ADDITIONAL LINKS
and Chief Information Officer
What excites you most about joining the new law school administration?
IT directors very rarely have the opportunity to come into an organization where there are no legacy systems that they must support or migrate from. The opportunity to build a solid IT foundation from the start that will allow this school to grow is very exciting and challenging. But what I find the most exciting about joining this particular administration is that everyone is very dedicated to making this school a success and is willing to work very closely together to reach that goal.
What are you most excited about doing in the first years of the law school?
The first two years will be very busy for the Information Technology Services unit. I am excited about laying a solid IT foundation, getting data flowing between the law school and various other administrative units on campus, developing applications to help the administrative staff and students and providing many other technology-related solutions within the school.
Describe a favorite project from your career.
UCI's Graduate Division was using an old DOS-based application that needed a major overhaul. The application tracked various types of graduate financial support for students and helped disburse that support to the students. The process was very antiquated and tedious, involving a great deal of data entry by hand. Problems related to the student’s eligibility were identified and tracked using 3x5 note cards. I helped identify key areas where technology could assist and changed the process to leverage other data repositories so that manual data entry was no longer necessary. Identifying problems was completely automated so that staff could spend more time reviewing and addressing problems instead of sifting through 3x5 note cards to see if a problem even existed. This project was especially rewarding because I was able to eliminate a very tedious task and create a more streamlined process that gave the Graduate Division staff more time to focus on assisting and directly serving students and academic departments in a more efficient manner.
- University of California, Irvine, B.S., Information and Computer Science, 1993
- University of California, Irvine, Office of Research and Graduate Division, database and web development manager, 1997-2009
- University of California, Irvine, Division of Undergraduate Education, network administrator/database administrator, 1993-1997
- University of California, Irvine, School of Medicine, software developer, September-December 1993
- Even as a student programmer, Furukawa was helping streamline old systems and procedures. She developed and maintained a student services database system in the UCI Division of Undergraduate Education that restructured the process of keeping student records to avoid redundancy and increase efficiency.