How CIOs Plan Succession in a Time of Change

Cynthia Golden: Hi everybody, I'm Cynthia Golden. I'm with Vantage Technology Consulting Group and it is my pleasure to welcome our listeners today to the fourth season of The Integrative CIO podcast. Today, I'm really excited to welcome a new co-host to today's podcast, Michael Cato. Hi, Michael.

Michael Cato: Hi, Cynthia.

Cynthia Golden: Michael is senior VP and CIO at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, and many of you may know him from the work he's done in EDUCAUSE or with the Leadership Institute with NERCOMP and with many other activities in our community. I'm really happy you're joining us today, Michael.

Michael Cato: Thank you very much, Cynthia. I'm thrilled to be here.

Cynthia Golden: And today I am also really excited to tell you all that we'll be spending some time talking to my previous co-host, Jack Suess, who's CIO at UMBC. We're turning the tables a little bit on Jack today and talking to him as one of those integrative CIOs that we have tried to engage on this podcast and so we hope to get Jack's take on a few of the current issues that are facing us today in higher education. It's nice to see you, Jack.

Jack Suess: It's nice to see you, Cynthia. And Michael, I am thrilled that you are taking over for me. When I heard you on the podcast that you did, I said this is the person that should be taking over for me. So thrilled that others agreed with that assessment and to see you in this role.

Cynthia Golden: Okay. So let's jump right in because I think we have a lot to talk about.

Michael Cato: Sounds good, and I'm happy to get us started this time around. Jack, maybe we'll start with the question that I imagine you get quite a bit. You've been at UMBC now for several decades. Maybe take us back. What first drew you to the university and my favorite question, what's kept you there all this time?

Jack Suess: So actually, this coming June will be 50 years from when I walked onto UMBC as an undergraduate. And as a first generation student, I didn't walk onto UMBC until I came to take my placement tests during orientation, because I didn't know anyone who went to college and no one told me you were supposed to go visit colleges. I also knew that because my father had died and I was really going to college on the fact that I had social security benefits that allowed me to attend, that I wasn't going to be able to live on campus, and so I had to pick a college that was in commuting distance. And UMBC was this 10-year-old school that supposedly was pretty good in science, and so I ended up choosing this one out of the three schools that I applied to and have been here for the last 49 years.

Now, how I got into this role as a staff person is during my junior year, I ended up getting a chance to be a COBOL TA of all things, and that then led me to get a job as a student employee over the summer helping to convert code. They were going from a mainframe to a mini-computer, if you could think of that. And so I ended up then being kept on. When I graduated, they offered me a job. I had no idea that I would ever work at a university, but at that time, it was early '81 and the economy was just awful. Unemployment had skyrocketed. The university offered me a job. It's like, "Okay, I know it. This seems fun. I'll do this for a couple of years," and I'm still here.

Now, the question of what kept me here is something that's really interesting, and I mentioned this to lots of people. What I loved about the time at UMBC is when I started as a staff member, we had just hit 15 years of age. And at that point, everything is new. You're having to build a university and so you get this opportunity to be doing things that no one else had done, and everything is a green field. And it's just been an amazing journey watching UMBC evolve. From when I first came here, we had 5,000 students. We're up to 15 now, but we've really gone through all of the rankings to finally get to R1, and it's just been an amazing journey.

I'll also say I've had two really amazing leaders that I got to work directly for. Freeman Hrabowski was president for 30 years, and 22 of those I reported to him. And the last three years with President Sheares Ashby have also been great. And so you've got this opportunity to be engaged with great leaders who are thinking bold and big things. It's kind of a fun place. And I know you're thinking that because you know Bowdoin has been a really interesting place as well for you, I'm sure, Michael.

Michael Cato: It has been. And Jack, I really appreciate your framing this up that because you arrived at UMBC when it was so young, you have been through, I would imagine, cultural, strategic, political shifts as an institution itself changed. It's not that you've had not only not the same role. It's not the same institution, and it's been through so many different phases of being what it is over the span of your career. Am I correct about that?

Jack Suess: Yeah. No, I really think of it as three or four different institutions, because literally we've gone through different Carnegie classifications. We were different types of institutions throughout that time, and as such, the problems that we faced were very different. Honestly, when I first started working at UMBC, I was in what was then called the academic computing section. And it was myself, my boss, and I was monitoring and managing a group of students. That's how small we were at that particular time, and so it's just really interesting to be seeing where we are today.

Cynthia Golden: I'm curious, Jack, are there other people at the institution and leadership roles who have the same or similar history that you have who have been there since the beginning?

Jack Suess: No.

Cynthia Golden: That's interesting.

Jack Suess: At this particular point, a lot of the leadership really turned over as we went from Dr. Hrabowski to Dr. Sheares Ashby, and part of that was the fact that we had just very, very little turnover for 10 or 15 years of the last part of Dr. Hrabowski's tenure. And so everyone was ready. There was a number of retirements or other sorts of things that took place.

But as we go forward, part of what I have to keep in the back of my mind is that people don't want to hear that you've tried something that now they're talking about and it didn't work. And honestly, back to UMBC's evolved, it may very well be the right time to be retrying that. And so I never want to couch anything, and we've tried that, done that. It didn't work. But I do try to couch things when people bring things up as, "Okay, here was the history, here's some reaction that we got. Here's some things you might want to be aware of."

As we go forward, it's helpful to understand where some people are, because there are some faculty and there are some people who probably are here from the early '80s still. And so sometimes if you tried something in the mid '90s or early 2000s, and it didn't work, you can at least understand and talk about the fact that yes, times have changed, it's different. We understand that we did this, and I think it gives a little more credibility that you've thought through all the things.

Michael Cato: Yeah. Well, one of the things I get curious about too, you said three to four versions of the institution at least. How have your perspectives on the role of the CIO evolved across that span of time and those kind of shifts either at UMBC and maybe just broader?

Jack Suess: Well, part of the thing that is going on in that period, Michael, is that in general, IT's role is changing. If you think back to early '80s, IT was not really viewed as this strategic role reporting directly to the president. It's really around the early '90s, mid '90s as the web and the internet really take hold that everyone is recognizing, "Oh, wow, technology is going to be an incredibly important element of all institutional strategy."

And then you really end up having the post-2000s where we're dealing with the fact that the growth of research and other sorts of things have really taken off around many universities. And so I do think that in that context, what we've seen is every decade IT takes on a new role and often it's more and more important. To me, the really interesting thing is coming out of the pandemic, you would've thought that everyone would've recognized just how critical IT was because as I said to some people, one of the things that we learned was that IT allowed us to go to be a virtual university pretty effectively.

Most institutions did it within a week and they did it pretty effectively and the university was doing pretty well. And again, there were all sorts of other challenges happening in the pandemic, but the context that's there is we now understand that technology is this cornerstone of the institution keeping it running. But what I noticed is that we were all just completely, I think, burned out to some extent over what change we had to absorb in such a small period of time.

And so you've seen a little bit of a slowdown, or at least I've seen it some here. But now we've got AI coming in, and we can all see that AI is like this building tidal wave that's just going to wash over our institutions and it's going to change things. And we're not exactly sure how, but we as technologists have got to be helping to try to understand how do we manage that change, how do we help us get ready for the fact that as this comes in, work is going to change, teaching and learning is going to change, research is going to change, and we've got to be nimble in how we're working through this over the next couple of years.

Michael Cato: Yeah, Jack, I appreciate all of that. I have a working hypothesis that a colleague who's an anthropologist gave me that during so much of the advances that we had during our COVID responses that if you reference COVID when talking about them, you risk triggering a stress response, a trauma response in the people that you're engaging with so that even if the lesson is a good one or it opens up new opportunities, making that connection back has just elicited such negative responses in some people that it washes over all of the benefits.

And I've been recently struck at how many institutions are wrestling with their AI conversations independent of their IT organizations. I didn't see that part coming. And so to have those two experiences happening so close together, I really think my colleague was correct that part of it is, "Look, if I can do this without IT, I'd rather because I don't want to go back through that experience of just all the lessons that I had to learn from that COVID experience."

Jack Suess: And I think what you're highlighting is really incredibly valuable. One, just that reference about we have to remember COVID can be a triggering word, but I think the other component is we have to be self-reflective enough about the fact that we probably didn't manage the change as well as we think we did.

And now we're getting ready to head into this AI space. And so people, they had to depend upon us because we had to be doing things almost immediately, but we have a little more time, but I don't know that we have as much time as people somewhat think in the AI space. And so that's the interesting question as we watch this evolve.

Cynthia Golden: Well, I think people are trying to figure it out as their staff and faculty and students are using it and dealing with it every day. And so that makes it challenging.

Jack Suess: Well, it is, and I know we have so many questions and we'll go on. But in this particular context, what I'll just say is that I think the other thing that's there is as it's having these leaps every six to nine months, AI, in and of itself, is changing. And to me, that is part of the challenge, that rate of change is almost impossible for people to plan for, understand, and anticipate effectively. We're not good at exponential change. And so that's going to be one of our challenges.

Cynthia Golden: And we know the CIO is playing an important role here. So that takes me to this podcast and The Integrative CIO that we worked on together for the last several years. I've thought about this, but what do you think have been experiences while doing the podcast that might've surprised you? Did you have any?

Jack Suess: Well, the one that I'm probably most surprised by is that for a number of people... And it's not like we have a huge audience of hundreds of thousands. That would be nice. But I'm surprised by how many people who are up and coming, they're in this track where possibly they could decide to go to be a CIO or not, listen to the podcast and are using this as, "Should I or shouldn't I?" and other sorts of things. And so I think that's really valuable in the sense of being able to help people.

I love, Michael, what you're doing with your Next-generation Leaders Program and all of that. I think we need to be giving examples to people of what others have done, not that they're to copy that because everyone has got to be authentic and be their own self in this role, but really to be hearing about some of the things that have worked. Now, I think it would be better if we're more comfortable talking also about some of the things that didn't work out as well, but that's always a little bit harder.

Cynthia Golden: Now, one of the things that I thought about, which is along similar lines that surprised me was how much practical advice people were willing to share and that they did share in all of the seasons. I think we heard a lot of that and I hope we continue to do so.

Jack Suess: And we should expect it in a way because that's EDUCAUSE, and that's what our community has been about from the very beginning. And so I think the podcast at least lives up to the values of the organization.

Cynthia Golden: Did any of the episodes or the people we interviewed leave a lasting impression on you?

Jack Suess: I think almost all of them had things that really helped me. When I think back, I remember Sharon, who was at The College of New Jersey, talking about how her role evolved, and she ended up taking on a much larger role within the organization and how that came about. And you saw this where leaders were talking about both their opportunities that had been afforded to them, but also some of their challenges that they've had.

And so honestly, I don't want to pick each name and other things, but I was just struck by how incredible our larger community really is. And I think there's a lot of valuable lessons in there for people if you go back and read and listen to many of the ones in the archives.

Cynthia Golden: So if you think about the future, what do you think Michael and I should be hoping our listeners take away from the podcast?

Jack Suess: I think that the one thing I hope people take away from this episode, I'll at least say that, is that this is an incredible role that we get to fill as leaders in our organization. Honestly, I'm honored that I've been given this chance. I never thought that this would be the role that I ended up having at UMBC, but the opportunity to make a difference is really there if you're willing to live those kind of opportunities.

And so I really encourage people who want to make a difference with people in higher education in our society to be thinking about how they can bring their full selves to this role and how they can be really helping their institution do the role that their institution... All of our institutions are different. And I think that when you get that opportunity, it's living it and making a difference and really caring about your students, your faculty, your employees, and through that [inaudible 00:20:24].

Michael Cato: I really appreciate that, Jack. It's interesting because one of the things you've said earlier that I definitely agree with that the EDUCAUSE community itself is known for being very collaborative and openly sharing with each other. And it's one of the places that you have become really known for as being a resource for a lot of us to learn from your experiences, to seek your insight.

And one piece that I've often heard you talk about is you just mentioned it earlier, developing that next generation of leaders and getting ready for succession in some cases, either at your institution or other places. Would you mind talking a little bit about how you think about approaching succession planning at your time, either at UMBC or as you engage with others in conversations about succession planning?

Jack Suess: So I think that there's two different components to that question. And so one component is really this idea of developing leaders. And whether the leader ends up being the CIO or a director or an assistant vice president or a manager, the idea of developing leaders is fundamental to organizational success. And so when you think about succession planning, I think it's a mistake to be saying we want to focus on the spotlight on one individual.

What you really want to be doing is holistically building the strongest possible organization that you can build as deep as you can be building it in a way that then can be continuing to thrive and do well. Because no matter if you have a great succession plan and you bring a person forward, but for whatever reason the rest of their team, your team ends up leaving, you haven't left that leader in a really strong place.

And so I think that's the first piece. I think the second piece, and I had to learn this, is that there are two different kinds of succession models. I think one is where you have a situation that a leader is going to be retiring, but everyone else at the institution is going to remain the same, especially your boss and other leaders. And there, succession planning can work out really, really well.

I think where you are having a leadership change and if you report to the president, that president is changing out, I think you're being a little naive when you think that you can be doing succession planning. It's hard to be getting into that point. You have a lot of turnover that ends up happening naturally through this.

And so you just need to be cognizant of that. And that's why also being focused on building this broad and deep set of leaders is really a critical thing to be focused on as you are starting to be thinking about succession planning. And hopefully, you're starting to think about it three, four years ahead of time.

Cynthia Golden: I think that comment about building your leadership bench is a really important one because no matter what happens in the other scenarios, you can do that and you know you will make a difference.

Michael Cato: Yeah.

Cynthia Golden: I've had to learn too, I had a situation where I thought I had identified a successor and we had things in place, but leadership changes happened and it didn't work out. And I think that what you said about having developed the rest of the team, the organization will still be strong.

Jack Suess: Yeah. And one of the nice things about higher ed is that there's lots of opportunities for thinking about leadership development. EDUCAUSE does a great job. We've also used MOR for some things and we've done some other work. And so we have some internal programs here on the campus, and so we try to use all these things. In fact, the internal one that I often highly recommend to people as a first step is get involved in shared governance.

We have a very active staff senate, and last year we had the situation where my director of networks ran our exempt staff senate. My executive assistant is running the non-exempt staff senate, and we had a student who worked for us who was on their graduate student senate's executive advisory board. So it's just really trying to build this throughout is a good way to learn people and learn how universities work.

Michael Cato: And to grow their abilities, right?

Jack Suess: Exactly.

Michael Cato: To both hone their abilities, also to give them a chance to prove it to themselves and perhaps to others that can be really useful later on. Thank you very much for that.

Cynthia Golden: So a few minutes ago we were talking a little bit about change and disruption and AI, and I think that it's pretty fair to say we're facing the kind of changes we haven't faced before. And right now, many of our institutions, if not everyone, has experienced some intense political and cultural pressures. We have been seeing growing skepticism of the value of a four-year degree on the part of the public. Of course, the rapid technology changes with AI. And so when you think about all of that, what do you think that means for the future of IT organizations within institutions?

Jack Suess: So I'm actually excited, and I'll say why I'm excited. I'm also a little petrified. But in the excited space of this, one of the things that I have been trying to do for a number of years is build and launch the Comprehensive Learner Record project here at UMBC. For those that aren't familiar, the Comprehensive Learner Record is this concept of the transcript does not do justice to the value that higher ed is bringing to the individual. It tells your grades, it tells what classes you've taken.

It has nothing about your skills that you've obtained. It has nothing around the co-curricular experiences you've had. It has nothing around the internships and experiential learning that you've developed. And to me, what I think we as a community really need to be thinking about is to tell our story, is to be thinking about how do we start to be thinking about capturing these key elements that we all know when you talk to people, what was the thing that made the difference?

So for me, what made the difference to me was getting an internship where I was working at the university where I got that first job also doing TA as a COBOL. That changed the whole course of my life by having that happen. And that is never reflected in my transcript at all. And I think that what we have to be thinking about is how we as technologists can be helping to be bringing solutions that allow us as a community to tell this story of the power of education, the power of bringing people together, the power of a community to be doing things that help you find who you are and what you want to do.

Now, that's one of the key things. I think the second part of this is that we have to be really thoughtful and look in the mirror and recognize that we have a problem. We bring students in, and the difference between K through 12 and college is immense. The whole requirements for how you go about learning, how you're tested, how you have to perform are much, much higher in college. And we have to be prepared to be supporting students through that transition from K through 12 into college.

And so that's got a technology component, that's got a student success component. That's bringing data, that's bringing pedagogical insights to faculty and helping them be able to think differently about how they teach the course. All of that is going to have a technology component to it. And so to me, these are the two pieces that we as technologists should be trying to be helping our institutions take advantage of is how we can be bringing technology to tell our stories, but to also support our students.

Cynthia Golden: And I think that way of thinking can help maybe aspiring leaders understand what they can be doing in the future too.

Jack Suess: Well, you can never go wrong by helping people be better and succeed.

Cynthia Golden: Yeah. Yeah.

Michael Cato: Oh, that's a really concise way of saying it. Maybe we could elaborate on that a bit more, Jack. As you think about everything we've talked about so far, how do you translate these experiences into advice, suggestions, mentoring, conversations that you have with those who are pursuing those next generation CIO roles, especially if they're just getting into them? What are some of the things that you offer?

Jack Suess: That's a big question. So first-

Michael Cato: You're welcome.

Jack Suess: So I don't have a great answer for all aspects of this. I think part of what I have tried to do, which I should, I'm not good with social media and I wish I was better and I wish I had more time to be thoughtful and thinking about how I could do more with social media because I might be able to reach more people. But where I've tried to be making a difference is to be thinking about how do I do different things of writing for EDUCAUSE. And so if you go back and you look at the history of what I have tried to do in different EDUCAUSE review articles or blogs or presentations or other things is I've been trying to tell that story, but it's hitting smaller numbers of people. And so in a new world, what I would hope is people who are much better at social media.

Michael, I'm looking at you right now. I look for you to be taking some of those ideas and amplifying and really you telling your story or other story in ways that are going to reach more people so that they can be seeing that this is the power that we're able to be providing back to the community. But I'm always amazed at how many people go back and there's this academia thing, and I'm just shocked. Every day they send me a note, "Oh, such-and-such has downloaded your article," or "read this," or "done that." And it's like, "Oh, that's surprising," because that was 10 years ago, but it still is a helpful article for people who are thinking about this.

If I could say one thing that will just add into this, and that is one of the areas that I'm really interested in watching, and it really just hit me in the last month as I was talking with someone else and looking at some materials, and it's really thinking about what is going to happen with the LMS, the learning management system. Because it's in the next two to three years that AI is going to be so centered as a component of the LMS that you'll be seeing personal tutoring, you'll be seeing potentially content build out, you'll be seeing potentially personalization.

We are going to be seeing this monumental change in this system that to date we've used rather rudimentary. And to me, that's going to be one of the really exciting things. But how are CIOs, how are leaders going to be able to work with the provost, with their deans, with other people? Because this is going to be a huge change that's going to be hitting higher ed as these two pieces come together to take the LMS and move it from often what we're using it for to what it could be used for. And I think it's going to just be a tremendously interesting period.

Michael Cato: Yeah. Along those lines, Jack, I strongly agree with you. I think the LMS is one of the places that we are likely to see the next few waves of innovation have some very interesting implications. And I was at one of the vendor conferences last week and for the first time started thinking about putting some of the resources that typically you have to go into these highly secure environments to get access to that AI agents and some of the new protocols could allow us to put that information inside other systems that you're already in. You're already unauthenticated.

Why can't I ask for my grade information, my course schedule? Why couldn't I submit an expense report while I'm already inside the communication system? Why do I have to go back and log into the other system? Those models are based on ways of working that were system limitations. And if those limitations aren't there anymore, is it really siloing the systems or putting the information and the actions in places where people will be spending time otherwise?

Jack Suess: So inside of our portal, which provides a lot of information to students, it summarizes it, we built something that we, in the search bar, now called myUMBC Answers. And you type in a question and we really just launched it, but I've been looking at it almost every day. We've had the first month of the year without any real advertising, 7,000 questions. And I'm looking at the answers, and it'll tell you, "What's my grades? What are my classes today? What's my GPA? Am I in danger of having academic probation?"

You can just go on and on and ask it a variety of things. And watching how different students are starting to use it, how they're thinking about it, I can see so much potential to that. I'm using it all the time. Last night I got an email from somebody and I was just curious what their role was on the campus. And so I said, "Who is this email address?" And it came back with, "Oh, they work here and this is what they do." And all of this is now the opportunity that I think we can begin to have.

And to your point, we should be thinking about how we make all of our software smarter and AI-enabled. We have a new software catalog that'll be coming out in the next couple of weeks, and we've redesigned it so that you can say, "How do I analyze data?" And it'll tell you all the packages that we own that you can analyze data with, and it'll give you a synopsis of what type of data they can be used with or how can you use that.

These kinds of things should just be built into all of our systems. Where can I park? It should know what parking areas I'm eligible for and be able to tell me all of that sort of thing. I'm with you 100% that this is where we've got to be going. And that's exciting and also petrifying because we know that vendors are going to want to charge us. If we can't roll some of our own, it's going to be too expensive to do. And that's why we built our own right now.

Cynthia Golden: Well, this has been a great conversation. Before we wrap up, Jack, you know how we always ended by asking people a fun question?

Jack Suess: I'm scared.

Cynthia Golden: One of the things we thought about was if you hadn't been a CIO and been in IT all these years, what might you have been doing instead?

Jack Suess: That's a really interesting... So the job that I probably would've loved doing, although I don't know that I was qualified for it, would've been being a statistician or analytics guru for one of the Baltimore Orioles or the Ravens. I love... I was an applied math major who also did the computer science track.

And so I think it would've probably been trying to do something with data and statistics and things like that. But sports analytics would've been fun, although in the early '80s there weren't a lot of people doing sports analytics. It predates Moneyball and the Oakland Athletics.

Cynthia Golden: Well, thank you for joining us today and I hope you come back on the show. And Michael, welcome again. It's so cool to do this with you.

Michael Cato: Thank you very much, Cynthia. And thank you, Jack, both for taking the time to be with us today and also for extending the invitation to succeed you on the podcast.

Jack Suess: Oh, one, this was highly enjoyable and I will be glad to come back anytime you want to have future discussions. But two, I am just also so thrilled that you're taking over for me. Michael, you're going to do a fabulous job, you and Cynthia, and you're going to have a blast doing it. So congratulations and I look forward to listening to this and not being the, "Oh, no, I've got to hear how I sound." I could just be listening to the two of you and enjoying it.

Cynthia Golden: And to our listeners, as always, if you have ideas for the podcast, for guests or for topics, you can send a note to me or to Michael. You can find our information on the EDUCAUSE website. And thanks for listening.