Pablo G. Molina: A Consensus-Builder and a Diplomat

Computerworld - At Georgetown University Law Center, CIO Pablo G. Molinas recipe for innovation includes a pinch of consensus-building plus a dash of ingenuity to get projects finished without breaking the budget.

Higher education is somewhat conservative in adopting technology, says Dimo Michailov, information security and privacy officer at the Washington school. [Molina] has been able to push new technologies and innovations and has negotiated that landscape very successfully.

One such innovation: implementing a digital audio capture system to replace the aging tape decks used in 40 classrooms to record lectures and events. The new system converts audio streams to digital format, stores them on an Apple server and makes the recordings available to qualified students by way of a Web application on the campus network. Fiber links and high-speed switches connect classrooms to the AV control room.

The custom-designed system can scale to support simultaneous video streams from all 40 classrooms  and came in at a fraction of the staggering cost of a turnkey system, with better scalability, says Molina, 38. To save money, his team substituted Macintosh Minis for multiplexers, built its own authentication infrastructure around Active Directory and developed a custom Web application in ColdFusion. He and one of our other team members were able to figure out how to use Mac Minis to do the actual analog-to-digital transcoding, saving tens of thousands of dollars in equipment costs, says Michailov.

We created a plan for using technology from scratch. We built our own applications, says Molina, who joined the university in 2000. We used lots of ingenuity and creative people who built their own tools.

The project required the IT group to build trust with vendors as well as faculty members, some of whom were wary of the initiative. It required significant policy work at the faculty level, says Molina. But it also forced the university to codify its unwritten policy on recording class lectures.

He builds consensus almost without you noticing, says Juan Escalada, director of systems, adding that Molina regularly visits every person on staff to ask for their opinions on current issues. Every time hes submitted a request for equipment, regardless of price, its gone through, Escalada adds.

In an earlier project, Molina got the idea of developing a Facebook-type application for the university after a student asked how to find other students from Missouri who might want to watch college basketball games together. Pablo was the inspiration behind the project, says Michailov, who helped complete the project over a summer. In fact, Molina says he came up with the idea and the name Facebook before the commercial Facebook service launched in 2004. Had I known, we would have registered the domain name, and I would be a millionaire, he says.