Meet Carolina’s new information technology leader

Larry Conrad became Carolina’s vice chancellor for information technology and chief information officer on Feb. 1. He came here from Florida State University, where he was chief information officer since 1998 and for the past five years was also associate vice president for technology integration. The Gazette recently spoke with Conrad about the role of technology at a major research university like Carolina.

CONRAD Larry Conrad, vice chancellor for information technology and chief information officer, poses in the ITS Manning Data Center. Conrad, who came to Carolina from Florida State University, has more than 35 years’ experience in the field of information technology, with a background in both corporate and university settings.

What attracted you to Carolina?

First of all, it has a great reputation. Historically Carolina has had a sustained reputation of being one of the top research universities in the country. Also its size and reach, coupled with the scope of the IT (information technology) organization was certainly attractive.

How does Information Technology Services support the University’s mission?

As the University’s central IT organization, our job is to make sure that we have built a sufficient and robust infrastructure for the campus, and that it works — period, no asterisks, no footnotes, it just works. Our customers here at the University rightly expect that.

As I like to think about it, when I walk into my office in the morning and hit the lights, I don’t give thanks to the head of the physical plant because the lights come on. They’re supposed to come on. And that’s exactly the case with the technology infrastructure we provide for the campus. It needs to be pervasive, it needs to be operational, it needs to be unobtrusive and allow people to get their jobs done.

In fact I’m fond of saying that we IT folks aspire to anonymity. By that I mean to the extent that people are aware of the technology, it usually is not a good thing — it usually means it isn’t working. Our job is to allow faculty, staff and students to forget about the technology for the most part and focus on things they need to do.

We as a central IT organization simply have to do a good job of reaching out and collaborating with the other key players on campus. It is incumbent on us, collectively, to make sure it all works together seamlessly and we are not pointing fingers at each other or working at cross purposes. That is a fundamental assignment.

You have led efforts to define and build high-speed research and education networks, both in Florida and at the national level. Can you describe what that means?

If you look at my resume you’ll see that I have spent a fair amount of focus in recent years on regional, statewide and national networking issues. And it isn’t because I’m a networking person — I’m not. I still consider myself just barely knowledgeable about the networking technology.

But what is attractive to me, and the reason I put so much effort into networking, is that these state-of-the art, high-speed networks have an incredible potential to redefine what we do.

These networks can basically eliminate the issue of place altogether. It doesn’t really matter where you are, who or where the other people are or where the resources are — the networks are that good, and that’s exciting to me.

Is this only relevant for research?

Many disciplines are already taking advantage of this type of networking. For example, at Florida State I reached out across campus looking for disciplines that might be interested in working on this. One of the areas that came forward was dance.

It turns out that FSU has a leading-edge professor of dance who is very much into technology. One of the things that he arranged was a choreographed number with dancers in three locations around the country, all done via the network. It was fascinating. There were about two people in each location, and they were interacting with each other in a choreographed activity.

I use that as an example because you could lock me in a room for a week and I would never have come up with that one. That’s the thing that is so exciting. This capability really lets our community fundamentally alter and rethink the way we can get things done. I can’t begin to guess where the potential is, but by making the technology available, it opens up new vistas of scholarly exploration.

Frankly, it’s that kind of thing that attracted me to this career and the reason I stay in it.

How does that experience translate to what we have here?

Now, that kind of networking environment already exists in North Carolina. In fact, this was an area we looked at as a model in Florida when we were trying to figure out how to proceed.

Here, we are very fortunate to have a rich history in support of high-speed networking. The thing that is exciting for a technology person like me is that all you have to do is look around campus, talk to people in virtually any discipline, any support area. Technology has become integral to the delivery of most services.

What is the biggest challenge you expect to face here?

My tongue-in-cheek response is that I may not know yet. But in a more serious attempt to answer that question, clearly one of the very large impact issues is the new ERP system. (Enterprise Resource Planning is the University-wide effort to streamline and integrate the computing systems that manage student information, human resources, payroll and finance.)

That is critically important to the campus. It’s an underlying infrastructure for a lot of the services that are mission-critical for the institution. Certainly it touches all students and all faculty and many staff.

In fact I had this conversation with a group yesterday. What is this ERP thing? When I was at FSU and we planned that ERP, we heard pretty consistently that it was going to be the hardest thing we ever did, it was going to cost more money than we imagined and everyone would be unhappy, because nobody likes change. But we also heard that if we did our job right, in some number of months — hopefully less than a year — things would calm down and we would really see the benefits.

So I was thinking, who in their right mind would take that on voluntarily? But in all seriousness, it is a very important project. It has high visibility on several different levels — not only on campus but also outside campus. So that is clearly one challenge. But my impression is that the campus community is ready for this change and is embracing the opportunity the ERP implementation brings.

In other areas, a key piece of what I’m trying to focus on is to ensure that ITS has a clear customer focus and is customer driven. That means we listen to our customers, we respond to their needs, we collaborate with them in a constructive fashion and the solutions we implement integrate well.

Sort of the good news about major research universities is that there is a wide diversity of need and wide diversity of solutions that people want; the bad news is the wide diversity of need and wide diversity of solutions they want.

The broader integration of technology on campus is always a challenge because invariably you will find instances where someone has a very specific product from a very specific vendor that for their needs is perfect, but if you look at how that’s going to fit with the rest of the campus, it’s problematic. And inevitably those are difficult conversations, but having them is part of our responsibility to the campus.