By Jennifer Zaino

The IT staff at The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania has a tricky agenda: to make sure tomorrow's executives and entrepreneurs — and their instructors — have access to the latest technology while at the same time creating new services and products that keep its academic and administrative communities thriving.

It's a tough job, to be sure, but Deirdre Woods, Associate Dean and CIO, Wharton Computing and Information Technology, wouldn't have it any other way. Driving thought leadership and creating and disseminating knowledge is the primary mission of one of the world's top institutions for business education, and everything she and her team do in IT supports that, she says. And it shows. The Wharton School continues to blaze trails of IT-supported efforts that extend from enhanced learning environments to revenue-driving research services to a burgeoning footprint in the new world of social media — all of which promotes and extends Wharton School's thought leadership reach and its brand.

The Wharton School's staff has a powerful weapon in its arsenal. Almost half of its IT staffers, 50 of the 120, work directly in the academic and administrative departments, working side-by- side with those employees. This helps the IT employees assigned to these positions, who work individually or in groups, to have a firsthand knowledge of what its charges need and want from a technology standpoint.

"If the IT people did not live in the departments and work together with faculty and staff each day, we might not have understood the nuances of their requirements or might not have even heard them," says Woods. This is something that other CIOs may understand all too well, says Jennifer Perrier-Knox, Senior Research Analyst at Info-Tech Research Group. "Too many IT departments are cut off from business needs and wants, and mutual understanding does not exist," she says. This is why IT is often viewed as a cost center, not a strategic enabler, and sometimes scrambles to keep up with business demand.

This internal perspective helped Woods and her team with a recent technology implementation: a major technology update of dozens of classrooms in the Jon M. Huntsman Hall, the school's primary interactive learning facility.

Faculty members were asking for specific functionality and talking about it with IT staff who worked side-by-side with them. This functionality included the ability to project different material from USB devices simultaneously to two projection screens, which involved the addition of new video switching equipment, and the ability to perform on-screen annotations from video panels embedded in podiums. The IT team also redesigned the video system, which involved ripping and replacing its middleware platform, to improve reliability and reduce the turnaround time required for faculty to post videos.