Clemson computing chief profiled in Computerworld magazine

Published: June 22, 2010

Jim Bottum image by: Clemson University

CLEMSON — Jim Bottum, chief information officer and vice provost for Computing and Information Technology at Clemson University, is featured in Computerworld magazine for his indirect career path to his high-tech career.

Bottum is one of four individuals profiled in the article “High-tech careers: CIOs who took an alternate route to the top.” 

According to the article, “instead of taking the traditional path to a C-level tech position — a computer science or engineering degree, followed by years of help-desk work, programming and project management — these tech leaders took an alternative route to the top IT spot.”

After a couple of years as an Air Force forward air controller in Vietnam, Bottum earned his bachelor's degree in government at Florida State University and was moving on to a law degree when on a whim he was persuaded by a friend to take a government entrance exam, according to the Computerworld article. The test landed him a government management internship at the National Science Foundation, which led to a 10-year career in program management, working on some of the first large-scale supercomputing facilities and on NSFnet, a precursor to commercial Internet.

Bottum came to Clemson in 2006 after serving as Purdue University's first chief information officer. Since his arrival, Clemson has established the state’s first regional optical network (CLight) connecting Clemson to Internet2 and the National Lambda Rail at no cost to the university. With Bottum’s direction, Clemson also has climbed from outside the top 500 ranking of computational sites into the top 50. Bottum is chairman of the National Science Foundation’s Advisory Committee on Cyberinfrastructure, and in 2008 he was elected to the Internet2 board of trustees.

The Computerworld article is at http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9177813/High_tech_careers_CIOs_who_took_an_alternative_route_to_the_top?taxonomyId=14&pageNumber=1.

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