Associate Vice President for Academic and Enterprise IT Solutions

Special Instructions to Applicants:  DO NOT APPLY TO THE RICE WEBSITE FOR THIS POSITION. SEE THE INSTRUCTIONS IN THE NEXT PARAGRAPH TO COMPLETE YOUR APPLICATION.

Rice University has engaged Opus Partners to assist with this search.  Thomas Lapierre, Senior Associate, is leading the search. For additional information or to nominate qualified candidates, please email Thomas at thomas.lapierre@opuspartners.net. To be considered for the position, candidates must formally apply via Opus Partners and must provide a resume and a cover letter that addresses the responsibilities and qualifications of the AVP role. 

About Rice

Boasting a 300-acre tree-lined campus in Houston, Texas, Rice University is ranked among the nation’s top 20 universities by U.S. News & World Report. Rice has a 6-to-1 undergraduate student-to-faculty ratio and a residential college system, which supports students intellectually, emotionally, and culturally through social events, intramural sports, student plays, lecture series, courses, and student government. Developing close-knit, diverse college communities is a strong campus tradition, which is why Rice is highly ranked for best quality of life and best value among private universities.

Rice is also a wonderful place to work. Rice faculty, staff, and students share values that are essential to our success as a healthy community. Those values guide our decisions and behaviors and shape Rice’s culture. They come through in how we treat each other and the welcome we extend to our visitors. These values can be recalled simply by our name — RICE — Responsibility, Integrity, Community, and Excellence.

The Rice Experience is their excellence and their culture of care — the close interactions between faculty and students, the interdisciplinary connectedness of their fields of study, and the commitment and ownership to Rice and its community. Learn more about Rice University’s newly launched ten-year strategic plan, Momentous.  

Information Technology at Rice

The Office of Information Technology is the University’s central technology provider, supporting research, academic and administrative systems, and other core applications as well as voice, network, and computing infrastructure for the Rice community. OIT is an integral part of Rice and is committed to supporting the University's mission through innovative uses of technology and service excellence. The University’s Vice President for IT & Chief Information Officer leads OIT, reporting to the Executive Vice President for Operations, Finance, & Support.

In the 2023-2024 academic and fiscal year, building on extensive work to stabilize its implementation of the Oracle ERP platform, Rice completed a technology maturity assessment and developed a plan to reconceive its enterprise IT portfolio to align services and solutions by customer rather than by platform. The VP-CIO shared the vision for this new paradigm, dubbed the Service-Oriented Operating Model, in March 2024 and set in motion a wave of organizational changes called for in the implementation plan, along with a re-conception of IT governance that will create institutional scaffolding to sustain this new paradigm. 

The elements of this new vision for OIT come together in its IT Excellence portfolio, which establishes OIT as a strategic partner across the University by enhancing IT services, technology infrastructure, and operational processes, fostering data-informed decision-making, and driving innovation to elevate customer experience and support the success of divisions, departments, and units. A central premise of the IT Excellence portfolio is collaboration – among teams across OIT and with clients and partners across campus. The program is one component of the strategic plan of the Division of Operations, Finance & Support.   

As it moves through its reorganization and its appointment of new leaders and a replenished layer of senior management, OIT is organized in six areas, each headed by a direct report to the VP-CIO:

• Academic and Enterprise IT Solutions 
• Technology Platforms 
• Information Security
• Research Computing
• Finance and Administration