CIO Staff and Responsibilities

The members of the CIO’s staff have specific campus-wide areas of focus, reflecting the CIO’s responsibility to assimilate campus technology needs and match them with creative solutions from a variety of sources, whether central, shared, internal, or external.

CIO Staff Members

Mona Heath, Deputy CIO

Acts on behalf of the CIO when the CIO is unavailable; plays a key role in strategic planning for the Office of the CIO and, more broadly, for campus IT.

Focus areas include:

• Alignment of IT services with campus needs
• Coordination of the campus IT accessibility initiative (a joint effort of CITES and the Division of Disability Resources and Educational Services)
• Improving communications with IT providers and consumers

Panit Lisy, Executive Director of CITES

Provides leadership and direction to the CITES organization, including oversight of the campus IT infrastructure, enterprise services, and solutions that support the education, research, and public engagement missions of the University; actively involved with all IT activities on campus, which are built around both a strong central program and strategic collaborations with colleges and departments.

Focus areas include:

• Campus IT infrastructure (campus-wide computing, networking, telephone, and instructional technology services)
• Management of resources, assets, and liabilities (e.g., Activity Based Costing)
• Staff professional development

Randy Cetin, Executive Program Officer for IT Resource Coordination

Responsible for building campus-wide support for coordinated and shared stewardship of information technology resources that contribute to the distinctive strengths of the Illinois campus.

Focus areas include:

• Increasing the availability and access to high-quality campus data center spaces through consolidation of lower quality general purpose campus data centers and server rooms into purpose-specific shared facilities; consolidation of University Administrative and campus enterprise data center facilities; and planning for the reuse of the Advanced Computation Building (ACB) as a shared campus data center
• Coordination and consolidation of disparate services that have great potential to be unified into a campus strategy such as email/calendaring; HPC cluster computing; and server and desktop virtualization
• Identifying opportunities and new support models that increase the value and impact of IT resources through on-campus partnering, external and corporate partnerships, and economies of scale, pooling of resources, or broad adoption of new technologies that reduce costs or enable new services

Mike Corn, Director of Security Services and Information Privacy

Responsible for the confidentiality of University-maintained personal information; leads the assessment and development of campus IT policies; is responsible for security and risk management of the campus-wide IT environment; directs the campus IT security office.

Focus areas include:

• IT policy strategy
• Privacy and appropriate use of University information and data
• Regulatory and legislative environment with respect to privacy and security

Mike Grady, Executive Program Officer for Cyberinfrastructure

Responsible for researching and helping the campus plan for the changing cyberinfrastructure (CI) needs of campus researchers; coordinate implementation of and support for shared CI resources (e.g., computing, storage, collaboration tools, applications, networking) and partnerships that help meet the campus CI needs; work with colleagues from other institutions on collaborative efforts around cyberinfrastructure and federated access to resources.

Focus areas include:

• Working with OSPRA, campus representatives, and individual researchers to gather information on current and future campus CI resources, needs, and impact on the campus; establishing and promoting a process that makes CI assessment and planning an ongoing activity
• Exploring ways of providing for campus CI needs by leveraging current resources more effectively, promoting shared resources, and establishing partnerships that allow us to gain advantage from expertise and resources both within the campus, across the CIC, and nationally
• Serving as project lead and/or team member on several multi-institutional or multi-unit collaborative efforts in areas such as federated access to collaborative tools, storage, and repositories

Glen Whitmer, Director of Budget and Human Resources

Responsible for budget, business office, and human resource functions for both CITES and the Office of the CIO.

Focus areas include:

• Activity Based Costing for all CITES and CIO services
• Increased transparency of budget planning and analysis
• Exploration of shared services related to business office and human resources activities

Also reporting to the CIO

Todd Nelson, Executive Project Coordinator

Serves as overall coordinator of the University's portal project; coordinates representatives from the three campuses, University administration, and the technical teams behind the project.

Judy Lubben, Administrative Assistant

Provides administrative support for the Office of the CIO, including scheduling, event coordination, and office logistics.