2018 EDUCAUSE Community Leadership Award: James Phelps [video]

GB: Could you talk a little bit about ITANA and how it helps people in higher ed IT focus on enterprise and business solutions?

JP: 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.

GB: 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?

JP: 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 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.

GB: This isn't on the list, but I'm gonna be interviewing a lot of people at the annual conference about IT governance. 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?

JP: 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 metapart 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.

GB: 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.

JP: 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."

GB: That's a good metaphor.

JP: Constantly adapt.

GB: 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?

JP: 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 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.

GB: 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 sort of … the thing that really keeps your brain going?

JP: 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, and an an 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, how we are going to effect that.

GB: Yeah, well, related to that, what sort of organizational and cultural shifts do you think need to happen in the next 5 to 10 years to keep IT effective and relevant?

JP: 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 [that] 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 toward 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 gatherers and code writers. That's another really big shift that's completely under way right now that is changing the skills and how we work.

GB: 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?

JP: No, we still have technical people, and that's part of the split in the stack is there's stuff that we have written that we need to run, but more and more, we are looking toward 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're 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.

GB: 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?

JP: I would of course say instantly join ITANA.

GB: Yeah.

JP: 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.

GB: 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?

JP: 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 [hearing?] committee really wanted to step up and do that and go through the hoops to do that and that EDUCAUSE has 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.