Interview with Helen Norris, VP Technologies, Chapman.edu, Speaker at 4th Annual Global Big Data Conference August 30 - Sep 1 2 Posted on : Jul 26 - 2016

We feature speakers at 4th Annual Global Big Data Conference Aug 30 - Sep 1 2016 to catch up and find out what he or she is working on now and what's coming next. This week we're talking to Helen Norris, VP Technologies, Chapman.edu.

Interview with Helen Norris

Tell us about yourself and your background.
I am the Chief Information Officer at Chapman University, a private university in Southern California.  Prior to working at Chapman, I spent 17 years in the University of California and California State University systems, so Higher Ed IT is my sweet spot.  However, I spent several years in the private sector in a variety of industries including advertising and consumer products. I like to think that I have a unique blend of senior operational management skills and technology vision used to develop and implement organizational IT strategy, and I am proud of my collaborative and communication skills.

Originally from Ireland, I hold a Bachelor's degree in Mathematics from Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland, and a Master's degree in Computer Resource Management and Business Administration from Webster University in St. Louis.  I’m also a certified PMP.

What have you been working on recently?
One of our current major initiatives is a business intelligence project to provide dashboards to our Deans and Chairs.  Historically, when they’ve needed data, they’ve called someone, or had an extract from a central system feeding something local.  We want to provide a dashboard allowing them to see the answers to some of the most-asked questions – how many more sections of x do I need?  How many students will be in a certain program this Fall? –  to give them faster access to more consistent data.

Tell me about the right tool you used recently to solve customer problem?
Recently we solved a problem for an end user by making something more visible within our portal.  But the tool that really solved the problem was communication and outreach.  We heard the customer say they needed something.  We had a deeper conversation with them and found the real issue, and worked to get to that.  Then we communicated with them through testing the solution – not just our testing, *their* testing – to make sure it did what they needed it to do.

What are some of the best takeaways that the attendees can have from your Lessons Learned From Executing IT Projects talk?
I hope that people can learn from some of my mistakes on projects and avoid making them themselves!   So I’ll speak pretty openly about mistakes I’ve made.  But I’ll also talk about techniques that have worked for me to keep projects on task, or to deal with the unavoidable issues that arise.