Reimagining Vendor Relations in Higher Ed

Jack Suess: Welcome to the EDUCAUSE Integrative CIO podcast. I'm Jack Suess, vice president of IT and CIO at the University of Maryland Baltimore County.

Cynthia Golden: And I'm Cynthia Golden. Each episode, we welcome a guest from in or around higher education technology as we talk about repositioning or reinforcing the role of IT leadership as an integral strategic partner in support of the institutional mission.

Jack Suess: Before we start today's episode on vendor relations, we'd like to let you know that the conversation was recorded last spring before some of the events talked about in the episode actually happened. One of our guests for this episode is EDUCAUSE's own Leah Lang, director of corporate engagement. Hi, Leah. Could you explain what we mean by events that took place afterwards?

Leah Lang: Yeah, sure. Thanks, Jack. Since we recorded this episode, we did actually hold a webinar on leveraging the power of consultancies and also conducted some other professional learning opportunities for the corporate community and the higher ed community to understand more about one another. And we've also held the first ever annual partner summit.

Jack Suess: We've added an update to the end where we're going to talk more about those events that took place and what this means for the community, but we want you to experience the podcast before we talk about the results.

Jack Suess: Hello, everyone. Welcome to The Integrative CIO podcast. Today, our guests are Brett Ingraman, Vice President for Information Technology at Tallahassee Community College, and Leah Lang, Director of Corporate Engagement for EDUCAUSE.

Welcome, Leah and Brett.

Bret Ingerman: Hey.

Leah Lang: Hi Jack.

Cynthia Golden: Hi Leah, hi Brett. Today on The Integrative CIO, we're going to talk about higher education institutions and the corporate community. So that's where we hope this discussion is going to go today. But before we really get into everything, let's hear a little bit from each of you about the path you've followed to your current role. Leah?

Leah Lang: Sure. Little bit of a meandering path. I started out as a statistician and went and worked for the Census Bureau for a little while. And then life took me to Pittsburgh, where I landed at Carnegie Mellon working in their IT department, because they needed somebody to do student research and ask questions about how much people liked the computer labs and things like that. And through that work, started presenting at EDUCAUSE, and then a job opened up at EDUCAUSE to lead the Core Data Service. And it seemed like the perfect marriage between my research background and the little I had learned about technology to that point. So then I spent about eleven years working at leading EDUCAUSE's analytics and benchmarking initiatives and ended up learning a lot about the changing landscape of the technology markets and was always really fascinated with that piece of the Core Data Service data collection. And over time, working with our member community and creating really good relationships with the member community and understanding their needs from the industry community, I always kind of observed and felt this tension. You know, going to the conferences and hearing people talk about how they're anxious about going in the exhibit hall or how they're upset about getting too much email from the partners that they're engaged with. It was always, I always, I was collecting these little ideas of how I might solve that problem or help our community solve that problem. And then the job opened up to become the director of corporate engagement at EDUCAUSE. And it seemed like the best opportunity to have an impact on that problem that I'd always seen in our community. So now I'm here. I've been here for about two years leading corporate engagement.  I really feel like my responsibility in this role is to our member community and helping to bring what they need from industry to them.

Cynthia Golden: Thank you. And Brett, how about you?

Bret Ingerman: Wow, so I'm well into my third decade of working in higher education IT. But my background is I'm a psychologist by training. Now it would be called behavioral neuroscience. And when I was at Syracuse getting my degree, I wanted to teach, stepped out for a bit to join a new faculty computing center that had just opened up first ever. And realized that by helping faculty learn how to teach with technology, I could affect far more, affect the way students learn far more than if I was just doing it myself. Because I could affect thirty students in a class, but if I helped thirty faculty, I could affect six hundred students. And so, I've never looked back. So I've only had one formal course in technology. I did some software development back in the day, and then my career has taken me really following a path of academic technology support. So, I was in Oregon at Lewis and Clark College, moved back after we adopted our son, moved back to New York to be closer to family, spent some time at Skidmore. I was the vice president for information technology at Vassar College before here, and then I've been at Tallahassee Community College, soon to by the way be called Tallahassee State College. I've been in Tallahassee Community College for twelve years and this has been one of the more interesting jobs I've had. It's a public two-year in the south, all which were new to me. But I'll never forget my first commencement where I was walking greeting students as they were getting their degree and I was talking to a woman who just grabbed my shoulder and she said, I just want to tell you, she said, I'm a convicted felon. She said, if I didn't have a place like Tallahassee Community College, I wouldn't have a future. And it got me thinking that the other schools I've worked at were great and I loved what I did, but the students at those institutions, if they weren't there, would have found another place to be. Being at a public two-year, if we weren't here, these folks would have nowhere. So, although 50, 60 percent of our students transferred to Florida State or another institution for a four-year degree, the 30 or 40 percent who find a career path or an education through us because we happen to be next door. It's really been pretty rewarding. And to find such interesting students and to make such a difference late in a career has just been great. So it's been a lot of fun.

Cynthia Golden: That's powerful.

Jack Suess: That really is, that really speaks to why we want to be in higher ed, because you are having the opportunity to change lives, and that is a great story. So, Leah, could you talk briefly about the corporate engagement, strategic activity that EDUCAUSE has started? And then Brett, maybe you could sort of add in as to how you got pulled into this and started your work for EDUCAUSE.

Leah Lang: Yeah, so EDUCAUSE just completed a strategic planning effort. And one of the main areas of focus for that effort is to influence the evolution of the higher education technology market to better serve institutions and learners. And just organizationally, we're planning to do that through initiatives that support elevating end user voices, supporting mission-driven collaborations between higher education and industry and then supporting institutions and their ability to make informed technology decisions. So not all of that work rests on my department, but we can do a lot to support that initiative through culture changes and program changes in my area. And I'm really focused on culture change. I felt like the main area of focus for me could be to kind of evolve that feeling or tension we have in the community with building trust between the corporate community and the higher education community. So a lot of the programming changes we're making in my department are in support of that initially, and then we'll kind of move on for there and how to support some of the other initiatives. So the three things, well, you'll see a couple of main changes within the next year, or the era already starting now, and Brett's helping with that. The biggest change is in our development of a corporate partnership program. We used to have different levels of signal to the community that certain companies have reached a certain status in our community and we called those companies partners, but that wasn't true partnership. What we're looking for here is to select some highly engaged organizations who are committed to the efforts of higher education and our mission and values aligned with higher education and working together with them to evolve the technology market. So you see initial partners like Vantage Technology Consulting and Moran Technology Consultants who have deep expertise in higher education and have been really good supporters of our community for a long time. So the partners you see coming out initially are ones who have either a really good proven track record of supporting our community or are working towards. building together with us on supporting the evolution of the technology market. They've committed to us at some level that they're planning to work on projects with us. A couple of other things you'll see are programming changes. So focusing on educating the higher ed community on how to work better with industry partners. But all so actually that's the flip side of an initiative that we started a few years ago that Brett's helping with where we're educating the corporate community about higher education and the nuance of higher education and how it's not the medical vertical or robotics or some other vertical that they might be dealing with. But in addition to educating corporate community, we are focusing now on how can higher education be better partners to industry in these efforts too. And then you'll see a couple of other things, us focusing on programming to support emerging technologies so that new technologies have an on-ramp into higher education and evolving the use cases for technology and higher education. And then another big change we've made this year is around corporate membership and what you are able to get access to as a corporate member. We heard from our community in the discovery process and developing these new programs that they're more willing to trust and support EDUCAUSE at the membership level. That signals to the community that they are, at least invested in the outcomes of higher education at some minimum level beyond just wanting to advertise or get their brand in front of the community, but they might actually want to participate in the community. And so through that, now you're only allowed to produce a thought leadership piece for Educause review if you're a corporate member. You're only allowed to participate in a webinar if you're a corporate member. You're only allowed to participate on Connect in the discussion if you're a corporate member. So we're starting to make it focus on a member only resource and kind of bringing the community together in this membership status.

Jack Suess: So Brett, I'm assuming that you probably complained to someone about how things were going and immediately were tapped into helping to solve the problem. So maybe you could talk about how you got involved.

Bret Ingerman: And that's almost exactly right. So much like you and Cynthia, for years, I've participated in the various forums that EDUCAUSE has, including most notably the CIO list, right? The go-to list for lots of information. And over the years, I've had my share of vendors harassing me after posts. I've had my watched vendors do things that are sort of inappropriate by our common guidelines on the list and I have complained in the past. And so a few years ago, Educause reached out and said, we want to start a new initiative to try to help vendors, partner corporate partners better learn how to work with us, understand us more. And I got the thinking that I can't do my job without them, and they likely don't have jobs without us. And so it seemed better to find a way to help them engage more productively with us. So they started, EDUCAUSE came up with a webinar series called the Higher Ed Guide for the Corporate Community, where the idea was for people new to working in the higher ed community or people who wanted a refresher could take a series of four classes, live webinars, with a diverse group of people from higher ed where we could explain to them, how are we organized? What's our procurement cycle like? Why does it take so long to get a decision? How many offices do you have to go to find the funding to do this? The issue of centralized versus distributed IT, why we have different contract terms that we need added. And so the idea was the more we could educate them about our processes, the more they could try to align their approaches to be more synergistic with how we do things. Because at the end of the day, they've got products that are valuable to various members of our community. They just, they might not have aligned their sales cycle or their communication cycle, or for example, know who to talk to. One of the things that's come up is a lot of times we have individual faculty reaching out to vendors, trying to talk about getting a particular solution. The problem with that is it's almost never the case that an individual faculty member either has the authority or the money to go ahead and procure. But our corporate partners don't know this and so they end up going down a long rabbit hole only to find out and now they've spent time, energy and money, right? Cause it's opportunity down this rabbit hole when at the beginning they should have said, hey, can we bring someone from your IT in because we know there's going to be issues of authentication or security, maybe want to bring procurement in basically to help them better partner with us. And I will say this has been one of the most rewarding things that I've done. I've gotten great feedback. EDUCAUSE gets great feedback on this. We've been doing it now for what, Leah, two and a half years? I was at the conference in the fall and walking around the vendor area and it's amazing how many people came up to me and said, I learned a ton from what you guys shared in the workshop. I've educated my manager about this. We've encouraged others to go ahead and take the course. So, it's clearly resonating. We're not solving all of life's problems this way, but hopefully we're building an ever-increasing population of folks who get us because we are different if you've sold to other areas, but they start to get us and that it's like a ripple in the pond, right? The ripples grow out further and further. And so I think I'm glad for the work that Leah and John O'Brien are doing with rethinking how we fundamentally engage with corporate folks. Because again, we can't do our jobs without.

Cynthia Golden: So just to kind of follow up on that point a little bit, Leah, you talked earlier about how, members were willing to support corporations if they were members of EDUCAUSE, right? So were there other drivers as you were putting the strategic plan together that said we need to put a lot more effort into improving the corporate partnerships or corporate relations on- you know, what else was driving this for EDUCAUSE?

Leah Lang: I think it comes down to that friction in the culture and it being just an ever-growing pain point that had always been part of probably the board discussions and just the temperature in the community. We need to do something to make this better. And the email situation and the spam has gotten worse over the years. And I think it was just a really good opportunity for the strategic planning effort to say, this is going to be the time where we focus on solving this major problem.

Jack Suess: You know, one of the interesting things to me is, like you, Brett, you know, I can go back a little more than three decades even. And, you know, when you're starting at, when I'm thinking about when we were starting out, we might've been talking about, if we had a dozen strategic vendors, that would be a lot. It might've been, you know, six to eight. And so, you could really have, you know, this idea of strategic vendors. You know, now when we've gone through and we've looked at our vendor portfolio because of software as a service, we're at 250, maybe if you count software and software as a service, we're at four hundred. And you know, it's harder to be thinking about well, which ones are necessarily strategic? All of them are important, but maybe they're not all strategic. But it also then sort of brings back this question of, as we're trying to be thinking about this portfolio piece that's out there, how can we be also not just educating vendors, but how can we also be helping our campus educate itself? Because I think we have an educational campaign potentially in our functional offices and our groups. Because often, their decision makers for what they are going to buy. If you think of Registrar or Bursar or Financial Aid or other groups, and have you been thinking about how this program can also be sort of helping us help ourselves but in other offices to some degree?

Bret Ingerman: I think you're right, I think in the past, people on campus had to come to us because we were the only place they could get the services that they wanted or procure the goods that they needed. And now with SaaS and everybody being online, many of the times, they don't actually need us to make a purchase. So, I think it changes the nature of the conversation where we want them to use us because we can help integrate solutions so that the sum is greater than the individual pieces and to get economies of scale and value. And so, at least at where I am at Tallahassee, it's led to a conversation about some of the vendors we procure from, we're just buying particular widgets, we're buying things from. And there's nothing wrong with that, right? We have a bunch of things that we need, they're necessary, but they may not be strategic. But the vendors that we focus on that are strategic, at least what I try to do is share with my executive team colleagues and people on campus, why they're strategic. And we talk about this in the higher ed guide, the notion of a strategic partner is not so much just trying to sell you something. It's like they're trying to build a relationship and a relationship is two ways. It's a company that wants to listen and really understand what we're looking for in their product or why this particular direction they took actually didn't help us and this might've and they're willing to engage. We get to talk to their developers. We get to talk to senior members of their team. And it's not just small company startups who do this. We have examples in our ecosystem of really large corporate partners who also expose their senior leadership and their product teams to us. It's a mindset, right? Not necessarily due to size. And what that lets me do is talk internally and say, yeah, we can get you those, but if you've got a more strategic need, like we're now heavily into AI and building virtual assistants, there's lots of vendors you could buy something from, but we've got a partner who's actually working with us to try to figure out how to make their product and how they sell it and how they service it, meet the needs of us because they've not worked in the higher ed community. So Jack, I think you're right. Us, by working to better understand the different types of relationships we have, I think it does lead to better conversations on campus in terms of facilitating purchases when you need to buy something but facilitating conversations when we want to have a more strategic alignment of the technology with the services.

Cynthia Golden: I think that's really critical. So to switch gears just a little bit, one of the things that I know I think you're both part of is the Corporate Engagement Advisory Committee that EDUCAUSE has. And could you talk a little bit about that, what its mission is and maybe what the big issues are of the day that the committee's dealing with?

Leah Lang: Yeah, the committee was formed mainly initially to help set a new direction for corporate engagement. And so early tasks are we're around the components of the partnership program, just guiding us in terms of, you know, what does corporate what should corporate engagement at EDUCAUSE look like and what would you like to see for the future? So, we're just finishing up our first year of engagement with the advisory committee. and currently we're working on building out this event that will happen at the annual conference called the Annual Partner Summit. And we're planning to bring together all of our partner companies, key leaders of higher education, and then key leaders of associated, of peer associations like Internet2, NACUBO, AIR. And we want to just get everyone in the room and talk about these big pain points that are in our community and then have that be the place to the next year of work with the advisory committee. They're a really great engaged group of both community members, higher education community members, industry colleagues, and people who have been on both sides of the community. And so it's always a really rich discussion. And I think that we're going to be moving in a really good direction with their help.

Bret Ingerman: And it's been eye opening for me to be on this group because it does consist of our corporate partners and members. And so I've learned a bunch, right? We have these conversations where we see both sides of the coin, which has been great. So one of the things that's coming out of this also is this summer, there'll be a webinar that I'm going to moderate from a number of our corporate partners about helping higher ed understand what, how, how can we best engage consultants to work with us? What are the things that we should know about? When you reach out to a consulting firm, what should you expect, how should it all work, which is a great way to educate ourselves on things that they're interested in. And I think the other thing I took away in this, I can say this because I've actually worked for EDUCAUSE, but one of the things in the past is a lot of the activities of the organization really don't exist. We couldn't do without the funding we received from our corporate partners and how they invest in things like the conference. One of the nice changes that you get out of the advisory committee. is EDUCAUSE is really looking to change that model. It's not just about writing a check, it's actually helping grow the organization, having to move us forward. And to see so many committed corporate partners from all different areas want to really fundamentally figure out, okay, they understand that at the basis, membership fees and how to make that work, but how to use those fees in a way that give them more value and that give us as the higher ed community more value from those investments. How do we come at this from both sides. So it's been really fun to see these partners in a different light.

Cynthia Golden: I bet.

Jack Suess: So, Brett, when will you fix the problems of me getting too much email or too many phone calls from vendors? And do you have any suggestions on how institutions might deal with that? And we were talking before the podcast, and I mentioned that I hate to be rude, but at the other sense. These are all automated bots coming out of CRM systems or other sorts of things. And so maybe figuring out how I can help them is one way. Are there resources we should be pointing people to if we're responding back?

Bret Ingerman: That's actually a great question. And it's a very loaded question, right? Because that is one of the problems we all face is the deluge that we've got of messages coming in. And let me cover it in a couple of different ways. One of them is actually helping the corporate partners realize that that's a bad way for them to monetize or to measure their success. So the example I use is at the annual conference. If their goal is to scan as many badges as people walk by their booth as they possibly can, I'm not exactly sure what that's telling their marketing or salespeople about anything, right? I think it seems to me to be better to have three really deep productive conversations than a hundred people whose badge you go ahead and get as they walk by. So part of it is talking to our corporate partners about changing the model that they use to measure the own success of their own sales folks. So that's been great. As far as email, that comes up in every one of these corporate guide sessions, like how do we stop email? Because I do ignore every single unsolicited message I get. I just don't do it. So we've talked about possible solutions and some of them involve getting a reference. I mean, Jack or Cynthia, if you send me a message saying, we've got a vendor who we think might really be good for you or we want to do an introduction, I'll take those every day of the week. Because if you value what company X has got, I probably am going to be interested in company X as well. Part of it is educating folks that on the list that getting them to realize that sometimes they can respond showing their knowledge of the industry rather than their ability to sell a product, right? So, they can give advice without being salesy, which changes the kind of nature of what's there. But I know for me, one of the solutions I hit upon a number of years ago, and it's been great, is I ask vendors to apply to talk to me. There's a form on my website that they can fill out if they're interested in actually getting my time. It's got a whole bunch of questions. Who are you? What are you trying to sell? Have we done business before? Who's actually going to be on the call with me? Because a lot of these companies have lead development folks. And I don't want to talk there, I want to know who we're going to talk to. And then two or three times a month, we line up these vendors, they get twenty minutes of my time. It's like a shark tank episode, no more than twenty minutes. I don't do any homework beforehand. I don't do any reading beforehand. And I start out by saying, it's not like I have a need in search of a solution, because if I did, I'd go on the internet and find you. You have a solution in search of the need. And so we quickly find out, did they look at our technology plan? Have they read any of our press releases to find out what's important to it? And in twenty minutes, they pitch. Some of them pitch very, very poorly. Some of them pitch very, very well. But I would say some of the companies that we now have our closest relationships with are ones who took the time to do that because to me it said, it wasn't about the bot sending out a thousand email messages. It was the one 20-minute conversation. And what I will say about Higher Ed is, we're a very, even though we're big, we're a very small community, right? If I have a great relationship with Cynthia Golden at company A today, but I'm not interested, we're not going to buy, when Cynthia goes to company B in two years and thinks she has something to talk to me about, I'm likely now to take Cynthia’s call because I've had a relationship with her to be able to do that. So for us, that's actually really worked. It's given me an outlet to tell folks, how can I get in touch with you? Go fill out the form and we'll see if there's something of value. But one of the things that you'll see coming up over the course of this year is, me reaching out and others reaching out to our community of CIOs and others and asking for their feedback on ideas of how can we do this? Is there a way, for example, and we've talked with Leah about this, is there a way where if I'm interested in a product that I could have a way where people in the community who may have a solution could post it without emailing me, I could see them, figure out if that's of interest, and then follow up with them to be able to do this. And I like the idea of the people who can pitch us being curated, such that you need to be a member. I mean, I don't mind hearing from people who are invested in our community. I mind hearing from people who think we're simply a means to check off the box that they sent out 10,000 messages today.

Cynthia Golden: So our listeners should be watching for your requests for input in the coming year, huh?

Bret Ingerman: Yeah, that's we, I think, so I've got this shark tank thing. I'd like to think there are lots of other clever ways that people have chosen to interact with the solicitations they get. I mean, because, you know, there's always a needle in a haystack, right? So, they're there and our job is to figure out where are the needles to get through the volumes of other males. So, I'm sure there are some other good practices out there that could become best practices for some of us.

Jack Suess: So, Leah, are there any sort of final words or final thoughts that you have in thinking about how our community can be improving or ways that our listeners, the CIOs and others could be helping in this effort that you're trying to sort of launch?

Leah Lang: Yeah, send all the feedback you can about pain points in this space and your relationships with industry. And we'll take that to the advisory committee and try to figure out how to solve the big problems. We feel that this is just a really good new direction for us to have better relationships with partners that can actually influence change. And getting feedback about this email problem, for example, is super helpful because we're hoping that at our level with our relationships with companies, we can educate the core salespeople that are emailing you, their beholden to certain metrics that people above them don't understand higher ed in the way that we do, to understand that those metrics don't necessarily work. So how can our relationships at a top-down level influence change while the work that Brett's doing and members of the community in terms of you know, teaching and demonstrating good leadership and how to have good relationships with industry colleagues at the ground is going to be helpful. So, I would say that's my second point is, you know, first give us feedback about how we can do better at the programming level. Second, lead by example and talk about the good relationships you have with industry. Instead of focusing on complaining about all the annoying email that you get, talk about how you've actually been able to have really good partnerships. And even if you have really good transactional relationships, I think that's fine to demonstrate success in those areas as well.

Jack Suess: So you mentioned feedback. Is there a particular spot on the website or the EDUCALS under the corporate partnership where there's a forum or there's something where people can be giving feedback or I'm just sort of curious How do they give that?

Leah Lang: You can always email CORP at EDUCAUSE or email me directly. My email address is L. Lang. But also just recognizing who's on our board, who's on our advisory committee. Sending emails to the people who influence change within EDUCAUSE is helpful. And then also working through community groups. I especially spend a lot of time monitoring connect those conversations and that's an area where I pay attention to. If the community is having a challenge with industry, I try to pick up on that and then bring that to the advisory committee as well.

Bret Ingerman: I think that Leah's comment about giving feedback can't be overstated enough. That is, whenever any of members of the community have something good that they think could be replicated elsewhere or bad, that's a problem and they may have a suggestion how to overcome it. I think it's important to email Leah, email me, email members of the committee. The other thing is, I'm certain that there are corporate partners who are listening to the podcast. And so for them as well, model good behavior. So for example, we have lots of corporate members who are really, really knowledgeable in their field. They should be sharing that knowledge even if it's not specifically to get a sale, right? Because again, the more we see you as a partner, as somebody who has information we need and can help us with, the more others will do that as well. So I would encourage those corporate partners out there who really do get us and really do understand, help us by leading by example and showing that there are other means to the end. You know, sometimes a cell may come because you sent me an email, but sometimes I get to know you, and then when I'm looking for something, I recognize I can reach out and go, oh, you've been really, really helpful. I want to go ahead and talk to you.

Cynthia Golden: So, one thing I thought about earlier, did the nature of your conversations within the advisory committee change when you were talking about corporate relations with R1s and large institutions versus smaller private institutions? Did that factor in much at all? Did you see differences?

Bret Ingerman: I think there are, I think that's come out because the committee has representatives from all types of institutions. And I think that's actually one of the things that we learned in the corporate community webinars that our corporate partners struggle with. Very, very different how you engage each of those, how you sell to each of those, who you need to talk to. So I think it's building an awareness both sides that sometimes governance really is an obstacle or something you need to have a deeper awareness of. So for example, many of the organizations didn't know about iPads, right? So they could go figure out how big is an institution is sort of a proxy for how complicated it might be to get something done and get across. So the R1 issue, you know, do you talk to a central IT? Do you talk to a distributed IT? How do you do this? Those are really tough, but we all benefit from our partners knowing how to have those conversations and understand those differences about us.

Leah Lang: say the conversations at the advisory committee level are more around like global project work that could happen to support the entire community and then from there in terms of implementing the project work the nuance of the different types of institutions comes out. One of our partners, AWS, just recently worked with us on an AI readiness assessment for the community. So at the advisory committee we'd talk about like the fact that it would be a great idea to come up with that kind of thing. But then the project work involved ended up resulting in the needs of all the Theth of higher education.

Bret Ingerman: And there's a good example, because I think, there's a case where educating the community is good. I have to admit, the first time I saw it, it struck me as an AWS AI readiness guide. And then when I clicked through and read, Noel, well, correct. So when I clicked through though and looked at the guide and downloaded the document to look at the guide, it actually, it uses the knowledge of the folks at AWS who've been asked this question and understand it. It's agnostic, it actually doesn't matter what you want to do or how you want to do this. And I think getting more of those would lead to people having less skepticism about having more of those, right? There's a perfect example of leveraging the expertise, not the product availability of a particular vendor. And I think that's going to be proving to be even more valuable to the community because I have to admit, it makes me look at AWS in a positive light. They did something to give back to the community rather than send out a bot with an email saying, we have a solution, we have a solution. So, I thought that was excellent. I thought the guide was excellent.

Leah Lang: I appreciate that feedback, Brett, because that's kind of what we're looking to change with the mindset for the community, is so many of our partners and so many of the partners that I know on a personal level, the people that I talk to, they do really want to create. They see a problem in higher education. They want to create a solution for higher education. Sure, they get an intangible benefit by having their name attached, but that's not why they're doing it. And I would love for the community to see more examples of those companies just supporting the needs of higher education because they really want to. They're just not, they haven't been, EDUCAUSE hasn't been doing a good job of giving them the tools to work in that way up until now.

Jack Suess: So, one of the things that I end up, that I want to advocate for is the fact that at least now for my institution, anything that we buy has to be having what's called a HECVAT, which is something that the community, the higher ed communities come together. It's the higher education community, the security checklist that we expect every vendor to fill out. And I'm sort of going to vendors and saying, if you don't have this already that you're prepared to give to me, I'm not even going to begin to talk to you. Because what we have found is having to pull this out of different organizations or have our security team spend days or sometimes weeks back and forth trying to get something so that we can see if we want to buy it. That's just unproductive time. And it should be that if you want to sell to the higher ed community, the first bar is, is you've at least met our community expectation of having the security assessments. There may be additional bars that you're asked to sort of satisfy by some places, but almost every place is going to ask you at least to have the basic of a HECVAT that would be there.

Bret Ingerman: And here's an example where I think our community has really come together well. Well, I know that started out by number Internet 2 and Educause and big institutions. We now at Tallahassee Community College don't talk to vendors if they don't fill out the HECVAT. But even more importantly, when we've talked to our corporate partners and vendors about this, we've been able to say, look, if you do it once, you're done. This actually saves you money. And if you can't, so we mostly talk to sales folks at those seminars If you can't answer the questions, you should be talking higher up at your organization, your company and go, hey, I'm being asked this when I go talk to these schools, I need to have an answer and I need to be able to figure it out. So there's a great example where it helps us, but it helps them too. I mean, it's a win-win. And so I think more of these kinds of relationships and partnerships and strategic directions are the way we all need to go because it makes us all more efficient and more effective.

Jack Suess: So we would be remiss if we didn't end with asking you the question each, what does the term integrative CIO mean to each of you? Brett?

Bret Ingerman: Wow, so I guess I'd like to think it describes the role that I think I have, that it's no longer, a CIO no longer functions on their own. There’re very few things we do on our own. That to me, it's like the integration of our solutions. I think we're the glue that ties together the needs of the institution. And we speak a language that our colleagues don't, right? We speak technology, we speak, we know the solutions. They speak their problems and we should have them talking in their language. But I think we need to be the middle person to figure out how do we solve that need in a way that's scalable and sustainable and that makes really good use of technologies we've invested in, the partnerships we've formed with folks. So, to me, I think that describes how we should go about doing our business, not on our own, but in partnership with as many different constituents on campus as we can.

Jack Suess: Leah?

Leah Lang: Yeah, I like that you said glue, Bret. The word that came to mind for me was connector or connection. You know, having deep understanding of how the technology is supposed to connect together, but also how the people are supposed to connect together. And I mean, I think at least 50% of the world these days is knowing who else on campus should be pulled into certain conversations and how to get everybody collaborating, not just getting them in the room, but how to get them talking to each other and understanding why collaboration is so important.

Cynthia Golden: I agree. This has been a great conversation. Thank you both for joining us.

Leah Lang: Thanks for inviting us. This was great.

Bret Ingerman: Thank you for having us. This has been great.

Leah Lang: This has been great, yeah.