Award Recognizes Innovation at Fordham IT

Staying Relevant: It’s central to the ongoing success, not to mention existence, of any organization. At Fordham, our digital resources must be relevant both to the University’s current needs and also five, even ten years in the future. Since technology is embedded in almost everything we do on campus and off, making achieving and maintaining the University’s relevancy is a challenge. But this is a challenge Fordham IT has embraced with its visionary and strategic approach to supporting and developing Fordham’s digital resources.

For those efforts, Fordham IT was named a recipient of the international Digital Edge 50 award for 2017.

Dr. Frank Sirianni, chief information officer and vice president of Fordham IT, accepted the award this March at Agenda17: What’s Next In Digital, a leadership conference held in Jacksonville, FL. The conference focused on transforming organizations for the digital world. In other words, how to drive institutions forward in a climate which demands that higher education institutions and businesses constantly look ahead and around corners in anticipation of what — and who — will be using our resources.

The Digital Edge 50 award recognizes Fordham IT’s pioneering efforts to move the University’s systems (including Banner, our system of record) and databases to the cloud in the summer of 2016. It was a bold step, because most higher education institutions still rely on local servers. By adopting a cloud-based strategy, which is already the norm in finance, healthcare, and other sectors, Fordham signaled to the University community and the world that Fordham is, and will remain, relevant to teaching, research, learning, and administrative practices, in the coming years.

For more details about why Fordham IT received the Digital Edge 50 award, read the post “Fordham IT Receives Digital Edge 50 Innovation Award.”