CERN has appointed a CIO for the first time, with the head of the information technology department Enrica Porcari stepping up into the role.
The confirmation of the creation of the chief information officer position came at the physics research org’s council meeting last week, which signed off on the management structure proposed by director general designate Mark Thomson back in April.
At the time, Thomson proposed a “new non-departmental role of Chief Information Officer (CIO), reporting directly to the Director-General.”
He said this “strongly aligns with the recommendations from the Audit Committee concerning cross-organisational authority for governance of IT-related activities.”
The remit was further fleshed out last week, with Thomson writing that the CIO was “Responsible for steering the organization’s information technology strategy, governance and policy.”
He added, “This will encompass areas such as cybersecurity, data privacy and cross-organisational initiatives such as artificial intelligence (AI) and relevant external partnerships.”
Porcari has headed up the information technology department at CERN for four years, and was previously CIO and technology director for the World Food Programme.
Her CV also includes heading up technology at CGIAR, formerly the Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research.
CERN is arguably most famous as the birthplace of the worldwide web, when Tim Berners-Lee “conceived and developed [it] to meet the demand for automated information-sharing between scientists in universities and institutes around the world.”
How much data?
However, the research centre is a massive driver of innovation across the board, not least when it comes to scientific computing, and developing the infrastructure to capture the vast amounts of information its experiments produce.
The most up to date figures for the CERN data centre show it running 12,000 servers, with 360,000 cores, and a quarter of a million disks, 189 tape drives, and 309 routers.
According to CERN, its data centre “stores more than 30 petabytes of data per year from the LHC experiments” and “over 100 petabytes of data are permanently archived, on tape.”
On LinkedIn, over the weekend, Porcari wrote, “The creation of the CIO role highlights the critical importance of computing and digital strategy to CERN’s mission. It’s a recognition of the outstanding work and dedication of so many across the organization.”
She added, “As I transition into this new role in January, I remain committed to supporting CERN’s evolution in digital governance—not through control, but through alignment, inclusiveness, and forward-looking leadership.”
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