J. Brice Bible: Ohio University's new CIO talks about how to pick up the pieces after a data security breach, how to build a vision of the future and why walking into a river of alligators can be a good thing.(THE GRILL)(Interview)

In April, J. Brice Bible left his job as interim CIO at the University of Tennessee to take on the CIO post at Ohio University. Several major, nationally publicized data security breaches had recently occurred, the previous CIO had resigned, and two IT staffers had been fired for their alleged roles in the security breaches.

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Your first day on the job, you had to jump right into problems from the past. How did that feel? I was literally walking into a river of alligators, but that's not always a bad thing. It can be a character-building thing. I saw a unified university--everyone from the board to the president to the provost to the faculty to central IT to the students. There was a community interest not just in fixing the problems, but in making the situation better and stable over the long term. I was very pleased to see everyone want to pull in the same direction and want to work together.

How did you approach the job? It was a unique experience, and it still is. I had to gather as much information as rapidly as I could to try to get a solid sense of what was going on, of what had happened and what was available to go forward, and how prepared we were from a technical and university point of view. I did a lot of listening, had a lot of conversations with anyone who had been affected. I wanted to hear their goals, their expectations, what they saw as solutions and what things they thought needed to be done. I continue to do that. I am still in listening mode.

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From a technology point of view, there are some basic things that have to happen to have not just a secure IT system, but a reliably performing, efficient and flexible [one]. You must have a modern, reliable, redundant, pretty flat-level network. You have to look at the operations of IT in terms of the servers and storage, operating systems, middleware and your authentication strategies. The more unified those are and standardized on fairly open standards, then the more likely that you'll have a stable, reliable environment.

I believe the IT staff needs to see a vision, not just a road map, and know their role in getting there. IT doesn't run by a CIO alone or even by management. It's the technology people, the experts, who make it happen, so I spend as much time as I can engaging them in the conversation. Maybe we don't have the pavement all the way 100 miles out, but we're at least starting to get it roughed in.