Tom Liggett

After nearly 18 months without a formal head of technology on campus, a new face will take the lead. On September 2, Jeanne Casares, the new Chief Information Officer (CIO), started her first day of work at RIT.

After being chosen from a long list of candidates from around the country, Casares is the first person to hold the position in a year and a half, said Dr. James Watters, Senior Vice President of Finance and Administration. Prior to accepting her post at RIT, Casares was the Director of Information Technology at Paychex, a Rochester-based national payroll company.

“I am responsible for overseeing the [Information and Technology Services] department,” Casares said of her job. “Which primarily supports the academic technology needs, deploying enterprise wide systems, applications, telecommunications, and any of the infrastructure necessary to support the academic affairs of the university.”

One of the projects Casares will be overseeing includes “wireless for the academic side of the campus.”

“The dollars have been appropriated for that,” she said, “and we are in the beginning part of that project, where we are looking at vendors and making a selection of the appropriate technology for wireless deployment.”

Also on the horizon, according to Casares: “There is an analysis project on the next Student Information System, how to better manage information on the academic side of the house.”

The requirements for the position were quite stringent. According to Watters, the search committee was looking for “somebody who may have had experience dealing with information technology centers in a network arrangement, in a sense that we have multiple campuses... Someone who has an appreciation of the challenge running global centers... Somebody who had the ability... to take complex problems and analyze them and come up with demonstrated examples of satisfactory solutions.”

“There was a national search firm involved in generating candidates from across the country,” stated Watters. “They conducted reviews with a number of these folks. There were several top candidates brought to campus. Those top candidates met with the leadership from around the university. So it was a very vetted process.” Casares emerged from the process as the premier choice after her visit to campus.

“I think Jeanne demonstrated to the search committee that she had an exemplary record of attainment,” noted Watters. “Just the sheer size of [Paychex], the fact that they’re international in scope now, the fact that they run multiple data centers... They have an extreme amount of highly sensitive data that they are the stewards of and are required to protect.”

Casares described her first month as an adjustment and learning period, inviting suggestions or advice.