“Historically, we had hundreds of new hires every year, and all of those were handled manually,” said Damarie Cardona-Reilly, senior director of human resources information systems. “This new system takes away all of the tedious manual effort involved in both the front and back ends. Now applicants have a much more streamlined way of getting access to open positions and being able to apply for them.” 

The move to modernize the University’s hiring system began in 2019, said Cardona-Reilly.

“IT has always been in the forefront of finding new technology and better ways of integrating different systems. A few years ago, their strategy for system integrations transitioned from flat file to Ethos, and the Office of Human Resources decided to leverage the Ethos integration for our applicant tracking system implementation,” she said.

Throughout the pandemic, IT and the Office of Human Resources worked together to integrate data from two platforms, Ellucian Ethos and PeopleAdmin, in order to create an online platform where prospective talent could easily apply to jobs and new hires could “seamlessly” enter the University system, said Cardona-Reilly. 

“In the past, applicants used to apply for positions by completing a paper application. When hired, they would complete paper onboarding forms that included personal information. We also had a team that manually input information for personal, employee, and job records. Now all of that is seamless. Instead of filling out paperwork and applying for a position manually, it’s all automated. This increases transparency, streamlines the process, and helps us to better secure personal and confidential information,” said Cardona-Reilly.

Thanks to the new online system, Fordham has been able to expand its reach to prospective hires, said Cardona-Reilly. From 2020 to 2021, nearly 1,000 applications were received for 60 open positions. In addition, 50% of recent hires are coming through this new award-winning system, while the other half are still coming through the older system, which is transitioning to the updated version.

The $25,000 grant was awarded to Fordham in April, in recognition of the University’s ability to use technology to operate more efficiently and to offer a better employee experience. The grant will be used to further enhance technology and streamlining processes at Fordham, said Cardona-Reilly.

“This integration was a huge effort by many members within HR and IT, and this could not have been achieved without the support of Fordham’s leadership. This is also the first time that HR has received an award in technology,” Cardona-Reilly said. “To see that our colleagues at Ellucian and other schools understand and appreciate the effort that was involved in that—that’s important to us.”

How His Fordham Career Began
“I started at Fordham in October 2007. I graduated from Fordham Prep in 1996, so this was my return to campus. I went to NYU for undergrad; got my bachelor’s in political science there, and then worked many jobs, including as a bouncer for three years at an Irish bar.”

His First Job on Campus
“I came to Fordham as a senior systems engineer. I was the guy in the back closet, rebooting the servers and firewalls, never seeing people or the light of day. Great job, great people who I still work with, but after doing that for seven years, I felt like there were natural skillsets I had that weren’t being used. There was an opportunity to move to another IT department where I would be doing technology training and development.”

What He Does Now
“Wherever Fordham or one of our business partners has a new service or product, I’m one of the people who builds the bridge between it and what people currently do. I help design the training, documentation, and communication.”

It’s a Small World
Byer was born in White Plains and grew up in Hartsdale. “When I started working here, I kept looking at my colleague,  Richard Eberhardt, in meetings and thinking, ‘Your last name is so familiar, where do I know you from?’ Couldn’t figure it out. Six months later, I go, ‘Oh my goodness, we were in Boy Scouts together.’ I’ve been on camping trips with him, I’ve been in his house, his mom has given me cookies. Now he’s my supervisor”

The Best Part of the Job
“I get to work with people outside of IT way more than I ever did before. A standard day for me is typically a meeting with HR, a meeting with finance or accounts payable, or with the provost. In the last three years, I have built strong relationships with people all over the university.”

The Biggest Challenge
“No one likes change, and I’m typically the person who’s coming in as the change agent. The challenge is trying to figure out what kind of change they do not like. Do you not like the change I’m bringing, the way we’re bringing it, the change I represent or do you not like me? There’s a big sociological, psychological component to my job, in terms of listening to people and understanding where their anxieties lie.”

One Family Supporting Another
Five years ago, Byer and his wife Clarissa had their first child, Isaac. He was born with a congenital condition called giant omphalocele, in which his intestinal organs were in an umbilical sack outside of his torso in utero. Isaac spent the first 14 months of his life in various hospitals, mostly in the New York-Presbyterian intensive care unit.

Byer said his IT colleagues went above and beyond any of his expectations to help them get through an unimaginably stressful time.

“When people talk about Fordham being a family, I can’t think of a better example than the way my department supported me through this really traumatic experience.”

Isaac still faces significant challenges, and recently underwent a nine-hour operation in July that required a 25-day stay at the hospital during the pandemic. Byer said his gross and fine motor skills are very delayed, but cognitively, he’s doing great. The couple had a second child, Austen, who turned 2 in February.

Byer said Isaac’s illness has “brought me and my wife closer together,” and has guided us through some difficult “life and death” conversations. He also said he relies on his belief system to help him through the tough times.

“I’ve been practicing Buddhism since 2003, and that has been incredibly helpful in trying to make some kind of sense and find some kind of balance.”

“I believe that Mr. Padmanabhan’s creativity, collaborative leadership style and extensive experience in multiple industries, countries, and cultures are ideally suited for dealing with the many challenges presented to higher educational institutions by the COVID-19 pandemic,” Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham, wrote in an email to the University community. 

On Sept. 25, Padmanabhan was appointed to his new position, succeeding Shaya Phillips, who served as interim CIO for the past seven months. In a national search that vetted more than 50 professionals, Padmanabhan stood out for his “innovative thinking; multi-industry, global technology leadership experience; and accomplishments enabling transformation through technology,” said  Father McShane. 

Padmanabhan comes to Fordham with an extensive background in academic technology. He most recently served as chief technology officer at Whittle School & Studios, a global institution for students aged 3 to 18, where he led an initiative to develop technology strategies to support a multi-site, multinational K-12 education system in China and the U.S. Before working at Whittle, Padmnabhan served as the senior vice president and CIO for the New School, where he led a 120-member team and supported academia, research, and administrative computing for five years. He has also served as CIO for Everonn Education’s higher education business unit in India, the Shiv Nadar Foundation, the Stern School of Business at New York University, and Hunter College of the City University of New York. He earned an MBA from the Stern School of Business, a master’s degree in computer science from Louisiana State University, and a bachelor’s degree in engineering from Madras University, one of the oldest universities in India. 

In his first week at Fordham, Padmanabhan reflected on what brought him to the University. 

“I was looking at the CUSP strategy, and there were multiple things that really drew me into applying for the position—things like reimagining student-centered teaching and learning, looking at how the University deepens its relationship with New York City, from extending Fordham’s global engagement to focusing on research,” said Padmanabhan, who has worked at multiple institutions in New York City over the past two decades. “Many of those things spoke to me. And it looked like the University is really rethinking and moving to the next level.”

At Fordham, Padmanabhan will be addressing technology issues that the University will face in the years ahead. In the midst of a pandemic, Padmanabhan said he looks forward to figuring out how technology can enhance teaching, learning, and working at Fordham, while maintaining interpersonal and social ties. 

“Everything has changed and moved to a new normal. Many things are now being done remotely, and technology plays a significant part in making this happen,” said Padmanabhan. “One of the big things for me is to make sure we live up to our standards, whether it’s on campus or off campus … I’m really looking forward to reimagining teaching and learning and various University services for the new normal as we come out of the pandemic, using current and emerging technologies, and making sure that we provide the best service across the community.”

You may know how to use technology—for instance, which buttons to push—but do you ever stop and think about how you use technology?

Mark Silver, Ph.D., certainly does. Silver, an associate professor of information systems in the Schools of Business, studies the design of information technology (IT) systems and the consequences of how people use them. He argues that these outcomes, good and bad, intended and not, follow from the interaction of people and organizations with the design features of the technology.

“Why do we build systems? Why do we acquire systems? And why do we use systems, whether we are talking about big systems or iPhones? Ultimately we are trying to accomplish some objective,” he said. “And, at the same time, we want to do so while avoiding any negative side effects.”

Silver developed what he describes as “a lens for looking at IT.” He breaks down the topic into three pieces: the design of systems; the people who use the systems; and the consequences of the interactions between them. When it comes to systems design, he proposed two attributes that are vital to understanding the consequences of information technology: system restrictiveness and decisional guidance.

“Everyone thinks of IT as being enabling, but anytime you rely on a technology, that system also restricts and limits you,” he said. Recognizing the system’s restrictiveness may be as important, or more important, than what it enables.
The simplest example of a restriction is technology’s dependence on electricity; when power fails, a system is no longer useful. In the workplace, a company that wants to enforce hierarchy might also make it difficult for employees to e-mail someone who is five levels above them in seniority. Restrictions also arise when a developer omits a feature in order to contain costs.

Restrictions are not inherently good or bad, but they are usually consequential. When Silver started paying his credit card bill online, his bank gave him two options: pay the minimum amount due, or any amount he wanted. It did not give him the choice to simply pay the full balance back; to do that, he had to figure out the amount on his own.

“They don’t want you to pay the maximum, so I believe they deliberately make it not impossible, but difficult—with more restrictions—for me to do what I want,” he said. “When you start to look at systems in this manner, you see lots of examples where someone has designed a system to make sure you do it their way and not your way. As a consumer, you probably want to be aware of that.”

Notwithstanding the system’s restrictions on what you can do, there is the question of how the technology influences what you actually do, which Silver terms “decisional guidance.” How, for instance, do you choose a camera from Amazon.com? For that matter, how did you choose to look for a camera there in the first place?

“Ultimately there are lots of ways to make this decision and lots of parameters one has to enter. To what extent does the system deliberately or inadvertently guide the choices you make?” he asked. “Each of these attributes—restrictiveness and guidance—represents a design choice, and they are not independent of each other. But it is not clear that the vendors and designers themselves are always consciously thinking about these issues.”

Silver’s goal is to get the public to think more about the relationship between users, technology, and consequences so that people and organizations can leverage the benefits while avoiding the pitfalls of IT. Focusing on the concept of affordances, adapted from the field of ecological psychology, is one way to do that. Affordances are the possibilities for goal-oriented action afforded by an object to a specified group of users. For example, a set of stairs might be easily climbed by some people but not others; it therefore affords climbability to some, but not everyone.

This idea was the focus of “A Foundation for the Study of IT Effects: A New Look at DeSanctis and Poole’s Concepts of Structural Features and Spirit,” which Silver co-wrote with M. Lynne Markus in 2008 for the Journal of the Association for Information Systems. The article won two best-paper prizes from industry professionals.

“The affordance view helps explain why different users of IT may experience different consequences,” he said. “In business, collaboration technologies that enable groups to work together to develop corporate strategy might afford a group nothing if its leader is autocratic. On the other hand, a group that is focused on consensus and equality could be afforded much power by such tools while collaborating and arriving at a decision.”

Silver presented his ideas on “How to Think about IT” as the keynote speaker at the Sixth Annual ILAIS conference in Israel in 2012. His “IT lens” is reflected in “The IT Interaction Model,” an approach he co-authored for teaching IT to MBA students, and in a set of fundamental principles that he uses to structure his undergraduate courses.

“Students want to learn the latest and greatest technology, but it’s gone by the time they graduate,” he said. “My goal is to teach them what is more fundamental and what will be more long lasting.”