Vice President for Information Technology and CIO at Radford University

September 19th, 2018, Mr. Danny M. Kemp spoke to our Enterprise Information Architecture class. Mr. Kemp is the Vice President for Information Technology and CIO at Radford University. He began by discussing his past experiences that led him to where he is now and what his responsibilities are. I am so glad that Dr. Pittges arranged Mr. Kemp as a guest speaker for us. Being an IT student myself, I am quite familiar with the rapid advancement of technologies over the past few decades and how it has been a challenge to the IT strategist to follow the latest trend and perform the business functionalities. We have the Division of Information Technology at Radford University, which is also responsible for fulfilling the technological needs of the faculty, students, and staffs. I think it must be really challenging to manage the entire division of IT. It was a great experience to hear from the man, Mr. Kemp, who is the person behind the scene for managing the Department of the IT. I was grateful when Mr. Kemp, who had been serving as a member of the President's executive cabinet, was sharing his experience. I was more surprised when he stated that he was responsible for providing vision, leadership, coordination and strategic planning for all the aspects of Information Technology at Radford University. It is quite amazing to learn how a person could manage several functionalities at the same time. I also learned that it is important to have a better understanding of technology trends that are applicable to client's business. I also realized that we need to keep a better articulation of tasks, deliverables, timelines and resources needed for any system. What I absorbed from Mr. Kemp's presentation is that we first need to develop some strategies and then only we should oversee the planning, evaluation, deployment and operation of the systems. The systems include areas such as IT infrastructure, enterprise systems, technology support services, web and mobile technologies, printing services, information security, electronic engineering and communication services, IT planning, policy and compliance, and IT project management. Every word he spoke felt like a word of wisdom to me. On the other hand, I was also quite happy to know his concerns regarding the security of the data of all the people directly and indirectly related to the university. It felt good when I knew that Duo – the two-factor authentication, which enhances security by adding a second layer of authentication to the login is also being implemented under his administration. I was personally very impressed by Mr. Kemp's presentation. He was very organized and very well informed about all the materials he was presenting. I strongly agree with Mr. Kemp's view on developing the strategies first for any business before trying to implement the planning and deployment. His presentation has affected me in a positive way. I am looking forward for the next guest speaker.