Jim Twetten is a man who has had a long history with technology and with Iowa State. In his 26 years working on campus, he has seen technology go from a simple Tetris game to a full-scale cloud-computing metropolis. Twetten sat down with us to discuss his history with ISU, as well as what we can expect to see in its technology-focused future.

What is your position, and what does that mean you do for the university?

I am the Director of Academic Technologies at Iowa State and I work in the Information Technology Services department. Basically that means that my area and my staff have oversight and can impact technology used in the teaching and learning process by faculty all across campus. That’s everything from Blackboard to classroom projectors.

What is your relationship history with the university?

[I have a] fairly lengthy history with the university. I am an alumni and I have two degrees from Iowa State. My first degree is in speech communication and I actually was a video producer when I graduated. That was from the telecommunicated arts program that doesn’t exist anymore, but the remnants of it have been folded into journalism. My second degree is again from ISU; it’s a masters in higher education administration. Not including my time as a student, I’ve been working here for 26 years; quite a while.

What’s your favorite/most rewarding part about what you do?

I get to work with a lot of great students and faculty. I just so enjoy the teaching and learning process and helping others derive more from both… it’s incredibly rewarding.

What is an example of your strangest occurrence while working here?

We had a video production crew from California come out to look at campus. I was the staff member who was supposed to accompany them. The crew was filming in the fall, and it must have been a day where a soybean harvest was going on near campus. In the middle of trying to get students to interview, a sudden plague of Japanese beetles descended over campus. That was pretty much the end of their shoot, because every interview was someone on camera swatting the bugs away. They asked if this happens all the time, but these are the same people who also asked me to turn off the Campanile because it was too loud.

What is ITS working on for the new school year that students can look forward to?

We have a new financial system that was a pretty significant undertaking. We also have an entirely new phone system on campus that is now all cloud-based; we’re one of the first universities in the country to move in that direction. We’re also planning on conducting a campus-wide needs assessment that addresses students as well as staff. We’ll ask for opinions/needs pertaining to services like Blackboard, classroom setups, and Internet access.

What is the greatest accomplishment and greatest hardship you’ve had to endure at your job?

I visit people who do the same job as I do, and we have national – and sometimes international – meetings with others about our positions and events relating to information technology. We got a group to form that has periodic symposia to discuss technology on campus, and that group still exists today. Additionally, EDUCAUSE, a professional IT organization, has recently asked me to sit on their committee for teaching and learning for the next three years.

Budget cuts are by far the hardest things to go through here, particularly when they lay off staff. They can happen for many reasons, but they always impact staff that have great jobs and are good at what they do. It’s a difficult thing to do.

If there was one thing about ITS at Iowa State you would change, what is it and why?

I’d like to change the perception that campus has on ITS. We’re frequently viewed as a utility: Those are the guys that run Blackboard; those are the guys that do email; those are the guys that keep our networks up. Those are all good and important, but there’s so much more that ITS does that is not broadly known. It’s difficult to get information out, in part because we’re an administrative group and not always in the flow of academic activities on campus. ITS currently has a very pivotal role in high-performance computing, and I’m pretty sure the majority of campus doesn’t even know that’s going on.

Twetten has been married for 28 years and has two kids, both of whom are Iowa State graduates. He loves baseball and will go out of his way to visit any field that happens to be nearby during his travels. Despite his “genetic disorder of being a Cubs fan,” Twetten always has a game on the television at his house. “I’m a fanatic,” he said.