"Art, not technology, is a museum’s core competency," he states dryly. In his view, museums should use technology to make art accessible to everyone. "IT is an enabler, something we can use to bring people and art closer together. Can a museum exist without technology? Sure, most of them have done it for years. But how can a museum use technology to play more of a role in people’s lives? That is the question I’m here to solve."

The CIO in His Studio

Steinbach’s basement office at the CMA is a museum in and of itself; he displays more gadgets and gizmos than a child obsessed with Pokemon. There’s a pair of TOMY hoppers, a model 1964 Chrysler Turbine, a plastic pinball machine and, of course, some Star Wars figurines. These items have followed Steinbach everywhere in the past decade, and as recently as last September, they lined his shelves at the Guggenheim, where he was hired in 1996 after two years as the National League of Nursing’s vice president for IT.

Back then, the Guggenheim’s IT infrastructure consisted of disparate local area networks running off DOS computers. As Steinbach remembers today, the institution was so behind the times that its "fax machines didn’t even work right." During the next three years, he converted the museum from DOS to Windows, consolidated a half-dozen LANs into a wide-area network and partnered with Novell to establish a virtual private network that bridged the Guggenheim with its sister institution in Bilbao, Spain.

Across the industry, these accomplishments did not go unnoticed. In the spring of 1999, CMA officials approached Steinbach to come to work for them. The museum had never employed a CIO, but after rewriting their strategic goals that winter, museum officials and other members of the board of directors were eager to establish the position for the future. According to Assistant Director Stephanie Stebich, museum officials knew exactly what they wanted their CIO to do, and they knew they wanted Steinbach to do it.

"We decided technology is a tool and a vehicle for us, that it wasn’t just about bits and bytes, but instead about getting our message out and bringing people closer to art," Stebich explains. "In order to do that, in order to do it right, we needed an equal partner who would be working on technology full time. We needed Len."

Steinbach was flattered but skeptical at first. Despite the museum’s reputation as one of the foremost encyclopedic institutions in the world, he questioned the organization’s commitment to technology and wondered aloud whether he, a die-hard New Yorker, could "stomach" a move to Cleveland. Finally, after Stebich and her colleagues institutionalized the museum’s goal "to become a national leader in the use of new and emerging technologies," Steinbach climbed aboard. On a bright but chilly day last September, he packed up his trinkets and moved from Forest Hills, N.Y., to Cleveland Heights, Ohio. It was time to start anew.