John O'Brien, EDUCAUSE CEO and President, talks with Ed Clark, CIO and Chief Digital Officer at the University of St. Thomas, about digital transformation.
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John O'Brien
President and CEO
EDUCAUSE
Ed Clark
CIO and Chief Digital Officer
University of St. Thomas
O'Brien: Welcome to Ed Clark from the University of St. Thomas, back in my old stomping grounds in Minnesota. It's great to see you and let's just start talking. In 2018 I think it was, I asked you to write something about digital transformation in EDUCAUSE Review, and you wrote a great sort of introductory piece to the idea of digital transformation, turns out to be one of the top 10 most downloaded articles in 2018. So what was it about that article that captured the imagination of our community? Do you remember what you said?
Clark: I think in 2018 digital transformation was this catchphrase where people were using it everywhere, it was kind of a murky topic. And so trying to attract people to conferences, salespeople were trying to sell their products, So there were these things like buy Salesforce and you can digitally transform. And so my goal at the time was an attempt to provide some foundation to this discussion so that people would have this level playing field and to start to talk about what are the right things to do to promote this in my organization, in addition to, well, what is it?
O'Brien: So and that was 2018, nowadays one week seems like a year. So 2018 seems a while ago. So if you wrote the same article again now, what would change?
Clark: If I were to write the article again today, I think some of the things were changes. I had quotes, early and late in the article, about the organization's culture and mindset. And to me what has really emerged is that you need to have the culture and mindset there to really get to the transformation part. Over the last eight months, most of us were forced to adopt technology at a faster rate than we ever thought possible. And it turns out having the technology systems there and pushing the button was pretty easy. In fact the change that in some of our faculty were scared of it, you mean this online thing, I don't know if it's good or bad or whatever, the change was much closer and more accessible, then we were led to believe. And that means it was mostly a change initiative all along. But where do you get to that next part where you're saying, okay, listen, we're just delivering our lecture online via Zoom, where we really gonna push forward on. Yeah, we're actually aiming at a different experience for our students where we're focused on outcomes and in engaging in it beyond just a temporary switch in the way we deliver instruction. I think that it turns out to get there you're gonna need this cultural change that is still needs to be there and may not be there at many organizations.
O'Brien: It seems to me that for the last few years, there's been a sort of in every industry, a push toward putting the customer more and more in the center. And it felt like that was starting to happen in higher education and then COVID kind of happened and we see all this research about students lacking access to broadband and students struggling to deal with income inequality and mental health resources needed and all of that. So in a funny way students are put in the center out of a sense of necessity. Is that what you're seeing at University of St. Thomas as well?
Clark: Absolutely, University of St. Thomas, we are seeing all of those things. We are certainly worried about their access, we're worried about their tuition, we're worried about the technology that they're using. And so we have gone through a lot of work to try to streamline things for them and make sure we have all these pools of money that we put aside and say, hey, okay, your bandwidth isn't great from where you are, can we fix that for you? And so reaching out in a way that goes beyond our campus, I assume a lot of other institutions are doing the same things but yeah, that's stuff might be part of it.
O'Brien: If you go back and look, there was a flurry of articles and talk about digital divide back in early two thousands and then sort of a patch where nobody was talking about it so much as if we'd solved it and I think to some extent, COVID proved that we didn't, and now they're coming right back to haunt us.
Clark: The thing that is really starting to be highlighted is we've gone into this raw world, we pushed the button, the technology switch in a way was easy. You heard almost every university say, hey, we went to Zoom in two weeks or three days or whatever it was, and putting those technologies out there is just part of it. But this virtual environment is not the same as the face-to-face environment. And so our teachers had to get better in learning environment, our students have to get better at learning in that environment, and we haven't had as much practice as we'd like. I saw an article in The Wall Street Journal this morning where executives are debating whether we'll all go back to the way things were before, and half of them said, yeah, absolutely. Because this online thing is not as good as face-to-face. So this work world works better when we're doing things face to face. I think that we've had decades to learn how to do things in a face-to-face format, and we've only had a little while to practice being in this virtual format. And I think over time, I think more and more organizations are gonna say, part of what we have to do is learn how to be effective in this environment. I think there's also been a lot of fear that has driven change at this point. We had to do something, and so we jumped there because of fear, and so people are working long hours, there are no boundaries, we're gonna have to learn how to bring those things back into our daily practice and daily routines even on the virtual world.