John O'Brien, EDUCAUSE President and CEO, talks with the Moran Technology Consulting executive team about supporting the EDUCAUSE Awards each year. Visit the EDUCAUSE Awards page to nominate your peers.
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Charlie Moran
Senior Partner and CEO
Moran Technology Consulting
Paul Giebel
Partner and COO
Moran Technology Consulting
John O'Brien
President & CEO
EDUCAUSE
John O'Brien: Welcome to another community conversation. Today, we're here to talk about the EDUCAUSE Awards Program with two of our sponsors. Moran Technology Consulting has sponsored our program. And we're here today with the leadership of Moran with Charlie Moran and Paul Giebel, welcome. I was curious if you can remember, when did you start sponsoring the awards program and what led you to-- Memory is not an easy thing these days.
Charlie Moran: Yeah, maybe Paul will remember. It's been over 10 years. It's been a long time, and we've been part of EDUCAUSE for 18 years. And before that, with another company. We got them into EDUCAUSE. And we've been around a long time. And when the opportunity came up to be a sponsor of the award stuff, it was a great deal. Let's let's go do this. And it's been very fun ever since, and wonderful.
John O'Brien: When you think about the awards over the 10 years you've been sponsoring the awards program, have you seen the, I don't know how to say it, the characteristics of the award winners change over time? I mean, we talk about how what it takes to be a leader in our world has changed, that new capacities are needed. But I'm curious if you've seen that as well, just from the lens of the awards.
Paul Giebel: Especially with the Rising Star Award, I think we're seeing a much different type of characteristics associated with the rising stars. And I think with all the leadership awards, I think there's an aspirational aspect of this whole thing, where you see award winners up there from year to year, and you're able to look at, wow, different people are doing different things and maybe there's some opportunities on our campus, or on my own campus, to do something different. So I think some of the things that each of the award winners are doing continues to be enhanced, I think, as we move along.
John O'Brien: I've heard this about the awards more than once, that somebody out in the audience tells me that they hear the award winners talk about what they're passionate about. And they say, that's me. I'm that too. And they start to have a chance to see their own leadership get recognized and celebrate their own leadership. I mean, I almost always, at the reception we have where we always recognize the award winners, I always say, the first thing each one of the award winners says is, but there are so many other people. They recognize that they're accepting the award kind of for all the other people that are doing really great work. With everything that's changing, do you think that what we're going to need in leaders in our community is going to change dramatically over the next few years? Or has it already changed?
Charlie Moran: Yeah, I think whether they want it to or not, it's already changed. I also think that you're gonna see a need for people, a lot more flexible to do things. Where their workers are working. Are they on campus? Are they remote? Some of those things. But also, getting much more involved with the academic and teaching side, that sometimes there was always kind of, well, there are those people and there's us. And nothing these days with COVID and stuff is being done without the delivery through technology, and keeping up reliable services and getting good vendors. And I think that's different than 20 years ago where who had done the best custom coding portal for somebody. The need has changed, and the need to really be seen by the institution as a technology leader, visionary, zealot, to try to help invest in the right places, not waste money in the wrong places, and to keep things moving along, because there's no going back. I mean, the faculty, we all know everybody's said, well, everybody used the learning management system. Most schools did not have heavy penetration of faculty actually doing anything in it. There's very few schools now that don't have 95 to 100% of their faculty deep into using the learning management system and trying off new things. And that just pushes the need to understand the help better. And I think, as we're growing these things, having people have more of a diverse background really helps them understand what's going on out there, and being able to sit down and say, hey, how's it going? What can we do to help?