Jane Grove Fishkin, Chief Information Officer at Brookings, has been promoted to Vice President in charge of information technology for the Institution, incoming President Strobe Talbott announced today.
In announcing Fishkin’s appointment, Talbott said, “The communications revolution is one of the defining phenomena of our time. Therefore, Jane and her team are crucial both to the issues Brookings studies as well as the way in which we go about our work and communicate our findings to the world. I look to her and her team for leadership in keeping Brookings at the forefront of understanding and utilizing breakthroughs in technology.”
Fishkin, a technology specialist at Brookings for more than thirty years, has been involved since the earliest days in the Institution’s pioneering efforts to use information technology to both assist its scholars in their research and analysis of public policy issues, and to disseminate their work to a wide audience of policymakers, the news media, and interested members of the public.
Fishkin has been the head of Information Technology Services (ITS) at Brookings since 1988, becoming chief information officer in 1998. She served previously as assistant director of ITS and manager of Administrative Systems Analysis. During her career at Brookings, she has designed and implemented systems for all aspects of the Brookings operation, starting on a mainframe computer and moving through timesharing, PCs, and finally to today’s networked technologies and much-admired website.
Before coming to Brookings, Fishkin was a systems engineer with the IBM Corporation’s New York Banking Division, where she provided consulting and systems integration services to large financial institutions.
ITS provides round-the-clock computing and related services in support of Brookings research and administration, managing a local area network linking PCs to network resources, including the Internet and a wide variety of applications software.
In the aftermath of September 11, Fishkin has been involved in the Institution’s efforts to secure Brookings data and to plan for continuity of operations in the event of a terrorist attack or other emergency. She brought to this project her experience as chair of the Y2K Compliance Task Force, which successfully brought Brookings computer systems into the twenty-first century through Institution-wide inventory, assessment, conversion, testing, and implementation of compliance solutions.
Fishkin has served as vice president of the Computer Ethics Institute and has been a board member of the E-Gov Knowledge Management Conference, Data Warehousing Institute, Russian Cultural Center, and Paperfree Systems, Inc. She is also actively involved in the CIO Forum, Knowledge Management Forum, and is a frequent speaker on technology and knowledge management issues. She has consulted for numerous organizations, including Federal Realty Investment Trust, the Urban Institute, Public Broadcasting Services, and the Federal Judicial Center.
Fishkin earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from Pennsylvania State University, did graduate economics studies at New York University, and graduated from the Stanford University Executive Business Program.