IN 1981, WHEN VIJI MURALI CAME TO THE U.S., HER first attempt was to rekindle her research work from India. “My husband was at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana,” recalls Murali, “and when I approached the faculty there, I was told that my research was too applied.” Murali was asked to restart from scratch. Subsequently, Murali’s husband moved to Iowa State and she followed. But instead of restarting her research in chemistry, Murali sought to explore. “My father, a visionary, advised that I search for a program in computers,” recalls Murali. She began with a couple of summer courses in computer science at the applied math department at Iowa State, and soon liked the field. Murali began from scratch.

In 1987, Murali completed her master’s from University of Arizona and continued working there till 1999. In 1999, Murali joined Western Michigan University as the vice president of Information Technology and CIO. “I was the chief architect of the Unix group at Arizona and we were very successful in it,” says Murali who has consistently stayed on in the education field from the start. A big change for the chemistry research student from Osmania University in India.

Murali splits her University needs into academic computing, administrative computing, telecommunications, community liaisoning (Western Michigan is in a very small community and plays a leadership role) and so on. “The needs are very different,” says Murali, “for each category. The students’ requirements range from laptop needs to classroom stations, online transactions with the University, labs and so on. While many of the faculty needs mirror the students’, there are very specific needs in the faculty research work. In everything we do at Western Michigan, IT has a role to play, so much so, IT has become a very horizontal entity in the campus.” Then there is the large administrative group which needs to be wired into the University functioning. “The University is a very good example of how we have leveraged IT to become more efficient and totally approachable,” says Murali. “We also manage the entire telecommunicating network.” Murali also consults with the Kalamazoo community to enable the IT proliferation within the community.

“Students bring totally unorthodox perspectives to the department and we rely on this freshness of thought to be an agile and effective department,” says Murali. With a budget of $10 million, Murali has enabled the University to rank amongst the 100 wireless universities of the country. “Unlike a private university, the demands on a public university are very different and time-bound,” says Murali. One such time-bound window is the admissions program. This online process faces heavy traffic and request for information in the Fall and Spring semesters at the University. “Any changes and new product trials we do are time bound within these windows. And there is no space for a glitch, as the time is very critical for university admission,” says the CIO.

“Institutional needs drive what we do, as opposed to what cool toys we want to have. We are constantly assessing our priorities. Once a year I meet face-to-face with faculty and meet much more often than that with student groups,” Murali says. “That said, decision making in a University doesn’t happen by a directive from a CEO. We have a multiple-team decision making process that includes people from the board, the student body, the faculty and so on. In this, everybody has an interest in the upgrading of the University’s IT initiative—towards leveraging IT in Western Michigan’s strive to be one of the best Universities.” Murali is one of the few CIOs in the education field. “Stakeholders’ engagement in the decision-making process is very time consuming, but this is the critical part of the entire process. The technology is never the issue.”

ROI in the educational business is not as straight forward as in the corporate world. “How do you quantify better teaching environments, superior research or better class of students,” asks Murali. “The savings is not immediately evident or related to the spend in such an environment, and the task of convincing the decision makers to spend the money is even more difficult.” Yet, Murali has taken pains to ensure that the IT initiative at Western Michigan has buy-in from all concerned. “ROI comes from evaluating the University’s standing in the national and regional competition,” says Murali. “In such a case, the IT ROI is linked wholly to the University’s ROI.” Murali works closely with the infrastructure companies like Cisco to bring best-of-breed products to show immediate savings. “Wireless, VoIP and technologies like these have given immediate returns, and these consistent victories help me sell bigger projects to the decision makers,” remarks the CIO. “The CIO needs to be very creative, too. We should be able to take judicious risks with partners that could pay off big profits in the long term.”

Higher education doesn’t work like a well-oiled corporation, says Murali. It works more like disjoint entrepreneurial teams working towards different goals. In this situation, there are databases that exist in isolation, research environments that don’t connect and so on. Murali has sought outside consultants like Gartner, PWC and others to conduct studies to integrate the environments. “We don’t consider outsourcing relevant to the University, but we have “out-tasked” different needs at various points to our consultants, and the results have been phenomenol.”

The biggest challenge Murali faces now is in the telecommunication infrastructure. “Students are demanding different solutions today, and we are working on making the telecommunication service current,” says Murali. The network is becoming the computer, says Murali, and the network is becoming ubiquitous. “The network needs to become a strategic asset and the demands on the network are changing from what they were in the past.” With an ear constantly on the ground, Murali has rendered the IT asset of the University to become a nimble, accessible service entity. “Higher education is different; the work, the culture, the processes and so on. So I’m actively involved in securing funding for the university, whether it is from federal or state grants or private hardware and software companies. It makes a difference to have the CIO be a part of that, because then [donors] see that this is a serious IT venture.”