Lisa Davis, chief information officer at Georgetown University, explains the importance of having stakeholder buy-in when taking on IT modernization projects.
Watch the video or read the transcript below.
"FIrst you have to understand what is occuring at the organization or the institution and that always starts with an assessment of IT. What are we doing well? What are we not doing well? What are our stakeholders need? What do our business units need? And we developed really, a modernization strategy to addresss those areas. And it encompassed everything, from modernizing our technology infrastructure to modernizing our core applications to figuring out how we better integrate these applications.
One of the biggest hurdles though, in managing this type of change, is really having your stakeholders buy-in to the modernization that needs to occur. And when I arrived at Georgetown, there was a perception that IT didn't meet our needs or IT didn't understand what needed to occur to support the research and academic missions. And you have to understand what your stakeholders need. How can technology help enable their business and get their jobs done? How does technology make their jobs easier? So you've got to have to have the faculty, the staff, the students and the administration start believing in what you're doing. Start building that foundation of trust. Start executing. So I believe you establish credibility by one, doing what you say you are going to do and executing on the strategy that you put in place is that is ultimately meeting their needs."
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Lisa Davis is Vice President for Information Services and CIO at Georgetown University. Prior to being recruited to Georgetown University, Ms. Davis served in various technology leadership roles during her 26-year career in the federal government. Most recently she was Assistant Director of IT and CIO of the U.S. Marshals Service. She has been recognized as an outstanding leader in the design and delivery of infrastructures and applications to solve complex business problems. Follow her on Twitter @LisaDavisCIO.
