Lewis Temares
CIO Emeritus, University of Miami

Dr. M. Lewis Temares is VP/CIO Emeritus for Information Technology and Dean Emeritus of the College of Engineering at the University of Miami. For the majority of his career, he led a staff of 300 employees and was responsible for all aspects of computing and telecommunications, operating with a $40 million budget. Dr. Temares joined the University of Miami in 1980 and later became the first officially designated Chief Information Officer in higher education in the United States, while simultaneously serving as Dean of the College of Engineering from 1994–2007. Selected as one of the “Premiere 100 IT Leaders in the World,” he led the University of Miami IT Department to place in the top ten of Computerworld’s “Best Places to Work” for eight consecutive years, a distinction only the University of Miami can claim.

A frequent keynote speaker, author, and presenter at academic, business and information technology conferences, Dr. Temares has consulted with governmental agencies, private companies, and multinational organizations alike. He is often cited in national publications and is a senior member of IEEE, a Fellow in the American Marketing Society, and a member of multiple executive councils and advisory boards, including the Dell Platinum Council and Microsoft Higher Education Advisory Group.

Dr. Temares: Let me make this comment first so that we get everything straight and straightforward. I am no longer the CIO for the University of Miami, because I retired in August.

Ed Yourdon: Right, yes, I do know that.

Temares: So I’ll put everything with the caveat, “as of August,” because the new person coming in should have a new perspective and obviously have different goals.

Yourdon: Yeah. Let’s start with something specific: one of the things I’m obviously seeing—as I’ve kind of expected—is that all of the CIOs have some fairly universal tasks of keeping the lights on, worrying about security, and so on. But I’m curious from your perspective: what is different about the CIO role in the university or academic institution than you would expect to see somewhere out there in the Fortune 500 commercial land?

Temares: Well, there are a couple of things that make you unique. First of all, my customer is the student. A student coming in has this unique role of being my customer and probably the gentleman or the woman who is most likely to raise a breach of security. You know, when I was dean and a student came in with a 1600 on his SAT, we said, “Yes, he could have gone on to Carnegie-Mellon, could have gone on to MIT, he’s at the University of Miami.” And the VP side of me, the VP/CIO side of me says, very succinctly to himself, “Oh, damn, I think I have somebody coming in that’s going to be way ahead of my own people and he’s going to break into my system.” So, you know, my customer is also one of my most dangerous security risks, just being an 18-year-old student.

The sad thing which happens, which is very unique, is that we recruit faculty members who are all very smart and doctors who are all very smart—and they have individual entrepreneurial characteristics. They have tenure, they can do anything they want with regards to setting up a network; they have funding, they have research, they have everything, and they can make the same decisions as the person who does research in the field of medicine. We have a bunch of people who are actually very independent entrepreneurs, and yet I’ve got to bring them all together to share in the network and share in the mission so hopefully everything that they all do will meet standards. So that is a very unique characteristic that we have in education, especially in higher education.

Yourdon: Interesting. Now, when you were doing this role, did you have to act as a champion, so to speak, for using more computers and technology in the classroom itself—which I can imagine some faculty would resist?

Temares: Well some people are, because of the generation gap, the older faculty, are resistors. I thought of bringing computers into the classroom for a long time and I can give an instance of something that happened. I looked in [a classroom] door and [noticed a faculty member] writing on the whiteboard from yellow notepaper. … I said to him afterwards, “I’ve got a couple of questions here. One, did you notice those devices that were with the students? Those are called computers. You could have sent them notes in the mail. And they could have had them available and learning for the first time in front of you. And, secondly, is that paper yellow from age or is that new paper?” And I didn’t score many points, but I made my point. I think it really didn’t help because, as a senior faculty member, you cannot tell them how to teach. If they want to use technology, fine.

And yet I have a young faculty member who was teaching English and teaching how to do research and immediately went to the computer and showed them how to use the Web and showed the students that they can’t trust the Web. It has to be totally accurate ’cause the stuff on there is not reviewed and not verified. So you can verify something or not verify something—just between an encyclopedia and Wikipedia, that kind of thing. So, it depends on the faculty member. Some grasp it immediately. Some don’t. The same thing happened with the doctors putting in an electronic hospital record right now. There’s one third of your doctors who are really excited, one third of your doctors who are indifferent, and one third of your doctors who are opposed. And the big thing is keeping the one third “indifferent” away from the one third “opposed” so you can get it in.

Yourdon: Interesting, interesting. Now you raised an issue that was my second question for you, and it is kind of an obvious one. Obviously, a university like yours is likely to see, and is going to be forced to deal with, a much denser population of these New-Age, technology-savvy kids—so my question is, what advice do you have for the CIOs of various other companies that are likely to be hiring them as soon as they get out of your university?

Temares: Well, one of the things that’s good about these kinds of students is that they teach you what’s the next step in technology. I mean, I knew enough about mobile technology and the need to have wireless for my campus long before people knew about having to have wireless computers for their workplace—mainly because I’m dealing with students there on the leading edge. See, you’re dealing with a bunch of people that truly grew up with computers that are attached to them, and now you’re learning from them—and social media is another example.

Using social media, which they do, they think that we have to communicate differently with homework. You see, we’re not a corporation that has to communicate something it wants to get out to its customers. So the new recruit that comes in has to work towards it and is expecting things that are not necessarily available at the firm that they’re coming into. They’re expecting to be able to use the social media. You know, this whole generation, it’s a non-secretive generation. We’ve always told people, “You’ve got to be transparent if you want to be trusted.” You’ve got to tell people to communicate. Well, this generation, this is TMI [too much information]. There is too much information about this generation. They feel nothing about exposing themselves on Facebook, on Twitter—I say “exposing themselves,” because they communicate what we (the previous generation) used to consider private information. This generation just talks and talks about people freely, and that’s a whole different environment for us in the computer field, and in the security of computers. This generation will expose things to the school and forward it and not think twice about it. It’s a totally different culture.

Yourdon: Very interesting. Yeah, I certainly agree with you, having watched some of this myself. Well, that kind of leads me into the next area: what are some of the key technology trends that you see shaping the next few years? I mean, obviously, social media is now in front of us, but do you see other things coming along that we should be watching?

Temares: Mobility. Mobility is a big one. Everybody’s going to want video mobile, I mean, you know, your RIM [Blackberry] device, your Apple device. I used to say the students coming in had a six-second attention span. They’re down to three seconds. And one thing that occupies them is the picture. So they want more and more video entertainment. And so if you want to get to your customer, or you want to get information out, you’ve got to use a mobile video device.

Yourdon: Yeah, I was just reading some details about a speech the CIO of Delta gave at some computer conference, and she was saying similar things, saying that, you know, “One of the things we want to do at Delta is to be with the customer 24 hours a day. You know, whatever they’re doing with our mobile phone apps, and so on,” and so I think that’s how business has got to look at it. Aside from mobile, what else?

Temares: It’s very simple. The life of a CIO, getting into the corporate world, getting into the executive suite, it’s a different kind of lifestyle. More and more it’s going to be a checklist of how you’re going to use the technology. More and more, it’s going to be a marketing effort of trying to explain to people in your corporation how information technology can better sell the product or can better reduce the less cost of a product.

Yourdon: You know, it’s interesting: earlier this week, I was interviewing the CIO of the New York Stock Exchange, who was saying that maybe the CIO of the future has got to be the Chief Media Officer also—explaining all of this stuff.

Temares: There’s no question about it. I agree completely. I think if anyone does not understand or become fluent in media, the whole relationship between voice/data integration, they can forget about it. I agree completely; and don’t forget about the advantages of voice. It’s been overlooked, and people forget that the phone conversation is a valuable tool as well. And it’s a lot quicker in a lot of ways than detail work.

Yourdon: Absolutely. Well, all of this had to do with looking forward. What about looking back? You’ve been in the field probably almost as long as I have. Throughout your career, what would you say have been the most significant changes or developments that you’ve seen in the field?

Temares: Oh, there’s no question that life changed with the personal computer. The second time life changed was with the Internet. Even being in the educational field, I was on e-mail in the early seventies, because we had ARPANET and the Internet and things of that nature for the research networks. But the fact that the personal computer became so commercial, was a major, major change. The second thing is the Internet, and the third thing is mobility.

Yourdon: Yeah, I think I would agree with all of those—although something I’m coming to appreciate just in terms of the pervasiveness, particularly with students, is the Google phenomenon. The fact that any question that occurs to you about anything at all—which you would often have shrugged and ignored in the past—you now Google it.

Temares: Absolutely. And I’ll add to that, not only can you answer any question, but you can also do it anywhere, at any time, because of the mobility of a wireless device. You don’t have to go to a library to look it up. In the old days, even when you had computers, when you first had computers, you had to get to computers and then do it on your own.

Yourdon: Yeah, that’s a good point. Wherever you are, even if you’re out on the street.

Temares: Absolutely, wherever you are, and you add to that the GPS technology that’s everywhere you are. There’s no getting lost anymore if you have an intelligent phone.

Yourdon: There’s a related issue that has occurred to me a lot: one of the things that old timers like you and I would have seen is that back in the ’60s, there were a lot of technologies that were very expensive and very scarce, and, therefore, very restricted and very controlled. For example, think about mainframe computers. And now we’ve got a lot of stuff that is essentially free and ubiquitous and pervasive, everywhere, and yet we still live in social institutions that are trying desperately to control these things. Mobile phones are a good example of this phenomenon. Do you see any more things of that nature coming along, things that are going to become universal and free?

Temares: Well, I’ll tell you, one of the things that I’ve been involved in is telemedicine. And the most difficult part of telemedicine is the cost of telecommunications for processing data from Latin America—because it’s all government-controlled and their prices are absolutely ludicrous compared to what it is in various other parts of the world. So, eventually, I think the economy is going to break that down, the same way it has broken down barriers in terms of dealing with China, trading with China. It’s going to break down the telecommunication barriers also because we’re going to have to communicate to be in business, and if that’s the case, if it’s too expensive, it won’t get done. And Skype is in business; you’re doing this on Skype. Skype is in business because they found a way to get business done and in a cheaper way.

Yourdon: Good point, good point.

Temares: And economics kills everything.

Yourdon: Yeah.

Temares: And it changes things.

Yourdon: Let me move on to another category. You hear a lot of talk these days about IT being a strategic weapon to enhance the business. Would you say that’s true for universities, too?

Temares: Oh yeah, there’s no question that the only reason for IT’s existence is to support the business unit. For example, IT supported the admissions applications: you need to have a great Web presence, for a quick response and getting information out to people who are inquiring. We now do a lot of things, for example, in terms of inquiries. It used to be we lost the inquiries. You know, they’d inquire but we’d be so busy about applicants that we didn’t have time for inquiries.

Now, with technology, anybody that inquires, we start to send things to them—because they’re a tentative, they’re a possible, they’re a future maybe. So now we can go after different people; whereas we were only dealing with the admissions applications, we’re now dealing with anybody who asks about the university, sending them promotional information, because we can do that over the Web. We’ve got their e-mail address, they’re coming through the Web, we give them back the information through the Web.

The other thing is the cost. Obviously it reduces the cost to support the information technology, to have the infrastructure to reduce the cost of delivering the classroom information. But most important of all is the way it’s changed our whole medical side. Being an academic medical center, you need the high-performance computing to do your genomic research, you need your high-performance computing to do other kinds of research, engineering research, architectural stuff, so the whole of information technology is networking. We have to keep the network up 24 x 7, 365, no question about it—so in addition to the network that supports the faculty members doing their individual intelligence and research and work, we also have to have the support in terms of the applications systems that will allow them to keep performing their administrative duties as well.

Yourdon: I would imagine also, as a recruiting tool, you’ve got to have up-to-date and leading-edge technology to attract the best researchers and the best professors.

Temares: There was no question when it first came to my attention. I think we were the fifth school that had all our campuses wireless. We have five campuses, but three major ones that are ten miles apart; each is like ten miles away from the other one, almost like an equilateral triangle. The medical school, the marine school and oceanographic sciences, and the main campus, which is basically the undergraduate and graduate school. And all three campuses had to be interconnected, all three campuses had to have wireless, because no matter where you go, from campus to campus, you had to have the connectivity that you needed to do your job. So a faculty member may be teaching on the marine campus when in fact, he’s a biology instructor, so he has to have that ability to be in both places at the same time. And that’s what’s happening. I like it. You know, you used to say, “You can’t be in two places at one time,” but now we can, now, because of the mobility. We can be in two places at one time.

Yourdon: That’s a good point. Well, as I’m sure you know, this has been a very frustrating area for CIOs in normal companies because they have kids coming in applying for a job who will say to them, “I’ve got better computing equipment at home than the crap you want me to use in the office.”

Temares: [laughter] That’s true. That’s very true. We find that all the time. All of a sudden they’re saying, “What do you mean you don’t have split screens? You only have one screen for me to do my applications on? You know, I’m used to working with two or three screens at one time so that I can have multiple applications open at one time. And I move one from the other.” I mean, the things they come up with … you know, instead of criticizing them, you’ve got to listen to them. That’s one of the most important things, I think, that has changed in the CIO role. The CIO role is more of a listener now and asking the problem of what’s going on and listening to what’s going on than the guy who’s promoting what he thinks is the future rather than watching the future appear in front of his eyes.

Yourdon: Interesting. I certainly would agree with you. I had one other question in that category, and that is whether IT is expected to enable entirely new things which the university simply cannot do today?

Well, let me give you somewhat of an off-the-wall example: both MIT and Berkeley are the two examples that come to mind. They have essentially put all of their lectures online. Well, Berkeley has put everything onto YouTube, which in a sense changes the essence of a university as being a place where you have to go there for the most part to get your degree. Now, aside from laboratories and the experience of interacting with other students, you can get a lot of your education through YouTube. I mean, that kind of changes the nature of the business, doesn’t it?

Temares: Well, that goes along with the whole idea of having online, to the resident having the experience of being in the classroom. There are a couple of things that go wrong as far as I can tell. First of all, part of the differentiation is the faculty member. The reason that private schools charge a different amount of money is not only the support they get from the government but often there’s the quality of the researcher or the instructor that they’re talking to. You want to deal with the guy who writes the book rather than the guy who reads the book. The guy who writes the book is someone you can deal with, and he’s a decent faculty member, too—you get a huge interaction that you can’t get if you were doing it online. And the interaction of students, in terms of the student’s interactions with another student, is immeasurable. So there’s something to be said about the environment that’s worth working on.

We’ve almost gotten to the question of: can you have all telecommuting workers? When you want to do a project, you want to get together for something that requires bigger than individual effort, how difficult it is to get there through telecommunications? It’s not the same when you can’t watch the body language, you can’t watch the facial motions, you can’t watch the whole combination of what is the human interaction.

For a big psychology class, which normally has 350 students in a lecture hall, what does it matter? Fine. If you’re talking about a graduate course, or where you’re doing something with the sciences, I think it does matter. Stanford turned their lecture-hall engineering degree all online, and they found a very, very difficult time, because they were paying a bunch of graduate students to be available if a student had a question, because you couldn’t move forward unless you had an answer to the question.

They ran into some very big difficulties, because they were charging the same for the online degree, the same as the in-person degree.

Yourdon: Well, it will be an interesting area to watch, I think, as time goes on.

Temares: Oh yes. And, again, one of the nice things about IT is that you can predict a little bit of the future, but it’s virtually days that you predict. You can’t predict more of the future, because the things that come out are just overwhelmingly incredible, even when they’re advancements over existing things. Who would have thought everybody would want all this information out there on Facebook? Or some idiot walks around and has, you know, five million followers on Twitter? I mean, this is nuts!

Yourdon: [laughing] That’s right. Let me switch to a different topic area, of problems and concerns and issues. What would you say are the main problems or threats that concern your kind of IT industry and the academic environment over the next couple of years?

Temares: If my number-one concern wasn’t cyber security, I think I’d be asleep in the closet. The answer is security, security, security—and especially with the new generation, who doesn’t view security in the same way until they get burned. Until their identity is stolen or something else happens to them, because they really are just too open and they don’t appreciate the level of security that’s necessary to survive in our domain. So I really think it’s a combination of you need security because more and more of the information will be available. If you’re going to have your wallet somewhere on your RIM [Blackberry] device, you’ll have a real problem if somebody breaks in because it’s like stealing your wallet and stealing your life away. So I think the biggest, my biggest, concern is always the security protection of the individual and the individual’s data.

Yourdon: Okay. Well, a related question is how do you communicate that kind of concern to the university people around you, your peers and superiors, as well as the customers right outside—which would be your students—and then the people outside the university firewall?

Temares: It’s really like a losing campaign, it’s part of the marketing. You know, faculty members are the same way. Don’t forget individual faculty members are used to publishing their research and sharing everything they do. You know, we live in a crazy world in higher education. Think about this: we send people to conferences to deliver papers on all these unique things they learned, they’ve accomplished. After somebody outside sees these unique things they’ve accomplished, they offer more salary and hire them away from us. So we literally pay for our faculty members to leave us.

Think about it. It’s a crazy environment. But we do! So we want to publish, because it’s a great reputation builder. You know, your Stanfords, your MITs, they get their reputation because of the good research everybody knows they do and the exciting things that come out of them. But guess what? A guy who’s got exciting things at MIT will get a job offer from Carnegie-Mellon that will probably give a 30 percent pay raise or a 40 percent pay raise because of the uniqueness … they wanted to bring him. And offer him graduate assistants or whatever. And by the way, once you have tenure in an institution of any prestige, the next institution you go to automatically gives you tenure. It’s virtually a given.

Yourdon: Interesting.

Temares: You give the person the opportunity to advance himself, show his knowledge, make the world know you, and then he can go out and get another job somewhere else for more.

Yourdon: [laughter] That certainly is true. Well, given that state of affairs, then, how do you go about communicating the need for more security and maybe a little more privacy?

Temares: You try to educate them by publicizing leaks, publicizing when you have meetings—it goes along with all my other desires to publicize what IT can do and can’t do. So I meet with academic deans and counselors, or I’ll meet with the various people of the faculty senate, I’ll meet with the people in terms of the research council. The idea is that the CIO has to get out of his ivory tower and [get] on the road. And “on the road” means selling IT and selling the points he wants to accomplish with IT. A lot of times people don’t even know what IT can provide them. They’ll give you an awesome look like, “Really? We can do that?” I have to say to them, “If you have a problem with your systems or your mobility or anything of this sort, just give it to us. That’s what we’re here for, we’re the pros. We’ll deal with them.” And people don’t even realize that this thing exists.

Yourdon: Well, I think you’re right. So a lot of it is marketing and, as you say, getting out on the road. Certainly, one of the things I’ve noticed now that I’ve been looking more closely at CIOs is how often they are out on the road, speaking at conferences and public gatherings and so forth—much more than I would have guessed.

Temares: And, by the way, there are two things that I have to do. You have to be aware of what other CIOs are running into, which means going to the conferences and talking privately with other CIOs and what problems they’re confronting, even if they’re in another industry. It doesn’t matter because the things in their industry will move to your industry one day, so, if they have problems in the financial industry or the higher education industry, they will have the problems eventually in the retail industry and in other industries. There are twin towers, you know; it happens.

The second thing that you’ve got to do is market yourself and your department and your abilities internally to your organization. You can’t just say, “Okay, I’m there when they need me.” No, no, no, no. You create the need, you let them know what’s going on, you let them know what’s available so they can make use of it. And ask them, go out and ask, “Would it be helpful if? Can I do this? Can I help with that?” and so on, and that’s the way you learn things.

Yourdon: And that’s how you stay on the radar screen also, if you’re seen as a contributor rather than just a pain-in-the-ass cost center, which I think is important.

Temares: [laughter] Exactly. Oh no, you said it better than me. You’re absolutely right. What makes you a revenue producer rather than a cost center? If somebody says, “Hey, Lew Temares of the IT team was just over here and they really gave me something of benefit,” and you know, your boss and the rest of the guys will be looking at you in a different way. Rather than just saying, you know, “I need more hardware, I need more software, or I need, I need, I need, I need.”

Yourdon: Yeah, I agree.

Temares: And there’s nothing the matter with saying, “I need,” because, generally speaking, you do need. At such-and-such a cost-per-item. I mean, you can’t live with five-year-old technology, whether it’s servers or whether it’s hardware or software. Everything has an age. You know, one of these days they’re going to come up with something that will replace ERP. You know, we always are adding new systems, we’re always adding philanthropism, we always had COBOL. Then came ERP in the ’90s. That’s 20 years ago—the ’90s—or 15 years ago since the ’90s. How come we don’t have anything better than ERP now? It’s going to be there, but then in five years we’re going to have something that’s no longer going to be called ERP. It’s going to be called something else and it’s going to be better.

Now, a good example of that is cloud computing. I have this mania about cloud computing, because really, what it is, it’s host computing. We’ve had host computing since the ’70s. IBM used to have data centers, if you remember, and you’re going to have your data and get your result on your console in your office. These existed way back then.

Yourdon: Fundamentally, you’re right. Well, that raises an interesting question that kind of gets us back to this generational issue. How do you communicate to the younger generation that there are a lot of things that were done before, that there are a lot of lessons that can be learned without having to repeat the same mistakes and failure all over again?

Temares: Are you a parent? [laughter] How do you convey adages to a younger generation?

Yourdon: [laughter] Oh, okay.

Temares: It’s no different than being a parent. You hope that when you say what you say you’re not spitting into the wind, but really some of it … actually, you throw it and it actually sticks to the person. Don’t know how much sticks and how much not, even including the new worker that comes in. The hope is that they are bright enough to be as open as you are open to them, that they will be open to you rather than just saying, “Oh, you’re just old-fashioned, you’re an idiot.”

Yourdon: Well, of course, it’s a lot easier for them to have that attitude in our field because the technology is a million times faster than it was when you and I were young kids.

Temares: Well, they sort of understand that. They really do. You know, you tell them: what’s the difference between a “client” and the end of the terminal? I mean, there’s no difference between a client and a terminal basically, and we’re going more and more towards a terminal concept if you think about it. I mean, the, the new RIM device that’s going to be coming out is as close to a terminal as a tablet, basically. It’s going to be as close to a terminal as you’ll find, but yet at the same time we’ll have the ability because of the RIM device to do everything through the Internet.

Yourdon: Yeah.

Temares: It’s going to have very little storage. You’re going to have to buy storage from a vendor so I try to tell that to the younger generation, I tell them funny things. One of the things you can use as an example is a camera. When you want to take and keep and store pictures, you used to be able to do 12 pictures, 15 pictures, and then they went to 27 pictures on an entire roll of film and you thought it was incredible, then 36 pictures. Now all of a sudden, you’ve got this little thing in it and it’s got 2 gigabytes, 4 gigabytes, 8 gigabytes, 16 gigabytes, and you can hold hundreds of thousands of pictures. But the principle is the same: it’s a camera and it’s got a modem, you’ve got this little digital device.

It’s the same principle. You just got better technology. But the same thing is happening to computers. It’s the same principle, better technology, which makes things happen more conveniently, faster, and sometimes, and a lot of times, just nicer. I mean, the quality is better.

Yourdon: That certainly is true.

Temares: And they always relate to the camera. It’s crazy, when you relate to the simple thing, you relate to the throw away camera compared to what you do when you buy a camera and you put your memory in it and they can see, “Oh yeah, I guess that’s similar.”

Yourdon: And you can give one to every single guest at a wedding reception. That’s where I’ve seen it a lot. Tell everybody to take pictures, hundreds of pictures, and maybe one or two of them will be good, and then we can throw everything away at the end and that encourages behavior that simply was not allowed, let alone encouraged, a generation ago.

Temares: Listen, every firm, every business has old computers that they get rid of on a regular basis. I mean, everybody has a cycle now, their economic budgeting. It’s what your cycle of your computers, what’s your cycle of your servers, what’s your cycle of your everything, every piece of equipment. What’s the cycle? You’ve got to put in your budget plan for the next five years what the cycle is for that replacement.

Yourdon: Absolutely. I’ve got one more generational question, and that is related to, say, the young graduating student who sees a possible career that will lead up to your role. He says, “Some day I want to be just like Dr. Temares. I want to be a CIO.” What advice would you give such a person to prepare?

Temares: I always, I always tell that person to try and get as much education as they can when they’re young, because it’s so tough to go back when they want to go back.

Yourdon: Ahh.

Temares: So perhaps you can get a master’s afterwards. I also promote, if they possibly can, to get a combination of degrees. For example, if you’re going to get a bachelor’s in business administration, get a law degree or get something else other than a master’s in business afterwards. If you’ve got an engineering degree, go get an MBA unless you’re going to go into pure engineering. If you want to come into the technical field, into the business world, you have to have business background. You have to have some business courses. You can’t just fit in there unless you have the MBA, unless you have the BBA, or you have to have some criteria that gets you in there so you can understand accounting, economics, because it’s not just technical. There’s a cost factor and one gets weighed against the other, and you have to know, you have to know the difference between an income and a balance sheet.

You have to understand the business. Otherwise, you can’t talk to the people in the business, and you’re going to be viewed as just a techie and you’re going to go nowhere. Now, you can become chief technical officer, that’s what some of them want to be—but even the chief technical officer has to talk to the boardroom sometimes, has to talk to the senior management sometimes, and has to market their ideas. I tell students, engineering students, that they have to know how to market themselves and market their ideas. Think of the greatest invention in the world, and unless they know how to market it, it’s a waste.

Yourdon: I certainly agree with you.

Temares: Whoever’s going to make the money is the guy who knows how to market it.

Yourdon: One of the things that has impressed me with the interviews I’ve done so far is just the enormous breadth of backgrounds that these people have. The guy I interviewed earlier this week had a PhD in chemistry. The woman who’s the CIO at Delta is a concert violinist. The CIO at Microsoft started off in the Parks and Recreation Department. It’s just, it’s amazing. So this idea of the breadth of the education and exposure to things is great.

Temares: Somewhere in the background are communicating skills and business skills, somewhere, because they can’t get where they are and they can’t stay where they are unless they have communication and business skills. And that’s the other thing I tried to explain to them—that you have to learn how to communicate. You know, Twitter is one form of communication. It’s not the all, the end-all. You have to learn to talk and present and deliver. And, you know, that’s why we have a speech class at the university. My new pitch is in project management. People nowadays, when they do project management tend to underestimate the cost and the time. They are really bad estimators, and, of course, if you estimate low and you come in high, you’re looking for your next job. If you estimate correctly, you look like a hero. But, you know, the idea is not to hit it on the exact date and budget, the idea is to always come in lower than you estimate. So you don’t do yourself or your company a favor by saying, “Oh, I’ll have this up in three months for $2 million,” and you actually get it up in five months and it cost you two and a half million dollars. One day late means you missed the timeframe. One dollar more means you missed your budget. One dollar fewer means you came in under budget. And that’s the way you can deliver it. So it’s all in the marketing.

Yourdon: Interesting. Well, I certainly would agree with you. Let me move on to another category. One of the things I’ve been trying to figure out is the typical responsibilities and duties that a CIO has, and, I get the impression that a lot of it is pretty basic in the universal—keeping the machines on, keeping the lights on.

Temares: Sure, sure.

Yourdon: So from your perspective in the university, what are the key responsibilities of a CIO? Or maybe you’ve already covered it in a sense.

Temares: Well, I’ll say it again. I have a diverse population, having faculty members and researchers, grad students, and doctors. So having them being able to perform their tasks, some of it life and death, it’s truly —you know, I often use the phrase on the administrative side, to the provost: this is not rocket science, this is not life and death, and the shuttle will go up, whether I make this happen or not. It’s not like something that would be disastrous if we are one day late or some disorder just happens. However, when you are dealing with doctors, it is life and death. When you are dealing with faculty members who are only here a given amount of time, they are only in that classroom for that hour. It’s a little different in terms of the operations in an academic medical center than it is in a normal business. I hate to say it’s only money, because, of course, money is important, but it really is on the administrative side, only money. This is a lot more significant.

Yourdon: Interesting. One of the other things I’ve found in the interviews I’ve had so far is that CIOs do not act alone; they’re not solitary actors. They all have a team. And so my question is: if you are assessing various candidates that might be a part of your team, what kind of qualities and strengths do you look for in a candidate?

Temares: Ahh, well, one of the strengths that is very, very important is that I try to interview to see if they fit. Let me give you an example. Two years ago I was looking for an assistant associate vice president for applications of equipment. But really what I was looking for was that person had to have the characteristics that possibly could assume my role, ’cause I knew I was going to retire. So when I was looking at the person, I was assessing them in terms of their communication skills, their presentation skills, but also to whether they could handle the day-to-day administration of the applications systems and how they communicate and deal with people. So the attributes of the person basically have to do with [whether] they fit in with the team.

You know, I would say that an all-star team of the best player in every position will lose to a team that plays together regularly because as a team they play better rather than an individual effort. So while I need a superstar maybe in terms of a tech-math, in terms of the network, I need somebody that’s really good at security. Overall, if I’m looking at the meld of where they can go and what they do, above all else, I want people that know their specialty but also display keen knowledge of their specialty by explaining their specialty and being part of the team.

Yourdon: It’s interesting that you should mention that because I’ve now heard that theme a couple of times, particularly in the private sector—where a lot of these CIOs are saying that they themselves are putting in 12-hour days, as is everybody on their team. And you don’t want to work 12 hours a day with people you fundamentally dislike, so it’s very important.

Temares: I’ll say. That’s very true, very true.

Yourdon: That’s amazing. One last question for this area. Are there priorities for a CIO that you consider essential that other key executives, like the provost or some of the other people in the academic environment, might misunderstand and feel differently about?

Temares: Yeah, you have to have a passion. Our business is education and your passion in IT really becomes a passion of providing a service as best you can. It runs into conflict because to provide the best services very often is beyond the economic means of the institution, so the adaptability is that you have to provide “good enough” for the person and yet to have the trust of the provost and have the trust of the chief financial officer, who may feel that it isn’t good enough because of economic reasons, not because you think it’s acceptable to be good enough.

Yourdon: Okay.

Temares: It’s a very difficult line to walk, you know what I mean?

Yourdon: Yeah, sure. I’ve been hearing from some of the other CIOs that they find themselves surrounded by other key business leaders in their company who rose to their position because they had not only good talents, but very strong opinions about the right way to do things for their business—and they often don’t like to hear the CIO telling them their ideas or requests are unreasonable or impractical.

Temares: I’ve got 3,000 of those. Every faculty member and doctor thinks that they know the business better. You know the only difference between a doctor and God is that God knows he’s not a doctor?

Yourdon: [laughter] I think I’ve heard variations on that one before.

Temares: Yeah, right. So they all think they know the business better. I can’t tell you how difficult it is with all these paper records the docs have, to tell them, “We can scan this stuff in and then when you have a file of this stuff. See, you still have it but you don’t need your file cabinet. It’s called document management. It’s been used for years and years. You’re not the first to do it.”

“Oh no. I want to see that paper; I want to be able to read it.”

“You can still read it. You can read it online instead of reading it on a piece of paper.”

I’m telling you, I swear to you, this is a conversation I’ve had innumerable times, including with faculty members. Oh no, I mean, that’s way back to the TRS-80s. Remember the TRS-80s?

Yourdon: Oh, yeah.

Temares: The TRS-80 was very big with faculty members because they could buy it at a local store and do their own thing, and I was telling them that they’ve got to do stuff because that’s the digital policy, they had to buy IBM, or they had to buy from a real company that was in the business of this type of computer. And, you know, they wanted to do their TRS-80s. It’s been there forever, it stays. Whatever they used in graduate school they think they can use when they come into your environment, and I’ve got to make sure it works on my network. And all sorts of diverse things are on my network. It’s anything—a university is different than a real corporation in that they’re allowed to buy and do whatever they want because they get free money. They have government research money.

Yourdon: Right.

Temares: Government research money doesn’t tell you, “You have to use a Hewlett-Packard piece.” It doesn’t tell you, “You have to buy a Dell piece.” You see? It doesn’t tell you anything of that nature. It says you can do whatever you want.

Yourdon: Very interesting. I thought I’d finish up by just asking a couple questions about your background. I’ve read your bio.

Temares: Sure.

Yourdon: Is there anything about your background and rise to the CIO position that you feel are really unusual or unique that, you know, we ought to tell people about?

Temares: My father owned a grocery store.

Yourdon: Really?

Temares: And I grew up in the grocery store. And after school and for the first 14 years of my life, what you did was you worked in the grocery store. When I came back home, I went to the grocery store. In the grocery store you learn a lot about customer service. First, the customer’s always right, and you get a variety of people with a variety of intellectual levels and a variety of economic levels.

So one of the great experiences I had was dealing with retail and dealing with a variety of people face-to-face and learning you had to communicate and had to be proper and respectful, but yet in a convincing way. I had to convince somebody to buy Bumblebee tuna when they want Starkist because Bumblebee was more expensive. It’s a real knack, it’s a real challenge. You learn a lot by dealing with that kind of environment. So if I had anything to say, I’d say that the experience of dealing with part-time jobs, you can’t have enough internships, you can’t have enough part-time jobs, you can get various experience in dealing with people. You have to use the knowledge that you gain by dealing with people in your later life by getting people to work together as a team, by convincing them that you are transparent, convincing them that you are honest. Never, never, never lie.

Yourdon: Ahh.

Temares: Because you always get caught. And I have to say, if it’s not good enough to tell them the truth about it, it’s not good enough to do. You have to have a good reason to do something, and if you can’t tell them the right reason, then you did something wrong.

Yourdon: Interesting. Well, with that background, how did you make the transition into IT?

Temares: I came from the academic side in a sense because I was working at the university and I needed a computer to do my research. So I started on a 1620. I was a statistician. My major was statistics.

Yourdon: Oh, okay. Yeah, I saw that.

Temares: So I got into right away the SPSS programs, the SAS programs. I needed all that stuff to do my research, in terms of my field and then eventually what I did was I became a teacher, a part-time teacher, and then I became an administrator.

Yourdon: Oh, okay, interesting. All right, one last question for you and I think it’s perfect for you given where you are in your life right now—and that is, what’s next? You know, what comes after being a CIO?

Temares: Listen to this idea, Ed, how’s this? You know, it’s sort of like a Facebook mentality, but it’s a little different. I just got a site called matchmakerexecs.com. Matchmakerexecs.com really is my company. I’m going to do a company, I said. And what I’m going to do is what I have: the greatest attribute somebody has left is his former contacts. Or his current contacts.

Yourdon: That’s true.

Temares: And one of the things we do is we give away that information for free. All my contacts—you say, “Do you know somebody that’s a candidate for CIO?” Since I’m not in the position of being a headhunter, I’ll say, “You know, maybe Sam Jones is available. Let me give him a call and I’ll get back to you. I’ll give it to you.” But I don’t ask for any money for that.

Yourdon: Sure. Well, that’s what LinkedIn is all about.

Temares: Yeah, that’s what it’s all about. And so what I’m going to do is I’m going to, let’s see. I’ve got rainmaker.com, matchmaker.com; what I want to do is I want to be a rainmaker.

Yourdon: Oh, okay.

Temares: I want to do things to bring people together to get things done. I do that well, I know a lot of people, and those people know people. So what I want to do is if somebody wants to do something, they need a bunch of people to get involved, to develop something. I want to work with them to get the people involved developing, especially in the IT industry.

Yourdon: Seems to me that that’s something that a lot of CIOs could think about, for exactly the same reasons. They’ve got a lot of contacts and a lot of ideas about what skills might fit certain situations. Interesting.

Temares: Since I’ve retired, the most that people have … asked me is, “You know somebody in the industry? You know somebody from Cisco? You know somebody from Dell? You know somebody from … wherever? Is there any possibility you can introduce me to them? Because I’ve got this great invention, I’ve got this great idea, I’ve got this great project, and I need some help.”

Yourdon: Well, certainly among CIOs, I can get a sense that it’s a very clubby environment. You know, everybody knows everybody.

Temares: Yeah. That’s right.

Yourdon: Probably because they’ve got a lot of common problems to deal with and grapple with and it’s almost kind of a game of musical chairs also. People are obviously moving from one place to another because the shelf life of a CIO is only a couple of years long I think.

Temares: I’ll let you know in a year. Ten years ago, I would have said, “Give me three to five years and we’ll know whether we’ll do it.” Now if it ain’t made it in a year, we are unsuccessful.

Yourdon: I think that’s true. You know, that is one of the advantages of today’s environment. You can fail more quickly or at least get an idea if you’re going to succeed.

Temares: You’re right. It is whether you can know if you failed quickly or you are not. Now you know it very quickly.

Yourdon: And you can do it at almost no cost. That’s the other thing. You don’t have to go to a venture capitalist, which is huge.

Temares: You’re absolutely right.

Yourdon: That’s a big change, I think, from the ’70s and ’80s. The whole Web 2.0 industry has that characteristic. People are now financing it off their Mastercard, cash advances, and so on.

Temares: Yeah, you know, I agree with you. We’re talking about thousands rather than hundreds of thousands or more.

Yourdon: Exactly, exactly. So, all right, I agree. Listen, this has been fascinating. I could go on for hours and hours, but I want to keep us within our time limit

Temares: Well, I appreciate it, Ed.

Yourdon: Well, I appreciate your taking the time and it was very generous of you.