Rutt initially earned $1.85 per hour as a trainee in underwriting. Three years later – at age 25 – he was named head of the automobile underwriting department, succeeding his mentor, a pastor who was transitioning to full-time ministry work.

Suddenly, Rutt was managing a department of about a dozen people, developing underwriting procedures for no-fault automobile insurance. “The job of an underwriter is to find people you don’t want to cover with insurance and to exclude them,” he now says wryly, by way of explaining why he decided not to make a career out of the position as his predecessor had done.

Goodville did, however, expose him to the workings and possibilities of computers – the company had an IBM mainframe that processed data that Rutt’s underwriters needed.

Next life stage: one of six owners and president of an office supply and furniture business. Through the 1980s, this new company, The Office Works, added a personal computers sales division and grew to have seven retail outlets in Pennsylvania and North Carolina.

Rutt found himself writing the software code that his company needed for inventory control, accounts receivable, and service-work orders. He worked on a mini-computer that was one of the first to challenge the dominance of IBM mainframe computers for small businesses.

Ironically, the only class Rutt had ever dropped at EMU was Fortran taught byĚýJoe Mast, because the challenging class didn’t seem worth it when Rutt already had a full courseload. As a result, Rutt had to learn about computer technology the hard way – on the job.

Rutt and his partners sold their computer division to a national chain in 1990. Almost immediately, Rutt was recruited to be systems manager for a health maintenance organization affiliated with Blue Shield of Pennsylvania. There he supervised a small group of employees responsible for keeping three high-availability, multi-million dollar computer systems running. There, too, he earned the highest annual income of his lifetime.

That work continued untilĚýBeryl Brubaker, then vice-president of enrollment at EMU, contacted him to consider the role of information systems director at EMU, where Rutt’s two children were then undergrads. Feeling called, Rutt took a substantial pay cut to come to a place in December 1999 where stability was needed – he would be the third IS director in as many years.

The changes in EMU’s information systems since 1999 have been extensive. Computer technology now claims about 5% of EMU’s total budget. Key markers: the staff nearly doubled in size under Rutt’s leadership; about every seven years, the core networking infrastructure has been replaced; its student information system was converted in 2007-09 to a new operating platform.

In May 2014, Rutt handed over his departmental leadership to someone he had trained,ĚýBen Beachy ’02Ěýand stepped into a pre-retirement role of doing project management and communications facilitation for EMU’s building renovations.

Rutt is married toĚýGloria Short RuttĚý’72, a schoolteacher for much of their married life. Their children areĚýEric Rutt ’01Ěý˛š˛ÔťĺĚýMegan Rutt Rosenwink ’02.

This is a man who lived with his wife in a mud hut for two years –Ěýso remote in the eastern Congo that they needed to fly there in a small plane over a tree canopy as thick as broccoli heads packed together.

This is a man who got into a grad program at Duke University almost immediately after applying – far past any published deadlines, just a month before classes began. An intellectually provocative paper won him admission.

This is a man who made the world-renowned Rosetta Stone language-learning system possible through his computer know-how and vision.

The life ofĚýJohn Fairfield ’70Ěýcould read like novel, if he chose to write it up.

Fairfield’s introduction to computers occurred during his 1968-69 year abroad at 400-year-old University of Marburg, where he was asked to use Fortran to do a linguistic analysis of Italian poetry. He would walk into Marburg’s computer center – with its massive mainframe attended by people in white lab coats –Ěýand hand in his punch cards for processing, then later retrieve reams of resulting printouts.

Back at Eastern Mennonite College in 1969-70, Fairfield presented his eclectic array of coursework to the dean, Ira Miller, and asked, “How do I graduate?” Fairfield didn’t have enough chemistry courses to be a chemistry major – he had tested out of some of them. He knew German fluently, but needed another language to be a language major (French would be learned the following year). So he and Miller settled on “natural science” as his major.

Jumping to Duke University, Fairfield continued to be an unorthodox student while working full-time. (He and wifeĚýKathryn Stoltzfus ’70, who eventually became a Duke law student, had two children while they were both in grad school.) Duke’s fledgling computer science program relied heavily on faculty drawn from other fields – as was common during the birthing stage of computer academia. No Duke professor was involved in machine perception, the topic Fairfield decided to pursue, with or without their support.

“They kept saying, ‘Why don’t you do this or that?’ And I kept doing what interested me,” recalls Fairfield. “They didn’t know how to evaluate my work.”

Upon completing his not-understood dissertation, Fairfield had no assurance that the Duke faculty was going to grant him his PhD. He sent it to David Waltz, a renowned computer vision pioneer then at the University of Illinois, Urbana -Champaign, who grasped its importance. Waltz sent word back to Duke that he had granted PhDs for much less than what he saw in Fairfield’s work, and Fairfield got his doctorate.

Next came faculty appointments at James Madison University, where Fairfield remained for nearly 20 years, teaching all kinds of computer science courses, but especially relishing the 400-level research courses.

In 1992, Fairfield added his energy and talents to those of brother-in-lawsĚýAllen ’65 and Eugene ’72 Stoltzfus, plus Greg Keim, to give birth to a worldwide business now known simply as Rosetta Stone.

They built a team which created and integrated three forms of software: human interface code for language learning via browsers; speech recognition code; and code running the servers on the backend. As vice president of research and development Fairfield was a hands-on boss. “There were more keystrokes of mine in the software we were selling than anyone else’s.”

Fairfield retired in 2006 when the company was sold to financial investors. Fairfield then shifted his focus to envisioning and establishing EMU’s Center for Interfaith Engagement, where he remains active as a research fellow. He is the author ofĚýThe Healer Messiah: Turning Enemies Into Trustworthy OpponentsĚý(April 2014, available atĚýrruuaacchh.org).

The employees –ĚýDwight Wyse ‘68, the school’s director of business affairs, andĚýMark Shank, director of computer services − cobbled together a company they called Computer Management and Development Services (CMDS). Their first client was EMU; their first employee wasĚýHarvey Mast ‘80.

Mast, who shared with another student the distinction of being EMU’s first computer majors, recalls one of his first computer classes: “We built a very simple computer out of a Heathkit package and inputted information with an eight-button keyboard, one 8-bit character at a time.”

CMDS soon moved to a farmhouse on Virginia Avenue, which was eventually torn down to make room for the expansion of Virginia Mennonite Retirement Community (VMRC). In 1983 CMDS moved to a house next to Miller Cabinet Shop at the southwest edge of town and in 1986 to an office building on Virginia Avenue north of VMRC.

The company grew to 160 employees, providing software and services to nearly 300 customers in 45 states. CMDS became one of the nation’s leading developers of administrative software for colleges and universities, serving the offices of admissions, registration, alumni, development, financial aid and accounting. Its best-known software was TEAMS.

In 1999 CMDS built an imposing corporate office building, designed by architects LeRoy Troyer and Randy Seitz, on Technology Drive off Mt. Clinton Pike near North Main Street (U.S. Route 11).

In 2000 CMDS made the momentous decision to be acquired by a new Boston company named Jenzabar. Jenzabar also acquired three of CMDS’s competitors – Campus America of Knoxville, CARS of Cincinnati and Quodata of Hartford.Ěý CMDS and two of the other companies maintained their own buildings.

After the merger, there was a period of significant employee turnover. A number of the key players in CMDS, including Wyse, left or were laid off. The imposing CMDS building was now too big, and Jenzabar moved its Harrisonburg offices to the headquarters of a former technology firm nearby at 1401 Technology Dr.

Jenzabar supports more than 1,000 campuses in the United States and around the world. Some 20% of all U.S. colleges and universities use Jenzabar software. Among them is EMU.

“The core product EMU uses today is Jenzabar EX, the flagship student information system sold by Jenzabar,” said Jack Rutt ’72, EMU’s director of information systems from 1999 until last summer. “Several other systems which supplement the functionality of EX have been added over the years, including MyEMU and a retention management system.”

´ĄťĺťĺąđťĺĚýBen Beachy ’02, MBA ’09, Rutt’s successor at EMU:Ěý “A longstanding rumor in our department is that EMU was customer number one of CMDS, but I’ve never seen the actual database record to verify that.”

Today, 35 years after the founding of CMDS, Shank and Mast are still with the company. Fifteen EMU alumni work for Jenzabar.Ěý About half of them pre-date the merger. One of them,ĚýMark Showalter ’91, joined the day – May 1, 2000 − that the merger was announced.

The alumni at Jenzabar, in addition to Mast and Showalter, are:ĚýĚýLois Ann Handrich ’67;ĚýDon Bomberger ’72;ĚýDale Hartzler ’85, MDiv. ’08;ĚýBrian Boettger ’86, S ’88, ’91;ĚýMike Engle ’87;ĚýMark Deavers ’89;ĚýMike Weaver ’90;ĚýRobert Ranck ’90;ĚýDale Hess ’92;ĚýDerek Christner ’97;ĚýEric Weaver ’02;ĚýMark Horst ’05; andĚýJessie Groeneweg ’07.

At work in Wauseon, Ohio, Roth is just as multi-faceted. He is director of information technology with Solana, a company that provides business management software and related IT support services for agencies that serve people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Roth has been with the company since 2003. (He worked at Jenzabar after graduation for two years and then in Wauseon, with Fulton County Health Center, for one year before joining Solana as a network administrator and software developer.)

Solana serves more than 130 providers in 23 states (one of its Virginia-based customers is Pleasant View home in Broadway, a ministry of the Virginia Mennonite Conference). The company is owned by Sunshine (formerly Sunshine Children’s Home), a non-profit, faith-based service provider for the developmentally disabled in northwest Ohio. The company was started in 1997 by Lynn Miller, a Hesston and Goshen graduate who developed the ProviderPro software that is the basis of the company’s line.

Roth, who studied at Hesston College before transferring to EMU as a junior, enjoys the variety in his work. “Being a part of a small company, and working on the IT and programming side, really keeps things interesting,” he said. “I like to do all of it, but it’s hard to have a wide scope any more with how much there is to know about everything now. This role allows me to do some of each.”

A constant challenge for Solana’s clients is managing data specific to their needs, ranging from the usual business basics such as human resources and payroll, to more specific tracking of billing information, fundraising, client demographics and incident reports.

“We work with our clients to help them find more efficient ways to do their business,” Roth said. “That may be something as simple as adding electric time clocks instead of handwritten paper time sheets, so they can digitally track everything they are doing. We make our software as easy to use as possible, and the trainings short and simple to accommodate staff turnover.”

Recently, Roth has led the implementation of a virtualized data center that allows for upgrading hardware and handling hardware failure with little or no downtime, and a secondary data center that would function if the Wauseon site experienced a major disaster. He’s also helped design single-page web applications that “work on any device from a phone, tablet, or PC with a load balanced back-end” to accommodate new growth.

“We’re always developing new products or improving older products, designing new things and looking ahead to technologies we want to work on in the next few years,” Roth said, in a statement that encapsulates his creative and technical endeavors, from software to 3D carriage wheels.

John Swartzentuber ’85Ěýhas been working on that very sort of software with a company called OSIsoft for the past eight years. Swartzentruber is a development lead, working out of the company’s Philadelphia office. He leads a team of developers working on next iterations of the data analysis software, while coordinating with other team leaders, helping to plan release cycles, recruiting new staff and consulting with clients – power plants aren’t the only ones; many different industries have lots of data to manage – to improve the software’s “user experience design.”

An ideal user experience would render its designers invisible. When programs are working smoothly, doing what they’re supposed to, people don’t spend time thinking about why that’s the case.

“We strive to be unappreciated, almost,” Swartzentruber says. “If people don’t notice the software, you’re doing your job right.”

Accomplishing that often requires out-of-the-box thinking; new challenges keep things interesting.

“It’s not just rote,” he says. “You really have a lot of creative flexibility to figure out the best way to get there.”

Thirty years ago, when Swartzentruber was working on his computer science minor at EMU (a major wasn’t available yet), he took a class called “Programming Languages,” during which longtime computer science professorĚýJoe MastĚýassigned something involving a fairly esoteric language known as LISP. It was a toughie – so difficult, in fact, that Mast eventually cancelled the assignment. Inspired by the challenge, though Swartzentruber buckled down and kept at it and finally came up with a solution.

LISP isn’t something he actually uses anymore, but the appreciation it taught him for approaching problems from new angles has. Thinking of becoming a programmer? Go down the rabbit hole with something weird or obscure. Diversify your toolbox.

“It’s important to think in a different kind of way, to try something completely different,” he says.

Between Swartzentruber’s junior and senior years, EMU’s nascent computer science program suffered something of a setback: its PDP-11 – the machine that every computer student shared time on – died. (The PDP-11 was a “minicomputer,” an amusingly dated description in this smartphone era.)

That meant Swartzentruber spent his senior year working on Apple IIe computers, which turned out to be at the vanguard of the coming PC revolution, and which ultimately meant that the demise of the PDP-11 was actually a stroke of good fortune for students affected by the loss.

“In a lot of ways, I felt very well prepared [for work after college],” he says. “We sort of got into the PC world a little quicker.”

“I wasn’t sure I would find meaningful work in computer science. I thought I should be in direct service, and I tried to find a way to do that kind of work, but it wasn’t what I was best at,” said Shenk-Evans.

Now director of information technologies at the Capital Area Food Bank, Shenk-Evans oversees the technological systems within a new 123,000-square-foot warehouse and office that provide food to more than 500 partner agencies, which in turn feed 478,000 people in the Washington D.C. metro area. His goal is to develop technology as a strategic asset so that more hungry adults and children can be reached.

And while he may not be meeting those hungry people face-to-face every day, Shenk-Evans says his work is enriching and fulfilling. “At some point, I’ve decided to be at peace with the idea that I’m a technologist,” he said. “That is how I serve. It took me 15 years to be able to say that: I am good at this. I’m not a spokesman or a fundraiser. I’m a mission-focused technologist and this is my contribution to society.”

Now Shenk-Evans can tell his story of “running away from computers” with a sense of humor. In his first year of Mennonite Voluntary Service (MVS), he turned down a computer teaching position in Jamaica in favor of an agency liaison position at the Capital Area Food Bank.

“Almost immediately, someone was programming a custom inventory management system and he needed help,” Shenk-Evans said. “Within a few weeks, I was the database administrator.”

At the end of his first MVS year, he requested a different part-time position and was placed in a job referral program at the Spanish Catholic Center. “Again, I was trying to get away from computers, but I have a tendency to want to make things as efficient as possible, so I developed a database so they could track applicants, jobs, and employers.”

In the ensuing years, Shenk-Evans earned a Master’s of Divinity at Duke, which included taking a restorative justice course at EMU, and took a two-year stint as executive director of a Habitat for Humanity affiliate. There, his true aptitudes emerged.

“No matter what I did at this small non-profit, the IT work always fell on me,” he said. “I spent two years automating our office to make our organization more efficient. I set up the first email system, [and] the first network, and implemented a database to track our mortgages.”

Finally, a friend pointed out that his strengths – administrative and IT experience with non-profits – would be useful at his company, Community IT Innovators. From 2000 to 2010, Shenk-Evans was a senior consultant with CITI (described further on page 12). Then he returned to the Capital Area Food Bank as its first full-time IT director. Shenk-Evans now supervises a staff of three: a GIS specialist, an information systems manager, and a network administrator.

Asked what advice he would give others following in his footsteps, Shenk-Evans said:

For a long time, I had a narrow definition of what meaningful work was. I thought direct service was the most important way to help. Then when I tried to do it, I found out that I wasn’t very good at it. I had other skills. If you’re trying to do something that is outside your true skill set, you won’t be as effective at your work. Keep your mind and heart open to different ways to serve. Keep in mind that you’ll only be happy if you use your gifts to the good. Try to find the intersections between what the world needs, your gifts and God’s calling.

Ten Thousand Villages, too, has mission roots. It was founded in 1946 by Edna Ruth Byler, wife of an MCC administrator, during a trip to Puerto Rico. Still a nonprofit partner of MCC, the company is a fair trade organization that brokers artisanal crafts from disadvantaged people around the world.

Working mainly with inventory and accounting systems, Rutt customizes both to meet the business’s changing needs. He designs reports and extracts data, as well as providing troubleshooting services.

“A tremendous amount of information is needed to import goods from 30 different countries and then distribute them to almost 80 branded retail stores and other wholesale accounts,” Rutt said. “We would not be able to do what we do without computers and the programs that run on them.”

He is one of eight people in the company’s IT department (see page 18 for a profile of alumnus LeVon Smoker, who was the first IT employee for SELFHELP Crafts of the World, as the organization was known until 1996).

Rutt actually had little computer training at EMU, arriving on campus when the technology was in its infancy in the early 1980s.Ěý Attracted to the rigor and discipline of the hard sciences, Rutt double-majored in chemistry and math (his non-Euclidean geometry course was what really taught him to “think outside the box,” he remembers). His two computer courses were electives in an otherwise busy schedule.

But when doing voluntary service with Eastern Mennonite Missions at University of Alabama in Birmingham, he began handling and extracting data for research projects and when his year of service ended, he was hired at UAB, eventually becoming a programmer.Ěý “They were glad to have someone who understood the nature of the research, even though I didn’t have a degree in programming.”

Six years later, he was still at University of Alabama when he met future wife, Michelle, also working on a voluntary service assignment. Together, they ran a Ten Thousand Villages Festival Sale each December for five years.

In 2000, wanting their two children closer to both sets of grandparents, the Rutts moved back to Lancaster County and Rutt began work at Ten Thousand Villages. Both daughters attend Lancaster Mennonite High School. Katie, 17, is a senior and Joy, 14, is a freshman.

The Rutts attend Landisville Mennonite Church. Rick, a former Sunday school teacher and superintendent, recently began serving as assistant treasurer.

“Anyone in the field would know what I’m talking about,” said Akers, who majored in at EMU.

But yes, people not in the field, he acknowledges, are often confused about what all this actually means – and increasingly so as computer systems grow ever more complex.

“Oftentimes they don’t know how important the job is until I get that 3 a.m. call,” he says. “I’m providing critical services, and they have to be running for our tens of thousands of faculty, staff and students to do what they need to be doing.”

He likens this sort of IT role, at or near the front lines of keeping the digital world humming along, to that of a referee: invisible when things are going well, in the hot seat when things suddenly aren’t. It’s not a complaint, it’s just the way things are. Akers, about halfway done with a master’s degree in information technology from Virginia Tech, loves the challenge of the work.

“A lot of people, when they graduate, don’t find a job that they like, or one in their field,” he said. “I’m blessed to have found both of those.”

Derek Buchanan ’97Ěýis another computer-problem first responder, as a PC technician at Mary Baldwin College in Staunton, Virginia. From the main help desk, Buchanan troubleshoots for faculty, staff and students. Forgotten passwords are their biggest bugaboo.

The job requires patience and the ability to handle people with different personalities and vastly different computer aptitudes. Some people top out at printing things and browsing the web, while others can pretty much fix any problem except in cases of major catastrophe. It generally breaks down along age-related lines. The younger the person, the more technologically proficient they’re likely to be.

The rapid pace of technological change that explains the generally age-correlated abilities of computer users on college campuses has all sorts of other implications for those colleges’ IT staffs.

“One of the big things for us is that students are coming with more and more devices,” saidĚýJohn Thomas ’89, chief information officer at Florida Southern College in Lakeland, Florida (he calls it the BYOD, or bring-your-own-device phenomenon).

Based on wireless network usage, he estimates the average number of wireless-connected devices carried by students at Florida Southern at just below three. Figuring out how to accommodate and capitalize on that reality are some of the big-picture tasks that occupy Thomas’s time – things like enabling students to connect their tablets to classroom projectors, or rolling out a mobile version of an online class registration system.

In 2000, when Thomas began his current role, there wasn’t wireless Internet access on campus at all. He’s since overseen installation of about 650 wireless access points, at a college with fewer than 3,000 students.

An interesting wrinkle to that story stems from the fact that the college is home to the world’s largest collection of Frank Lloyd Wright buildings. That means Thomas’s crews can’t just install a “network drop” any old most-convenient place. Rather, everything happens in consultation with architects who keep an eye out for the integrity of the buildings’ original design.

Wait a sec. Network drop? That’s the word for a wall socket that an Ethernet cable plugs into, and that’s exactly the kind of IT word that passes the non-IT world entirely by (a collection of others collected during interviews for this article: “central authentication system,” “portal,” and “migrating”). As one moves higher within a university’s IT organization, translating this sort of technobabble to the technoignorant becomes a more and more important skill.

“It is extremely difficult to use acronyms and concepts that people aren’t familiar with … We try to steer clear of it. We try to protect people from the worst of the details,” saysĚýLeslie Geary, class of ’90, a technical project manager with the University of California, Santa Cruz.

One of her roles is managing teams of up to a dozen people working on IT projects such as the recent rollout of an “enterprise web content management system” – an application that makes it easy for someone with basic computer skills to create and maintain their own websites – for the university’s administrative departments. Next up: a similar system for faculty and graduate students.

After transferring from EMU, Geary earned undergraduate degrees in philosophy and biochemistry at Santa Cruz. Computers were something she fell into by chance while later working in financial aid. As a manager in the IT department, responsible for ensuring “clients” – IT folks’ term for IT users they’re helping – are getting their needs met, she needs to understand the IT stuff, but doesn’t have to live and breathe its finest details.

“I’m not a programmer. I don’t know anything about networking. I do have some technical background, but for the most part, what’s important are the soft skills, the people skills,” she said. “People are just happy to have somebody talking IT in a non-technical way to them.”

As director of infrastructure support services and administration at the University of Virginia,ĚýTracy Smith ’94, also bridges the divide between the worlds of IT workers and the people who depend on them.

“I’m a translator,” he said. “I help to translate technology into terms that anybody can understand. We also do a lot of listening.”

With several dozen people reporting to him, Smith oversees all IT troubleshooting at the university, from single-user glitches to massive, system-wide failures. He rarely gets involved in the technical details himself – nor does he feel he would be particularly adept at this.

“I wouldn’t make a good engineer, but I also wouldn’t be able to be something that requires a lot of right-brained power,” said Smith, who has found a foot-in-both-worlds niche he loves, helping technology at the university meet its users’ needs.

(Thomas and Smith both point out that good communication has to happen both ways; it can be very frustrating for help desk staff, for example, when they don’t get the clear, precise descriptions of problems necessary to solve them.)

In Philadelphia,ĚýDouglas Brunk ’86Ěýis a software development director for Penn Medicine Academic Computing Service (the IT department for the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine). He oversees development of software for things as varied as medical student admissions tracking, management of test tubes in stockrooms, and tracking clinical research ongoing at the university.

“I enjoy bending computers to my will,” says Brunk, who studied education at EMU. “[But] oddly enough, working with people is the part I enjoy most.”

Take the clinical research. Healthcare workers collect huge amounts of data, primarily in ways designed to serve the goal of treating individual patients. Sometimes those protocols make it very difficult to use that data for another purpose, like in research examining the treatment of thousands of patients. Software solutions can and do help with that, but cooperation between the various groups of people involved is also critical. Clinical researchers might need to convince other medical colleagues to adopt new record-keeping procedures to advance the long-term goal of better treatments for individual patients.

“Technology can help with a problem, but it will rarely solve the whole problem,” saysĚýDavid Brubaker ’03, senior IT project leader for the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

Whole-problem solutions require effort from people using that technology, which is why Brubaker spends very little of his time in front of a computer. He’s out and about, meeting with users, trying to figure out how the technology available to him and his team can best help the Wharton School accomplish its goals. (His responsibilities include, among others, online services offered to alumni, the IT budget, and technology that supports the school’s large alumni events that are held all over the world.)

This all relates directly to a broader point raised by many of the alumni interviewed for this article. Whether someone at a university is one of those technical folks who keeps things running behind the scenes, or an end user who doesn’t spare a thought for those technical folks until they can’t check their email, or a go-between who speaks the languages of both, they’re all playing part in the same broader university mission.

“Everything that we do ultimately is to help people grow, mature, learn and go out in society and be more productive,” saysĚýKevin Strite ’95, project manager for the University of Notre Dame’s Office of Information Technology.

He oversees parts of various IT projects around campus, focused on lots of day-to-day details – things like estimating costs for classroom projectors in the university’s recently opened study-abroad facility in Rome, Italy. But in the sense that these seemingly mundane details – combined with the daily details of life at the help desk and in systems engineering and in software development and a thousand other places – support higher education’s larger goals of education and understanding and collective betterment,Ěýet cetera…. Yes, it all feels very worthwhile.