The Johns Hopkins Address Registration System: Anatomy of an Application

46 When Baltimore merchant Johns Hopkins in the late nineteenth century bequeathed seven million dollars to found a university and a hospital, he only hinted at the nature of the relationship he intended to exist between the two institutions.1 With separate boards of trustees, the two institutions evolved and grew significantly independent of one another. This mutual autonomy continued late into the twentieth century. Given the enormous growth and success of both the university and the medical institutions, a prime opportunity to streamline the governance and internal operations of the Johns Hopkins institutions was being missed. Hence, at the close of the century, the two institutions were tied more closely together when the president of the university was charged with simultaneously serving as chair of the Board of Trustees of Johns Hopkins Medicine (a corporate body consisting of the Medical School, the School of Public Health, the School of Nursing, the Johns Hopkins Hospital, and the Johns Hopkins Healthcare System) and the dean of the Medical School was charged with simultaneously serving as chief executive officer of Johns Hopkins Medicine.2 With such organizational ties in place, Johns Hopkins was poised to streamline its internal operations. One of the first steps toward streamlining internal operations was the appointment of a chief information officer (CIO) and a chief network officer (CNO) in 1999. For the first time, information technology and network operations between the campuses at Johns Hopkins would largely be merged. In particular, the networked resources of Johns Hopkins—its campus data and telecommunications networks, its Internet connections, and so forth—would be centrally managed and operated. The Johns Hopkins Address Registration System (JHARS) is part of this ongoing process.