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3 superstar CIOs discuss the most important higher ed considerations

Three high-profile CIOs discuss the challenges and goals of their position, as well as the innovations needed for the institutions of tomorrow.

By Dr. Rod Berger
CEO, MindRocket Media Group September 13th, 2017

Many say that the one position in education that has evolved the most in recent years is Chief Information Officer, both in K-12 and higher ed. In higher education, the scope of fast-paced changes in technology are breathtaking. And unlike K-12 where the CIO/CTO position is still seen as the individual that keeps the network up and running, the higher ed CIO has become something of a star.

I recently had the opportunity to interview the CIOs of three very high-profile programs: The Kenan-Flagler School of Business at UNC, The Sloan School of Management at MIT, and The University of Chicago School of Business. I encourage you to watch the interviews in their entirety, but I’ve excerpted some interesting thoughts here.

We Continually Strive for a Seamless Student Experience with EdTech

– Georgia Allen, CIO at the Kenan-Flagler Business School at UNC Chapel Hill

Georgia Allen is the CIO at the Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She works with students of today–advanced digitally literate students who have used technology their entire lives. There are challenges in presenting EdTech to students where technically complex improvements need to appear simple. I asked Georgia what was important to her as the CIO.

“It’s about making sure that our education is a space of learning excellence. It’s a world where we have students coming up through K-12 who are digital natives. They’ve been using technology since they started kindergarten.

It’s important that technology is a part of their education, but doesn’t get in the way of learning excellence. It should enable our faculty in their teaching, and allow our students, who have an expectation of “anywhere at any time,” that it’s about what education technology can bring when the traditional face-to-face has its limits.

In today’s world, we’re moving towards a nimbler IT environment, and we need to deliver faster. We are leveraging cloud services, cloud platforms, and software as a service in many ways to increase the speed of delivery.

Many of those platforms come with their own identity and access. In our case, we are leveraging identity access management tools that allow for a single sign-on for our students across platforms.

It’s important that our students have a seamless experience, whether they are in the face-to-face classroom or they are in our learning management systems with online instruction. As they move to another platform through that learning management system, their identity needs to be consistent across the experience.

We have our internal systems that we build, custom-developed applications versus the platforms, and our students experience it all seamlessly. They don’t know that they have traveled from one in-house system to a cloud platform; and identity access tools allow us to do that.

How do we know what tools, platforms, and systems to use in an educational environment?

With our faculty, which has truly started to embrace learning technologies in their teaching, we do a lot of pilots. We will look at new platforms or services. Sometimes they are start-up platforms. Sometimes they fit the Gartner Magic Quadrant so they’re heavy lifters.

We look at all of that and test it with a classroom and faculty member. We talk to faculty members about their learning goals. We talk about what they want that student experience to be. We try it out. As the CIO, I bring in both this innovation experience and pilot experience, as well as the thought process of enterprise delivery. If it’s successful, how do we deliver that across multiple programs, multiple degrees, and multiple courses? Is this start-up in a state in their business that they can support an enterprise rollout?

I do a lot of shark tanking, if you will. I do a lot of explaining, creating momentum, and creating excitement. My office sits right on the hallway. I get elevator pitches all the time. The students love technology. They want to come and talk about it. We talk about “How do I transition or how do we transition the idea you’re presenting into something that could be used at the business school?”

Those are new doors for us in the CIO position that I’m thrilled about. I once had a faculty member tell me that it’s important is that we see every day through our students’ eyes, that the unimaginable is possible. I would say that with technology, that’s where we are as CIOs. It’s to listen to our students and our faculty and know that we can do something that we thought five years ago was impossible.”

It’s All About Anticipating the “Next Great New Idea”

– John Letchford, University System CIO at University of Massachusetts 

John Letchford is now the University System CIO at the University of Massachusetts. When I interviewed John, he was the CIO at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology  where he lived by the credo that every brilliant technological wonder they build today is going to be obsolete tomorrow. Therefore, John must be continually ready for the Next Great New Idea.

To help foster that kind of innovation, he needed to tread a fine line between promoting structure and promoting free-for-all creativity. As he puts it, “If you have too much structure, you can inhibit innovation, and if you have too little structure, you can inhibit innovation. A very large proportion of my day is trying to work out where that sweet spot exists between having an appropriate level of streamlining/standardization and having innovation.

I think we’re always trying to work out the right way to go about doing that and, certainly, in terms of how we can manage data or information across the school in a way that really drives insight and value. We’re always looking at What is the optimal way to architect things in terms of systems of records of engagement?” How things can come together in a way that really works for everybody ─ the students, the faculty, the staff, the alumni, and so forth?

You’re dealing with two very different constituent types. We have students who are going to be here for a very fixed period of time who want to have a very fast pace of change. Equally, we have a world-renowned faculty who has very clear priorities and we want to make sure that we’re not doing things which are unnecessarily disruptive; and have a very long-term focus.

The way we go about it is through communication and collaboration. We work with everybody in the staff as well as alumni in making sure that we’re engaging people of all different constituent types appropriately.

It is a bit of science, making sure requirements are understood; and some of it is a little bit of making sure that everyone has a voice. We want to make sure everyone’s voice is taken into account.

From a philosophy standpoint, the better way to do it is iterating a little bit at a time. I find that to be quite effective─versus trying to do something big bang and explosive which has a higher risk of maybe not working for all the constituents.

We certainly have a very fast iteration-cycle approach of implementing things. When we’re introducing new platforms for collaboration or learning management or administrative processes–we will start off and work out what is the minimal thing we need to do here?

And then, iterate, iterate, and iterate. I mean, if we actually did track all the versions of the different solutions we’re putting in place, there are many, many, many iterations and we just keep putting things gently and it allows us to manage expectations, I think, quite effectively.”

We Need to Communicate Twice as Much as We Think We Need To

– Kevin Boyd, Chief Information Officer at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business

Kevin Boyd was recently named by the Chicago CIO Leadership Association as a finalist for their ORBIE Awards CIO of the year  non-profit category. He is well known and respected in the Chicago area.

Kevin is responsible for managing the global technology needs and services for all the University’s campuses around the world, including Chicago, London, Singapore, and Hong Kong.

Kevin is careful to stress that there is not one perfect universal approach that applies to all universities. Different universities have different needs and one institution may use the same technology in a completely different way than another.

According to Kevin, “It has been a time of rapid change with technology. I think what’s been interesting is how technology in the classroom has been changing things with some of the faculty, particularly what we’ve seen with MOOCs starting about five years ago─the massive open online courses.

There was a time when everyone thought that MOOCs were going to change the world for higher education. People have pulled back a little bit on that thought. But I think that a lot of the concepts and tools that MOOCs introduced are making their way into classrooms in other ways like the creative use of video for a flipped classroom where you have faculty recording parts of their lecture and asking students to watch it before they come to class so that the class could be more interactive, or the creative use of blogs and discussions. There are a lot of other electronic tools and technologies that five or seven years ago many faculty weren’t interested in.

It is not enough for us to go out and do good work. We need to go out and do good work and then market it─and keep marketing it. We need to communicate twice as much as we think we need to and it’s usually about half as much as what we really need. It’s finding more and more ways to reach our different audiences, be it faculty, staff or students.

It’s listening to them and finding out what their needs and pain points are. It’s going and finding the right technologies, implementing those technologies, and then letting them know that they exist.

And that’s going to be done through emails, through our website and, in some cases, paper and posters. It’s ongoing communication because, with students, one of the real challenges is that they’re constantly turning over. It’s not enough just to introduce that great technology; it’s also recognizing that, in the business school world, every quarter there are new students coming in.”

Reflection

Perhaps the greatest skill a higher ed CIO can have is listening. In education, technology is an ever-changing symphony. The students, faculty and administration are musicians. The technology vendors are composers. All the musicians have opinions. And very real needs. In that scenario, the CIO is the orchestra conductor. And even when the noise is deafening, the CIO can select the music and direct the musicians. As the cacophony begins to subside, all eyes are on the maestro. And our learners are treated to a beautiful crescendo of learning.

About the Author:

Dr. Rod Berger is President and CEO of MindRocket Media Group. He is an education industry strategist covering thought leadership in global education for Forbes, Scholastic, The Huffington Post, EdTech Review India, AmericanEdTV and edCircuit. Dr. Berger has worked as a school administrator, college professor, edtech strategist, online content developer, K-12 PD provider and guest lecturer at Vanderbilt’s Owen Graduate School of Management. As one of the world’s leading education media personalities, he has interviewed top education thought leaders like Sir Ken Robinson, Former United States Department of Education Secretary Arne Duncan and over 500 global education influencers. He is currently collaborating with AmericanEdTV and CBS’s Jack Ford on original educational news programming. Email: rod@mindrocketmediagroup.com Twitter @DrRodBerger

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