Message from the CIO
Greg Smith
|
Fall 2011 |
The mission of Institutional Technology is to provide timely service, quality support, and servant leadership for meeting university technology needs through collaborative problem solving.
I came to George Fox University in the summer of 2004 after asking God to place me at a faith based institution in the West. Well Newberg, OR is about as far west as you can be and George Fox University is truly a Christ Centered institution. And I love it here. The last year has been challenging and rewarding for the Institutional Technology team as we have improved the network, acquired new software solutions and laid the groundwork for many new initiatives. You can check IT News for specific IT activity or checkout Greg's Webpage or Blog.
Update
The new school year is greatly welcomed after a difficult 2010/11 academic year that brought about dramatic change to our IT organization. Losing Russ DeVore, our Director of Academic Computing, to cancer in early 2011 culminated a painful journey but reinforced our strength of Christian community. Losing Jim Fleming, our Director of Administrative Computing, who became the CIO of nearby Pacific University allowed us to rejoice for his achievement but grieve for our loss of leadership. But God does provide and we are fortunate to have able replacements step into these roles. Josh Nauman who had been our Director of Media Production Services is now the new Director of Academic Computing. Sean McKay who was and still is our Chief Information Security Officer takes over the role of Director of Administrative Computing.
Major Initiatives:
We enter the new academic year with significant upgrades to our IT infrastructure.With the end of the Connected Across Campus laptop program we redirected a portion of those funds to improve our WiFi coverage and density, added many new media enabled classrooms and created a couple of special EdTech rich teaching classrooms. Academic Computing has redesigned the student worker program to make it much easier for our students to be able to serve our customers. Administrative Computing is constantly solving our business challenges with answers from our new PeopleSoft ERP System. A new online admissions process is scheduled to be introduced on October 1. And our mobile portal iGFU continues to grow with useful enhancements.