Mark Cianca

Mark Cianca has over 35 years of experience as a higher education leader, with an extensive portfolio of accomplishments in information technology, business transformation initiatives, enterprise resource planning deployments, strategic planning and leadership development.

About Mark

Successful transformation requires three key design elements — meaningful stakeholder engagement, well-crafted and visible governance, and above all, executive support and engagement. ”

Mark brings 35 years of experience in higher education to guide clients through strategy and technology transformations that align people, processes and technology with the institution’s mission to better serve students. He has led large business transformation initiatives as well as enterprise resource planning (ERP) and cloud financial implementations.

Throughout his career, Mark has:

• Led the largest business transformation initiative at a public research university system, implementing a single payroll, benefits and human resources solution across 235,000 employees, which helped standardize data, improve compliance, and capture efficiencies and cost savings.
• Developed strategy and business cases for a public research university system to undertake a number of cloud initiatives covering software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offerings.
• Led an IT transformation initiative for a large public Tier 1 research university to consolidate 10 campus IT organizations into a single IT unit supporting instructional and research IT, ERP applications, other administrative computing functions and desktop support. The initiative reduced IT delivery costs, increased service delivery satisfaction, and enabled IT to become a more strategic function.
• Completed multiple initiatives for a large public research university to implement student and finance ERP applications and transition from on-premise to cloud-based ERP applications, reducing operating cost and risk.

Before Huron, Mark served the University of California (UC) for over 35 years in leadership roles, including interim vice president and chief information officer (CIO). In the CIO role, he was responsible for championing the work of over 8,000 information technology professionals across all UC locations.

Mark earned his Bachelor of Arts from Carroll College and an information systems management certificate from the UC Santa Cruz Silicon Valley Extension.