John Borwick
This page is no longer maintained; if you’d like to know more about John please check out his EDUCAUSE profile or LinkedIn profile.
John Borwick is founder and manager of Higher Education IT Management. His mission is to make people’s lives easier by improving how higher education IT is managed.
He’s worked in higher education for over 10 years–principally at Wake Forest University from 2003 to 2012, where he started as a systems administrator and eventually ended as director of the portfolio management office (a team of 11, including both service management and project management).
At Wake, John
- built Wake Forest’s IT change management process,
- built the “process infrastructure” and governing document structure for all IT processes,
- managed and was champion for a major ITSM tool upgrade,
- helped restructure and retool the Service Desk and the incident management process,
- taught ITIL® Foundations to over 70 people with a 100% passing rate,
- worked with the CIO to rebuild the campus IT governance structures,
- worked with the project managers to rebuild the project management methodology–everything from building project charters to lessons learned to project templates and resource management, culminating in the PMP® certification of all project managers.
John has the ITIL® Expert, PMP®, and CGEIT® certificates. In school at NC State University, John was a PBK Benjamin Franklin Scholar majoring in Computer Science (B.S.) and English (B.A.).
John served on the itSMF Higher Education SIG Board for several years and was President from 2011-2012.
Recent Presentations and Articles
- “Riding the Maturity Model Wave.” Mar 2013 itSMF Higher Education SIG Presentation. Focused on continual improvement.
- “Problems are Treasures: Building ITIL Problem Management and a Problem-Solving Culture” with Kriss Dinkins from Wake Forest University. May 2013 EDUCAUSE Southeast Regional Conference presentation.
- “Past, Present, and Future of Change Management.” June 2013 invited talk for BrightTALK’s Change Management summit.
- “IT Project Management: The Process of Last Resort.” June 2013 EDUCAUSE Project Constituent Group presentation.
- “ITIL Demand Management: why August is a bad time for a presentation.” August 2013 EDUCAUSE ITIL Constituent Group presentation.
- “The Service Desk as a Strategic Function.” August 2013 invited talk for BrightTALK’s Service Desk summit.
- “Effective Organizational Change in Higher Education.” January 2014 invited article for The EvoLLLution.
- “People managers in IT service change management.” February 2014 invited talk for BrightTalk’s Change and Release Management summit.
- “Connecting ITSM to IT Governance.” March 2014 EDUCAUSE ITIL Constituent Group presentation.
- “Virginia Tech University Libraries’ Iterative IT Service Management Implementation.” March 2015 CampusTechnology presentation.