by Peter High, published on Forbes
3-28-2016
Anne Margulies is the Chief Information Officer of perhaps the best known university on earth, Harvard University. She has been an education technology pioneer for much longer, however. She was the founding Executive Director of MIT OpenCourseWare, the internationally acclaimed initiative to publish the teaching materials for their entire curriculum openly and freely over the Internet. As such, she was involved in some of the earliest precursors of today’s MOOCs.
It should come as no surprise that Marguilies was intricately involved in HarvardX, Harvard’s contribution to edX. For her own team, she has developed what she calls the IT Academy, aggregating training materials to provide common IT skills across her entire department. Therefore, Margulies is a remarkably innovative CIO, especially when it comes to training and education.
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Peter High: Anne Margulies, you are the Chief Information Officer of Harvard University, one of the biggest brands in the world. Could you could give a definition of what is within your purview?
Anne Margulies: Harvard is a large, complex, decentralized university. As the University CIO I am responsible for information technology strategies, plans, and policies, as well as all of the University-wide infrastructure and applications that serve all of our schools. In addition, I am directly responsible for end-to-end technology for the central administration and for the faculty of Arts and Sciences, the largest of our schools. It includes our undergraduate, college, as well as our graduate school of Arts and Sciences. It is a large portfolio.
High: You mentioned that strategy is one of those areas that is under your watch. Can you talk about your method of crafting strategic plans and maybe share some of the details of your latest plan?
Margulies: Absolutely. We have an important leadership group here at Harvard called the CIO Council, which I chair. It is comprised of the CIO councils of our professional schools, as well as our Chief Technology Officer and our Chief Information Security Officer. This leadership group is responsible for developing Harvard’s IT strategic plan. The way that we do that is we focus much on those things that make sense and are most important for us to work on together as a university, as opposed to those technologies that should be done separately school by school. Five years ago we developed a strategic plan with key strategic initiatives for the University, and the CIO Council has now also been responsible for overseeing the implementation of the strategic plan. Since then, we have updated and revised the strategic plan because we finished some initiatives and we have added some new ones. It is a process that I think is actually working quite well for Harvard.
