Scotia Roopnarine has joined ITS Infrastructure & Operations as the Director of Applications. He will oversee PeopleSoft Administration, Business Process Automation, Middleware Services, Linux Administration and Database Administration teams – about 32 people.
Roopnarine comes from Ellucian, a higher ed technology and cloud services provider. At Ellucian, he oversaw cloud infrastructure operations for more than 50 colleges and universities. He received his bachelor’s degree in biological sciences from the University of Alberta and master’s in computer science from Wayne State University in Michigan.
Roopnarine hopes to bring his experience of managing information technology using the IT service management (ITSM) framework to his new role at UNC-Chapel Hill. He has expertise managing higher ed institutions’ enterprise resource planning (ERP) business applications in Amazon Web Services cloud infrastructure. In this work, he’s used ITIL best practices for areas of workload, incident/problem and change management for aligning IT services with campus needs. ITIL is a leading framework for best practices for delivering IT support services.
“Having been part of many complex IT projects and implementations, I have had the opportunity to view things from different vantage points where I identify risks, analyze what works and how to bring about impactful change,” Roopnarine said.
Appreciates face-to-face
With Ellucian’s headquarters in Virginia and its technology center in Orlando, Roopnarine often traveled from his home in Chapel Hill to these locations and to meetings with the global teams he managed in Bangalore, India. He and his wife, who also works for Carolina, have two children. He is happy to be able to stay closer to home and work closely with the UNC-Chapel Hill campus community.
“Something gets taken away in the process of a video call,” he said. “There are a lot of tangibles that go into working in an environment where we can meet our clients and stakeholders face to face on a regular basis. I’m eager to focus on building relationships with the campus community while continuing the excellence of IT service deliverables.”
Encourages teamwork
Roopnarine hopes to bring his philosophy of teamwork to Infrastructure & Operations. He believes in having and building a strong culture of teamwork and the ability to cultivate individual strengths and opportunities for growth.
“To be successful,” he said, “we need to have strength in teams and promote individual members to be their best, and we can do that through thoughtful leadership and guidance. I am happy to be part of the Carolina community and look forward to working with everyone.”