on every part of the campus from medical radiology to business operations but with AI comes a significant cybersecurity component. The threats are real. We’re adopting principles of zero trust (named Smart Access on our campus) because it’s a journey without any specific endpoint in sight.

Navigating Dual Roles

While balancing the technical and managerial aspects of my role is a challenge, I try to constantly read and listen to our researchers in order to understand emerging technologies and trends. For those aspiring to leadership roles in IT within academia, I’d say exposure to different parts of the university is invaluable, but key is building trust because a faculty member has to trust you with their research funds. Think about how your work to build inclusive environments on campus, think about the diversity in thought from different research groups and different IT groups, think about equity in the products and services you offer. On our campus we do our best to consider the needs for all as we build enterprise solutions.