University of Montana Leadership

Energetic IT leader offering 11+ years’ in higher education with experience in planning, implementing and supporting existing and next-generation enterprise solutions. Utilize in-depth hardware and software expertise to create strategic direction, pioneer technological advances and facilitate strategic decision-making for enterprise-wide technology-related IT infrastructure. Overlook operational and strategic aspects of data centers and hosting services, including optimizing processes and technology while ensuring highly available service offerings to the University.

As a technology leader, I believe in cultivating a culture of collaboration and mutual support between various entities within Central IT and other IT organizations to increase and elevate service to the University to enhance student experiences and advance student success. I have been heavily involved in higher education IT for the last seven years working in IT at the University of Montana both within University IT and for a distributed IT unit. I believe that my unique background within higher education, along with a balanced educational experience uniquely prepares me for a position in leadership within Higher Education.

I believe in affording my team ownership of their work. This empowerment model has been key to my success in motivating others to work cooperatively to meet goals for our IT department and the University as well. I strongly believe that in IT we should work together with research computing and other distributed IT groups to move ideas to solutions while maintaining a forward-thinking attitude. In the end, we should be determining our success based on the success of our staff, faculty, researchers, and most importantly, our students.

Jonathan Neff is a Director of College Information Technology at UNIVERSITY OF MONTANA and Acting Chief Information Security Officer at UNIVERSITY OF MONTANA and is based in Missoula, Montana. He has worked as Operations Manager at Modwest, Systems Administrator at Missoula City-County Health Department, and IT Manager & Forensic Analyst at LMG Security. Jonathan attended University of California - UC Berkeley between 1992 and 1994.