Vice President for Information Technology and Chief Information Officer Ellen Waite-Franzen has announced her retirement.

After a decade at the helm of the College’s Information Technology Services (ITS) division, Waite-Franzen said she’s ready to move on to the next phase of her life. She will finish work at the College early this summer.

“ITS certainly has evolved and developed to meet the changes in our tech world and the needs of Dartmouth,” Waite-Franzen wrote Thursday in an email to ITS staffers. “I will miss this dynamic organization. We have seen lots of change in the past 10 years. Just think, in 2006 the iPhone did not even exist, nor did many of the applications and technologies we use today.”

Provost Carolyn Dever thanked Waite-Franzen for her leadership of ITS. “We owe Ellen thanks for shepherding Dartmouth’s evolving technologies through a time of great change in higher education. Her work has touched every area of the College in unwavering service to our core mission of teaching and research,” says Dever.

Waite-Franzen came to Dartmouth from Brown University, where she spent four years as vice president for computing and information services. Before Brown, she worked as the chief information officer at the University of Richmond and, before that, as a library administrator and librarian at Loyola University, the University of Arizona, and Marquette University.

Her time working in libraries in the late 1970s coincided with the building of technology infrastructure that has led to today’s online indexes, catalogs, and online journals and books.

“I am proud of what we’ve accomplished over the last decade at Dartmouth,” says Waite-Franzen. “There hasn’t been an IT challenge or opportunity that our team has not been able to address.

“We’ve partnered with virtually every area on campus to either build or implement applications that have improved the operations, services, and communications of these areas.”

Those projects include redesign of the Dartmouth.edu website; work with faculty to introduce teaching applications in the classroom; selection of a new learning management system, Canvas, which is being used by all of Dartmouth’s schools; implementation of several data warehouses, the first of which, for the Advancement division, provides information used in fundraising; and implementing increased IT security and updating the infrastructure of the College’s IT systems.

“Ellen has led many important technological changes at Dartmouth, she has collaborated with colleagues across the institution, and she has provided thoughtful leadership and management of ITS,” says Rick Mills, executive vice president.

Joe Doucet, ITS chief technology officer and deputy chief information officer, will work as interim vice president for ITS while a search is conducted for a new vice president.