Luker Leaving DoIT To Join Educom

Mark Luker

Mark Luker, director of the Division of Information Technology (DoIT) and chief information officer at UW–Madison, has accepted a position as vice president of Educom, a nonprofit consortium of 600 colleges and universities.

Making the announcement was UW–Madison Provost John Wiley.

Luker will join Educom in January as vice president for networking. Educom, headquartered in Washington, D.C., focuses on improving higher education through the use of information technology.

For the past year and a half, Luker has been on part-time leave from UW–Madison as program director of NSFNet, the network planning and policy-making branch of the National Science Foundation. That split will continue until the end of the year, when Tad Pinkerton, DoIT’s deputy chief information officer, will become acting director. Luker will retain ties to UW–Madison as a consultant on information technology issues.

Luker came to UW–Madison as DoIT director in 1992. He previously served as chief information officer at the University of Minnesota-Duluth and later as acting chief information officer for the University of Minnesota System.

Under Luker’s leadership, DoIT was transformed from six specialized services – academic computing, administrative computing, telephones, networking, video and printing – into one integrated organization. It also dramatically expanded its services to provide every student with e-mail, web access and improved computer labs.

“I’m very proud of what the DoIT staff has accomplished in the past five years,” said Luker. “They have created a first-rate service organization for all types of information technology. They also have demonstrated time and again that the organization can change direction in response to changing needs of the campus. Also, it has been a pleasure to work at a campus with the leadership, vision, and teamwork of UW–Madison.”

“Mark did a wonderful job of bringing together a collection of separate units that were all offering information technology services, making DoIT one of the most unified service units of any at our peer universities,” Wiley said. “We certainly will miss Mark, but we will continue to benefit from our connections with him and are happy that he again will be able to contribute at the national level.”

At Educom Luker will work with colleges and universities to help them take full advantage of emerging high-speed network technologies.

“We’re enthusiastic about Mark joining our staff,” said Robert Heterick, president of Educom. “His significant accomplishments at UW–Madison and his tenure with the National Science Foundation have put him squarely in the national networking policy arena.”

Educom is one of two complementary national consortia dealing with information technology on campuses. The other is CAUSE, which historically has focused more on planning and management for information technology in higher education, while Educom has emphasized academic applications. The two groups plan on creating a new organization combining both memberships by the end of this year as these issues and technologies converge through networking.