Office of Information Technology
Richard Mendola, Ph.D. is the Vice President of Information Technology and CIO for Emory University. In this role since 2007, Dr. Mendola and his team are responsible for creating and sustaining a seamless, agile, innovative and efficient information technology environment that advances the educational, clinical and research activities and aspirations of Emory.
With a backdrop of change across the Emory organization, the Office of Information Technology (OIT) continued to focus on our many customers, seeking to enhance the present and lay the groundwork for our future. One of our more significant strategic initiatives involved an analysis of how to optimize the experience of those faculty and staff who are involved in activities that cross Emory's academic and healthcare domains.
Spurred on by the engagement of some of the most senior leaders in the Woodruff Health Sciences, teams of OIT staff spent over six months assessing what it would take to create a more seamless and improved "One IT experience" for our customers. The work products of those team's have now been factored into actual projects that will begin implementation in the coming fiscal year.
Looking forward, the changes in the One IT Experience initiative will result in more unified methods of logging into systems, seeking help from our service desks and accessing data for research. We also expect to introduce common enterprise platforms for collaboration and sharing project materials.
One project that has already been scaled across the entire enterprise is our Microsoft Exchange email and calendaring system. Exchange went through a major upgrade over the past year and is now serving over 38,000 members of the Emory community. With 10GB mailboxes, integration with voicemail, and minimal archiving, the Exchange user experience has clearly moved in the right direction. An updated HR system, new financial reports and automated course creation/enrollment in Blackboard are further examples of the progress that was made in our academic and administrative areas, and that will have clear benefits for our customers.
In reviewing the OIT information security function, I will always remember this past year as the point at which we became a proactive security organization. Thanks to a new event monitoring system, our IT security teams are now able to monitor millions of events each day, and in most cases resolve issues before they become problems. In addition, we now have a standard approach for encrypting laptop drives, so if a laptop is lost or stolen, the sensitive information on the drive will remain secure. With an increasingly mobile workforce, this is a feature we simply cannot do without.
Organizationally, the School of Medicine and OIT took our collaboration to the next level, with a new organizational structure that began delivering tangible benefits within a few short months after its creation. In a similar vein, the Goizueta School of Business adopted a number of additional OIT services, resulting in lower costs that are making more capacity available for their strategic initiatives.
On the broader Research front, a formalized service center offering has made it even easier for customers to take advantage of our expanding number of data management services as well as tools like standardized electronic data capture forms.
Behind the scenes, the OIT architecture team continued to build a technology foundation that will allow us to more efficiently develop new applications and share data across systems. In the past year, this foundation translated into a very practical example, when clinical data from Emory Healthcare began flowing to the Center for Health Discovery. It is great to see IT enabling the multi-mission nature of our institution.
I hope these examples demonstrate the passion my organization has for improving the IT experience and placing the customer at the center of our endeavors. I look forward to continuing our efforts as we move into the new academic and fiscal year.
I am confident that the changes that are coming out of the One IT Experience project will better align IT with the multiple-mission nature of the institution and will improve the stewardship of our IT expenditures. My colleagues and I view this exercise as the next stage in realizing the full potential of our information technology investments at Emory.
Rich Mendola
Vice President for Information Technology and Chief Information Officer
"I am confident that the changes that are coming out of the One IT Experience project will better align IT with the multiple-mission nature of the institution and will improve the stewardship of our IT expenditures. My colleagues and I view this exercise as the next stage in realizing the full potential of our information technology investments at Emory."
Dr. Rich Mendola,
Vice President of Information Technology and CIO for Emory University