CIO Blog - by Pablo Molina - (4438 Visitors)

I have just published a piece on EDUCAUSE Review about diversity in the work place. Basically, I believe that the diversity of the people in my team make us an efficient, creative, and resourceful organization. Also, I extol the values of organizations promoting diversity in technology leadership like the Hispanic Technology Council and the Information Technology Senior Management Forum. In the same piece, I issue a call to arms for educators worldwide to increase their diversity efforts.

I recently became a Certified Information Privacy Professional. I strongly recommend that technology executives responsible for the management of personal and private information educate themselves in privacy issues through EPIC, IAPP, and other organizations with an interest in this field.

January 28, 2009 is International Privacy Day. Designated by the Council of Europe three years ago, this day is meant to raise awareness and educate the public about the importance of privacy in every context. In line with my work on the Advisory Board of the Electronic Privacy Information Center at www.epic.org and my commitment to privacy at Georgetown University, I would like to encourage all community members and visitors to be mindful of privacy and to support privacy efforts worldwide personally, professionally, and financially.

Many law schools stream their conferences and academic events to the world. The Georgetown University Law Center web site, for example, receives over one million visitors per year, most of them coming to watch videoclips or listen to podcasts. To make it easier for Internet users anywhere in the world to watch legal education videos, we have created a channel called LegalEducation on YouTube, available on-line at http://www.youtube.com/legaleducation. Please subscribe to the channel and contribute your own video materials.

For more than twenty years, the Law Center has recorded classes under special circumstances with the approval of the academic administration. In 2007, the Information Systems and Technology department switched from using antiquated cassette tapes to an all-digital recording and secure delivery system. Besides being more convenient to the students and incurring lower labor costs, the new system saved the Law Center and its student population from having to purchase and dispose of 4,000 cassette tapes during its first year of operation.

In 2005, the Information Systems and Technology department upgraded the cooling and electrical systems in the data center of the campus. The project received an APC InfraStruXure award. It also translated into significant on-going power savings.

On January 3, 2008 an external computer hard drive was reported stolen from a locked office within the Office of Student Affairs on the Georgetown University Main Campus. The hard drive may have contained social security numbers and other information about approximately 38,000 Georgetown University community members, most of them alumni and students. Almost a month later, the University informed potentially affected individuals, the community at large, and the world about the incident. At the same time, the President of the University, Jack DeGioia asked all University employees to conduct a new information security and privacy campaign.

The purpose of the campaign is to identify and control the management of confidential information within the institution. Technology solutions for content monitoring and filtering and for data loss prevention have come a long way but are still in their infancy. Their effectiveness is limited in the open computing environments of higher education. In my opinion, awareness and training ought to be our primary focus. We should help alumni, faculty, staff, students, and other community members guard their privacy and that of others by providing periodic communications and training sessions. In general, we should rely on common sense when handling confidential information. If we must store confidential information, let us do so in locked spaces for physical records, and on network or encrypted drives for electronic records.

I have the pleasure of serving on the Advisory Board of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, EPIC. The EPIC Executive Director and Georgetown University adjunct faculty member, Marc Rotenberg recently challenged the institution in a public forum to rise to the occasion. He proposed, and I agree, that universities should join other organizations in advocating for simpler and more affordable ways for students and the general public to safeguard our privacy, and to protect preemptively and to monitor our credit histories. By all accounts, data losses and identity theft are on the rise and every person needs reasonable protections against them. For more information, please visit the Information Systems and Technology Privacy web site at http://www.law.georgetown.edu/ist/privacy. Feel free to contact any of my team members or me with questions and comments.

I have recently joined the Advisory Board of one of the most influential privacy organizations in the world: the Electronic Privacy Information Center led by Marc Rotenberg. The web site is located at http://www.epic.org. Every technologist, and every person, must become aware of privacy issues. I encourage you to vist the EPIC site periodically and subscribe to the newsletter.