(twinkling music)
- Could you talk a little bit about ITANA
and how it helps people in higher ed IT
focus on enterprise and business solutions?
- Yeah, there are a couple of, I think,
different ways that it does that.
The first would be we teach people the skills they need
to be enterprise or business architects.
We help them meet with their peers and learn
from others about that so that they go home
with a toolkit that they can apply
and with lessons learned from other institutions.
So I think that's an important part of it
is just building up that skillset of people
who are architects in higher education
in various institutions of all different types and sizes.
The second is we share case studies
or we bring outside people like registrars
or things like that into the calls
so that they have real life examples of what worked,
what didn't work, they can have things that they can
actually take back and apply, or they've heard from
leadership from CIOs at other institutions,
or from EDUCAUSE leaders, or anything like that.
What's really front of mind, to give
them better context in what they're doing.
So I think those would be the two big ways I would say.
- Can you talk a little bit about what you most like
about working around enterprise architecture strategies,
and what do you find most rewarding and most challenging?
- What I find most rewarding is that sense of alignment
that you get, that sense of vision of having your eyes
over the horizon and thinking what's really big and next.
That's something I enjoy doing.
I enjoy being, you know, a futurologist if you want.
To me, that's where it becomes really interesting
is when you see that vision start to hit the ground
and other people begin to understand it
and people follow in behind whatever vision you've set.
So that's what's most rewarding to me.
The challenging part is what comes with that.
It is a lot of change management.
It's change management at the organizational level,
at a group level, and at a personal level.
So you end up doing a lot of coaching and mentoring.
You end up doing a lot of thinking of different ways
you can message something because it's not working
with this group or that group.
So there's a whole lot of the interpersonal kinds
of change management things that you are doing
and those influence skills that become really challenging
when you're dealing with, especially like me at big research
one university, when you're dealing
with 500 people in the IT group.
- This isn't on the list, but I'm gonna be interviewing
a lot of people at the annual conference about
IT governance and could you talk a little bit about
IT governance and how it factors into what you do
and maybe what the biggest challenge
is for you around IT governance?
- So, here, IT governance is really interesting
'cause we're trying to architect effective governance.
So we're really thinking what are the decisions it needs
to make, how will it work, what are the processes that
will get us there, what are the artifacts
that will help those governance groups work well?
So there's kind of a meta part of this of trying
to actually structure and design governance to be effective.
Then, from us, my vision and the belief is that IT needs
to become a business transformation partner.
We need the other parts of the university
to really view the IT group as someone who's bringing
opportunities, who's a strategic thinker,
who can contribute to that.
That means that governance becomes incredibly important
as we get linked at the hips to say, you know,
this is what we need to do on the academic side,
whether that's lifelong learning, whether that's thinking
about new types of courses and new degree programs,
whatever, with IT saying hey, if you wanna do badging
and credentialing, we need to do these things
just through an information system.
They have to be tightly linked.
So governance becomes a really important part
and it needs to shift from kind of a once a year meeting
with the board to being a much more active,
and agile, and engaged year long continuous process.
- So it's always changing you would say.
It's like it's never like we're done.
It's always like iteration after iteration.
- It's never that we're done and it's never
that oh, we've built a five year plan, great,
let's just go run on that for five years,
'cause things are shifting so fast
with opportunities and stuff, so it really is this,
yeah, we built a five year vision, is it still correct?
Do we need a course change, do we need to adapt?
I think of it as taking a really long road trip across
the country and then you discover that there's construction
some place or there's something, you know, going on in
a museum four towns over that you really wanna go see,
you have to constantly evaluate.
You don't just blindly say, well, I'm staying on this road.
I don't care if it's closed for the next three weeks.
I'm just gonna sit here.
- That's a good metaphor. (laughs)
- [James] Constantly adapt.
- A little bit larger scope question,
what do you think is the biggest challenge
or challenges in your mind for
higher ed IT these days, in today's environments?
- I think there's several and I think that they're linked.
One is the rapid rate of change of things that are hitting
us from, you know, machine learning
and artificial intelligence with its ever-growing
capabilities, where do we apply that,
whether it's blockchain and thinking how do we apply
that to, say, transcripts and to degree attainment
so that we can have lifelong learners
who are bringing courses from multiple places
and managing their own transcript.
So there's that huge rate of change,
and then there is that need to really shift
from being what I would consider sort of either
a commodity partner, IT has these services, and we buy them,
and they're fine, and otherwise we don't talk to them,
or being kind of, you know, guns for hire,
oh, we're doing this project, let's bring an IT in,
into being that transformation partner
into saying no, we need to be at the table
when you're talking about the roadmap for the registrar
so we can understand what's going on,
but we can also bring opportunities or risks to the table.
- This is related and it may be a redundant question
from what you just talked about,
but is there any issues that keep you up at night?
Are there any sorta pet issues that are always
in the back of your mind that's sort of
the thing that really keeps your brain going?
- Right now, my team, I have a team of three architects,
has really picked up a huge shift in sort of
organizational development which is pretty new
to our enterprise architecture
'cause we're just seeing the need for very different skills,
and that keeps me up 'cause that's a big change.
We had, historically in IT groups,
the person who was the service owner,
the service leader, an a iTel sense service owner.
Right, they were really bright technologist
who became a lead developer who was then made into
the service owner, and they really wanted to be
behind the screen looking downward at the technology.
If we're gonna make that change to being business
transformation partners, then they need to get out
from behind their computer, they need to have influence,
they need to have great communication skills,
they need to have business acumen,
they need to go be engaged with the business
about their service and helping them understand.
That's a totally different skillset.
That's drawing on what I call a lot of above the line
competencies, those things on how you do work.
Are you a good strategist, are you a good communicator,
rather than the below the line, hey,
they really are great, they write tons
of Java code, they're a great developer.
That's a big organizational change for us to lift
and that's something that keeps me awake
is how we are going to affect that.
- Yeah, well, related to that, what sort of organizational
and cultural shifts do you think need to happen
in the next five to 10 years to
keep IT effective and relevant?
- That function of business relationship management
is going to move, I think, very much to the fore,
to where you're gonna be saying how
are we working with our campus partners,
how are we working with governance?
That's gonna be embedded in the department all over.
We'll become much more of a distributed engagement model
I think rather than sort of, oh, well, they write to
the help desk if they need something.
It's gotta be much more we're in the meetings,
we understand what's going on.
So that's one big part.
I think the second big trends are around
moving towards cloud and software service
and everything that comes with that
and us becoming much more of brokers between
the business and those service providers
and less of the requirements gather and code writers.
That's another really big shift that's
completely underway right now that
is changing the skills and how we work.
- So, would you say, I mean, I'm just, since I'm outside
the industry, I'm just curious, 'cause I grew up in
the 90s when everybody built their own stuff, right,
would you say that the technical skills within
an IT organization are sort of, not that people, you know,
have technical people, but is it just,
do most of those people work for private companies
that provide third party services to you?
Is that how it works these days?
- No, we still have technical people,
and that's part of the split in the stack
is there are stuff that we have written
that we need to run, but more and more,
we are looking towards outside vendors
to be providing things, so going with a software solution
for your customer relationship management,
Salesforce being really common,
going there for your HR payroll system.
So rather than you actually running a big stack of code
in house for your HR and payroll system,
or your finance system, or your student system,
that will be run by an outside vendor.
What you'll be doing is configuring those tools
to meet the business requirements
and then understanding what the vendor is trying to do
with their system and what the capabilities are.
So it's a shift in skills from, yeah, I'm gonna go write
code around our PeopleSoft implementation
to do what the business wants to saying,
well, I'm gonna work with the business,
I'm gonna work the vendor, and I'm gonna figure out
if we can configure it in a way to execute what you want
to do, but we are, you know, we've a bit bipolar in
this way in that we have to be doing that,
but we also have a lot of legacy code
that still needs to be maintained, and written, and run.
So we have a foot in both camps.
So we have this separation that's happening
where we need both skills suddenly simultaneously.
- That's a great answer.
Two more questions and I'll let you go Jim.
Do you have any advice for those
entering your particular field of
enterprise architecture, enterprise strategies?
What are some of the particulars you would tell
somebody that wants to become a leader of that industry?
- I would of course say instantly join ITANA.
- [Gerry] Yeah.
- You'll meet a lot of peers, you'll see what's going on,
you'll understand better what it really means.
It is a leadership position so get leadership training
either through Moore's IT leader program
or through EDUCAUSE's leaderships programs,
whatever that is, get into one of the in-depth leadership
training efforts so you understand that aspect,
and then third, find a great mentor.
Find somebody who's in a school like you
or a school that's different,
and that's why I say join ITANA.
You'll meet people who you maybe will say, that's great.
Step out, put yourself out there and say,
"Can I have a monthly call with you?
"You seem like you're doing great work,
"can I talk with you, can I find out what's going on?
"Will you help me as I get onboarded onto this?"
Really look for a coach and a mentor
as you're making that transition,
and those are the three big things I would say.
- That makes a lot of sense.
Lastly, did you, first of all,
congratulations on the award.
Did you expect it, or how did you
feel about it when you heard about it?
- It's been overwhelming, it's been a great pleasure.
I've had a ton of emails, I'm trying to respond.
If I haven't written back to you, I'm really sorry.
I took a vacation in the middle of that
so a whole bunch came in that I ignored.
I knew that I was being nominated
and I was just really thrilled that my theory committee
really wanted to step up and do that
and go through the hoops to do that
and that EDUCAUSE haws recognized the work
that I put into build ITANA and the engagement
I've had with them over the past 12 years.
So, like I said, it's marvelous, it's still sinking in.
(twinkling music)