CIO Carolyn Brown enters Westminster

CIO Carolyn Brown has joined the University of Westminster as Director of Information Services following a successful career as CIO of Durham University. Brown was CIO in Durham for just under three years.

Brown said there are great opportunities “for delivering change” at the University of Westminster.

Brown will lead a review of University of Westminster Information Strategy “through a collaborative engagement with stakeholders across the University, drawing out business needs and identifying clearly where the University’s strategic goals will be supported by, and delivered through IT. This new Information Strategy will be underpinned by an updated multi-year programme of work,” the institute said.

During her career with Durham University Brown defined and delivered the most significant transformation the famous university has seen. Her £40 million project created new teams, central resources, centres of excellence that benefited tuition, embraced and delivered new teaching models where students receive materials ahead of lectures and she led the creation of a major high performance data centre for the institution.

“For the academics that are teaching, that means leading them to know what a 17-year-old expects, such as Twitter interaction, for example. There’s also lecture flipping, where you provide the information before the lecture so students can read and prepare. They have come up through schools that are strong on technology, so we have to have a virtual learning environment. There are also experiments with using video as a form of lecture feedback,” she said of the culture change and digital native student’s universities and their CIOs have to provide services for.

Brown described being a university CIO as: “Looking at what technology is available and how they might be used and to inspire the institution. It is exciting looking at how we can use technology to help teaching and collaboration.”

Prior to joining Durham University Brown was Group CIO at building materials wholesaler and retailer Travis Perkins and has held academic positions as a PhD academic in Informatics.