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Duke's IT Leaders Share Vision For 2015

Annual Tech Expo draws 500 professionals from across university, health system

Stephen Toback of Duke's Office of Information Technology (left) demonstrates 3-D and other technologies at Duke's fifth annual Tech Expo.
Stephen Toback of Duke's Office of Information Technology (left) demonstrates 3-D and other technologies at Duke's fifth annual Tech Expo.

By the time today's sophomores receive their Duke diplomas, students and faculty will more likely use mobile devices than computers and video traffic will account for more than half of Duke's Internet usage.

The rapid pace of technological change necessitates new ways of working across the enterprise, Duke's IT leaders told about 500 technology professionals from units across the university and health system last week at the fifth annual Tech Expo.

"Our jobs are going to change every day," said Tracy Futhey, vice president for information technology and university CIO. "We need to move from talking together to doing together."

IT organizations must develop and strengthen their partnerships in order to meet users' demands for access to information anytime anywhere, said Art Glasgow, chief information officer (CIO) for Duke's health system and medical center.

"Customers have unlimited expectations," Glasgow said. "The pace of change will overtake us unless we learn how to do this. It's how we learn to work together that will allow us to continue to meet the needs of Duke moving forward."

Duke's two CIOs shared their predictions for the year 2015 as part of their keynote address for this year's Tech Expo. In addition to widespread use of mobile and video technologies, they predicted:

  • An explosion of digitized personal data, with the average person collecting more than 90 terabytes of digitized personal information.
  • Plummeting cost of cloud storage, to the point that 5 petabytes can be bought for less than $500.
  • Voice recognition capabilities (similar to Siri) that move the smartphone into the computer realm to create interactive digital assistants.
  • Real-time cloud-based analytics that leverage this voice-aware fabric to unlock information across the enterprise.

"Think of being able to access all the known knowledge by speaking into your smartphone," Futhey said. "This is all going to start to happen. This is where we're heading right now."

In addition to the CIOs' keynote, the event included presentations on information security, identity management, network technology and the new system Duke Medicine will use to manage patient interactions, among others.

The theme of this year's Tech Expo, which drew a record number of IT staff from across the university and health system, was "Communication, Cooperation and Collaboration." The event plays an important role in fostering new partnerships across Duke's diverse IT environment, organizers said. Many times, IT staff collaborate via email but never meet face to face, said Matt Royal, event director and IT analyst with the Office of Information Technology.

"This event gives us an opportunity to learn and benefit from each other's expertise," Royal said.

Susan Gerbeth-Jones, assistant dean of IT for the Nicholas School of the Environment and a past Tech Expo chair, said she hoped technology might be used to broaden the event's reach in the future.

"I'd like to challenge us to look at offering some of the sessions online, so we could reach people in other locations or who maybe thought they couldn't take a whole day (to participate)," she said.

Learn more about the event on the Tech Expo website.