Adapting to the Future

Sophie White: Hello everyone and welcome to EDUCAUSE Shop Talk. I'm Sophie White, content marketing and program manager at EDUCAUSE.

Jenay Robert: And I'm Jenay Robert. I'm a senior researcher at EDUCAUSE.

Sophie White: We'll be co-hosting today's show and today with us we have Mike Richichi, who is assistant vice president of IT at Baruch College of the City University of New York, and Brendan Post who's assistant vice president for IT client services at Carnegie Mellon University. And they'll be with us to chat about adapting to the future. So I did not memorize their bio, so bear with me as I read some notes right now. But Mike Richichi is assistant vice president for IT at Brew College. He has volunteered with EDUCAUSE for over 20 years and is on the 2024 program committee. So thank you Mike for planning this great event where we are today. He has an interest in the use of social media avatars for professional development and maybe we'll talk about that, what that means later.

Brendan Post leads a team of 70 employees in the central IT organization that provides best in class support for frontline user services, including productivity and collaboration tools, learning spaces, technology, media services, software delivery and help desk active for 20 years in higher education. it he's served as CIO, shared services program director and IT manager for both public and private universities. Brendan is engaged wide lead in the IT community both regionally and nationally through participation in numerous conference presentations, invited panels and advisory councils. He holds his M-S-M-I-T from the University of Virginia and is a certified change practitioner. So we'll be talking about change a lot today I think. And I'm excited to hear about your expertise. So we'll kick off the conversation today. Feel free to jump in if you have anything, but I wanted to hear when we said we're interested in talking about adapting to the future and higher education, what does that mean to both of you and why does that topic excite you in your work?

Mike Richichi: I think what it means to me, I think about the transformative change that's going on in higher education in general and the issues around its place in our society. And I think about an IT organization. What we do is we enable what happens in higher education in general. So it's critical for us to understand how things are changing, how funding models are changing, how enrollment is changing, and know that we have to still provide a high quality level of service to our entire organization. So I think it's really about figuring out how to do that with a changing climate of resources, a changing climate of support and a changing ethos about higher education in general. That's what I think.

Brendan Post: To build on what Mike said, I think thinking about us as strategic enablers is really critical. We sit at a confluence where we get to see things in the IT space across the university that maybe not everyone sees depending on their subject matter expertise in the area of expertise they're bringing. And so we're uniquely positioned to help universities through this transformative time and build on that and be seen as a strategic enabler and help both our teams and the university at large think about how we can adapt to the future and adapt to the changes that are coming and be a key part to that and a key advocate for helping that be successful.

Jenay Robert: And when I think about adapting to the future for higher education, I mean plus one to what these brilliant colleagues are saying, but also we're in a time where things are changing faster than they ever have before. And so adopting means something different now than it meant 10 years ago, even two years ago. I think it means being flexible, more flexible than ever before. I think it means being more future minded than ever before. That's something that we really value at EDUCAUSE of course through our horizon report research or we think strategically about the future and I think those skills are just becoming more and more essential. Yeah,

Sophie White: I agree with that. And I think, so we saw Brené Brown this morning for folks watching the recording later. She was our general session speaker today at the EDUCAUSE Annual Conference and I love that she talked about the pandemic, which is obviously a huge change agent throughout the world. We all had to adapt to that and I think it really encouraged us in higher ed to figure out how we can meet more resilient as institutions. But she also gave a call out to this community for really holding things together during that time too that we had to transition to emergency online learning. We had to make sure that all of the IT infrastructure worked while people weren't physically on campus. So I think that was just a great illustration of how we need to, hopefully we don't have a pandemic anytime soon, but we need to be ready to adapt to change and put those processes in place that enables change even of if we don't see it coming.

Jenay Robert: Side note, I got a little teary when she thanked everybody in the audio. I just felt like it was this personal thank you from one of my heroes.

Sophie White: Wait a second, did anyone else cry when she said that?

Mike Richichi: Bored.

Sophie White: No, I love that. And I'm curious at your institutions, do you all feel like there is this kind of understanding that we need to be able to adapt to change more or do you feel like there's some resistance to change that you're running into in the IT organization?

Brendan Post: I mean, I think in our IT organization we see both going on. There are folks that are very engaged in the opportunity for change and are hungry to participate in that and be both leaders and participants. I think we do have folks that have been with our organization for a very long time and the way that roles are shifting and the way that the work is changing is going to be a disruptive force for both them and for us as we offer services to the university. So thinking about how we do the professional development and the coaching and the mentoring to build and bring people along to support both what it needs to do as well as the institution at large is a conversation we're having all the time in IT leadership and thinking about where those investments need to be made in our people because they're at such a critical part of what we do and recognizing that change is not easy for everyone, whether it be at the institution scale or whether it be with our teams ourselves. And recognizing that and building environments to support that and invest in it is something that we're thinking a lot about.

Mike Richichi: I think one of the big challenges about change is in an organization you have a whole spectrum of opinions on the change. And the example I'll bring up is two years ago we moved our email from on-premises to in the cloud and about half of our users were very exciting and we're wondering why we couldn't do it more quickly and why we hadn't done it five years ago and the other half were very reluctant to do anything differently about their email. Email is a very important thing we had, unfortunately we had a few challenges during our transition, which caused a little bit of chaos, but the fact of the matter was there were people who were enthusiastic about change and they didn't mind as much and the ones who were reluctant had a lot more inertia and a lot more aggravation because of what happened.

And so that can be a challenge for any organization and change. Obviously you plan and we planned and we planned and we had an unexpected side effect, but you hope everything goes smoothly, but you also have to know that it may not and that you have to be ready for those impacts. And the community, the ones who were reluctant for change, they found that they felt they were right because oh well did something happen and it was not what you said it was going to be. And so it's important to prepare people for change and understand that sometimes even if you plan for something, things happen and also even if sometimes change happens without even knowing it's going to. And so you have to be ready for those situations as well and life has changed, so you have to be ready for anything.

Jenay Robert: I have a question for Brendan. I think because a certified change coach manager, what was it?

Brendan Post: Change practitioner . . .

Jenay Robert: All right, you're the official expert on change now, but hearing this story from Mike about certain people kind of having these preconceived ideas about what will go wrong and then that does go wrong and that's evidence for them to say, aha, I see I told you this was all a dumb idea to begin with. Is there sort of an approach that we can take when we're implementing change to maybe avoid that ahead of time or mitigate the impact of that kind of resistance?

Brendan Post: Yeah, I mean I think there's several models to that. I mean some of what Mike indicated in terms of anticipating where those change, either fatigue or those change challenge points might be, and having plan around that, even though sometimes you don't know what those points might be, but having awareness to be intentional to think about that is a key aspect to trying to do that. I think also just transparency is a critical piece too. So as we're moving organizations or teams through change, being honest about that, being honest about even where we are with that in terms of trying to move it forward and where we can set honest expectations about where that change may be impactful in ways that we know and maybe where we don't know yet, but to build that. So if you can build that sort of expectation and trust with the folks that are going to be impacted, whether they're feeling positive about the change or not, you just build that better level of transparency and honesty to try to navigate it and to commit to we're all going to walk this walk together. It might be hard, it might be easy, it's going to depend on your point of view on it, but we're committed to that partnership and can you have people believe that you are committed to that partnership? And I think it is uniquely positioned in that way because we are partners to so much of the university and to our own teams, and so that gives us a foundation to build on for that.

Jenay Robert: Yeah, and I'll plug here. I mean I think also I'm a little partial to this work. The Horizon work again, I think gives us something kind of tangible to have those conversations too, where we can say, here are some scenarios of what we may expect in the future and might help with some of that conversation ahead of time before it happens.

Sophie White: Yeah, and one thing I love about the Horizon report methodology, I'm not a researcher, I know that's your area of expertise, but just this idea that we have a structure for how we look at what we can not predict in the future, but how we can forecast what might happen in the future. And that I think applies to higher ed and where can we create structures for how we think about change and we replicate that over time. I am curious, we were talking about the pandemic a bit, do you feel like people in higher ed, do you feel like the acceptance of change has changed post pandemic or do you feel like there are still the same mindsets about being resistant to change? What does that look like? That's a great question. Thanks. I just thought of it.

Mike Richichi: I think it has and I think we learned a lot during the pandemic and one of the things I think first and foremost in my mind was compassion. So the idea that we had people in our who suffered loss, we had people who just the experience of not having the routine change was traumatic. So there's a lot of different experiences and I think we overwhelmingly learned we had to be compassionate, we had to respect work-life balance. And I think in the aftermath of that, as I think about what we've gone through at Baruch since again, we went through this email transition, we went through an event last year that was very transformative and I think people kind of feel more like they're rolling with a punch snap and they're able to understand, yes, this is a change and it's okay. And as we are now going through doing more upgrades and changes and transitions, we're really trying to be careful to document and communicate and understand and give people advanced warning and give people enough time to respond. And again, I think they also now know that even with as much planning as you do, a change is still a change and sometimes the change has different effects than you might anticipate and to be ready for that as well.

Brendan Post: I think we all learned important lessons and new best practices through the pandemic. And I mean we've talked about even in this community, how much higher education moved and pivoted in ways that we couldn't imagine pre pandemic. So we set a different pace at a different expectation where change might be possible. And as we see the sort of outside forces that are driving higher education and us knowing that we're going to have to continue at a pace, it has given us some new tools to think about that. But also while we think about being compassionate to Mike's point and recognizing where people are at, I mean one of the things that we're thinking about with the number of transformative changes we want to do is how do we sequence those and intentionally how do we look at where those cross impact different populations of the campus so that maybe we don't do them in an order that all of the same campus populations are going to be impacted at the same time? Can we leave them some room to breathe and recover and come back ready to go and stronger after a series of changes? But that takes a lot of intentional planning, a lot of forethought, but that's some of the work that we're thinking about right now is how do you sequence those things, knowing the impact, knowing people's appetite for it, but knowing where we need to accomplish things strategically from a university perspective.

Mike Richichi: Yeah, another thing that I just thought about was we learned a lot of things in the pandemic and we did things because we had to, and sometimes that meant we didn't follow the same rules that we used to. And it's interesting to see as we are now in a different phase of all of that, we're not in an acute phase that we're bringing back some of the restrictions that we used to have that we got rid of. And probably some of that is good, but some of it maybe we should take the time to sit back and assess and say, we actually were a much more nimble organization because we had, can we take the lessons we learned by being nimble and move them into this new model where we do have to follow the rules of course, but that flexibility and that nimbleness that we learned should be something we carry folk.

Jenay Robert: Some of these topics really make me think about some of the research we've done at EDUCAUSE over the last year around the higher ed workforce. We've published three workforce studies in the last year. We have a couple of landscape studies and in those studies we look at workforce issues. So the analytics landscape study was the most recent of those, and it's really a consistent finding even before the last year or two that our workforce still is very stretched, too thin, they feel burned out. I think some of this was exacerbated post pandemic. Do you all feel like we've shifted our approach to change management or need to shift our approach because of that burnout that's only getting worse post pandemic?

Brendan Post: I think we have to recognize it and understand it, but there's also some unpacking of understanding where that sort of stress or that friction or the burnout points are coming from. We're trying to understand why people feel that way and is it aligned to the work that we really are trying to do? Or is it that we've got legacy things that we need to adjust for, or technical debt that we need to clean up that we haven't addressed or that got carried over, say post pandemic, how is that aligned? Where do we need to restructure on that? And sometimes that has to be some honest conversations that maybe we're not used to having to really get under the hood of what's going on in that space because we're all resource constrained. We've got a time box what we're trying to accomplish, but we need to understand where the barriers are to moving transformatively forward or managing that change in an interesting way.

So I think trying to have more open transparent dialogues with teams and team members to understand where those pressure points are coming from or where that sort of sense of feeling is, but also how we keep them aligned to the work in terms of the transformative. We're pivoting to other sorts of things. Here's why. Here's what we're trying to accomplish on behalf of the university. How do you fit into that? How can you see your opportunity in that space? How can we make that be effective for you? Is also part of the conversation. I think . . .

Jenay Robert: It sounds like making it feel like this isn't a new thing we're adding to your plate, but let's work together and approach this collaboratively. Maybe it could improve burnout.

Brendan Post: And I think an honest conversation about what can come off the plate sometimes. I mean that's a conversation that I have with my teams frequently is everybody on the team is always busy and they always say they're busy unpacking what that means and where we can move that and where even we can do some of the transformative technology for our own teams to move it forward. AI is a great example of that even in the IT operation space or support space. Yes, if we manually process every ticket that comes in, you're going to be busy. Is there value add to us manually processing every ticket that comes in or can we use tools to help us be more automated about that and more? But that is also change again for people. And so how do we walk them through effective positive change that helps them do their work differently, that can avoid burnout but also add capacity back for us to do the strategic initiatives. And that's an interesting conversation to try to walk through with teams. I think.

Mike Richichi: Yeah, I went to a session this morning about IT burnout in the IT stats, and one of the points they mentioned that was I think important to think about was one of the causes of burnout is a lack of reward structure. So people, even if you're working hard sometimes and working long hours, if there's a sufficient reward incentive structure attached to that, you don't suffer as much burn out and well you might, but you suffer less if there's a sense of reward, a sense of shared values, shared destination and acknowledgement of the work that was being done. So I think that's an important part of the student and it kind of goes perhaps back to the point of compassion and the idea that you need to know that your employees, your staff value and need to feel appreciate and need to feel valued and appreciated. And so that's an important part of this as well, is making sure that they know that if they had to do hard work, and certainly there have been times that we've had to do hard work in the last few years that their efforts are being rewarded and that they're appreciated.

We're not going to give high bonuses and higher education and lots of money, but we can acknowledge, we can thank, we can appreciate, we can value, we can have some flexibility say and work schedules and things like that to help them out. And I think about the resource issue, of course we all see where resource constraint, and I've heard the most, well-resourced universities in our association. I've talked to people in those campuses and they're like, yeah, we don't have enough money that is like, you don't have enough money. People like us who work at public institutions, we are not doing as well as you are. So it's a constant challenge. And at some point that can't be an excuse. It has to be an acknowledgement of the landscape. But if we have too much work to do and we have too many, we don't have enough people, well, we need to better define what we do and what people do to do. So we need to figure out what aptitude we need to figure out how to scale that work to fit what's available.

Sophie White: Yeah, made me think of a few things. One, I work really closely with the young professionals initiatives at EDUCAUSE and was just talking to someone about those reward structures. And we know that in higher ed, it's tough for young professionals sometimes there might not always be a promotion available, a space available to move up the ladder, so to speak, in the way that it's traditionally been done, but to make people feel appreciated. Maybe when you're choosing who comes to the EDUCAUSE annual conference, the people who've done the best work at your institution, that's a reward for them, or they have a great professional development opportunity. They have a coach at your institution, they have a mentor that can work with them on their specific goals. But I think there are creative ways we just need to think about intentionally deciding what those are and working with the employees to figure out those career paths.

It also made me think of, I've been hearing a lot of discussion about doing more with less, but also considering why we need to do less with less with the automation of all these technologies, adding efficiencies, when can we actually take things off of people's plates? And then as leaders considering how we adapt, do you have to kind of block and tackle what's your team to faculty and say, our service level agreements are changing because we can't respond to this issue in 24 hours. It's going to be 48 now, and this is why, and this is so that our team doesn't burn out. And that's a hard conversation to have if faculty members are used to a specific level, but that might need to be what happens or we automate more.

Mike Richichi: I think it's an important conversation to have because I think it allows, let's say faculty in this case to acknowledge that and understand that there's a resource stream. Many faculty don't want to hear it, they just want to know, oh, you're always going to be there for me. But to be fair, many of our faculty are again compassionate and understand, oh, you guys are working really hard. Yes, yes, my team is working really hard. And yes, we have to be realistic about what we can offer and what we can support, and we can't over promise and under deliver. I'd rather give you a realistic expectation of what's possible and move in that direction. And if we as a community decide that's not good enough, then we need to figure out how to resource a better model.

Brendan Post: Yeah, I think the words come up a couple of times, and it's one that we use a lot, is about being intentional, about both agreeing to the work that can be done and agreeing to the work that can't be done or this isn't the right time to do that work, and how do you make those choices and constantly have that conversation, both as an IT leadership team and with individual teams, but also with executive leadership or faculty leadership or whatever your constituent parties are. There is more projects that we could ever all do at our campuses at the same time, and not that any of them are better or worse, but there is strategic timing and strategic outcomes and value propositions that we have to look at that and can we consistently engage in that conversation, especially when something new comes up, the hot new priority that might come out of the president's office or from wherever.

Yes, we can do that, but we need to pivot resources or we need to pause on these other efforts to make that successful and to support the teams that need to do that work. Where can we have those conversations? It's a conversation. We're tending to have a lot at our institution all the time in the IT leadership table because the priorities are shifting rapidly and there's not enough to go around to meet all those. So where do we make the intentional choices? How do we prioritize? What's our rubric for making that prioritization? How do we be transparent with everybody involved around that too to help set the expectations of if it's your time versus not your time, and when will it be your time and how do we make that compromise and those conversations be effective because that's what we have to do to be good stewards of the resources.

Mike Richichi: And we find ourselves constantly having to move project timelines. And the way you do that responsibly is by having good project timelines and then being able to say to somebody, okay, this change has come in this new piece of information, this new priority has come in and these other things will shift because you've got a plan laid out already and then you could say, this is how this plan needs to be adjusted because of new circumstances. So you're constantly doing, I think we all do that in our organizations. And again, I think it speaks to what Brendan was saying about transparency. If you document and discuss what your timelines are and what your plans are, then when they change and you have a reason why they change, people can accept.

Sophie White: Definitely Brendan's point. I think it's definitely a hard exercise in setting boundaries with people and maybe that's something you work up to. If that's not something that's comfortable, you start with a small one and then add big boundaries as you go think. I'm going to keep going back to Brene Brown because we saw her this morning, but I'm definitely guilty of being a scrappy chameleon or whatever she called it earlier where you maybe say yes toity things, but it's a really important concept to consider institutional resources and people resources that you have to be good stewards of. It

Jenay Robert: Reminds me of something else, being somebody who does a lot of research about the future and thinks about the future basically constantly. There's a really interesting dynamic when you're working at an institution where you have to be reacting to things that are happening in the present. You have to be planning for the future, and you also have to be sometimes cleaning up things from the past. It's almost like you're living in three different time zones simultaneously. How do you balance that as a leader at your institution? It's not a tough question or anything. No.

Mike Richichi: Perhaps you don't. No, but what I mean by that is I think what I find is there are people in the organization who are better at one of those items than the others, and you let them focus on that. So if somebody is really good at thinking about future plans and what might happen in their two or three year horizon, you give them some freedom to do that. I've got people who are very good at doing the here and now and things that are in front of them, let them do that. And then I also have people who are really interested in, I don't like this old stuff that we've got lying around. Not that it's actual physical stuff. Sometimes it's old applications, old software, old tools, and you give them that space as well. And you hope that you have an organization with all of those people who enjoy those kinds of work and you do it as a leader. Again, I'm probably going to be better at one of those than the others. I'm probably better at the future thing than the others, but I also know I need to bring in those people to do the parts that I'm not did at, but I need to listen to them again to come up with a system for dealing with everything and it's okay. It's okay. I can't be a master of all of this. I have to work with my teams and let them do what they're good at.

Brendan Post: I think to build on what Mike was saying, one of the things that we've thought about is how we a strategically plan differently and using strategic programs as sort of the longer term goals. We have four or five key overarching programs that will have projects or milestones or initiatives within them that we could be more iterative about and have shorter timelines and also reach milestones, but they're building toward a bigger picture from a program level. So whether it might be replacing major administrative systems over a five to 10 year roadmap that's going to ebb and flow, but there's going to be lots of pieces along that way and a roadmap to doing that. And to Mike's point, how do we align the best resources who are good at the tactical sort of project here in time versus the sort of strategic, let's figure out how to pull all the pieces together as well as where those folks are that can help us clean up as we go so that we don't bring along everything from the past, but it has shifted the way we think about the planning cycle.

Our CIO does a top five every year. It kind of feels like the EDUCAUSE Top 10 kind of approach, but he's got sort of a top five overarching and we talk about that on an annual basis and then align initiatives and efforts underneath that. And some of those programs are long-term programs and they're going to take a long time to come to fruition, but where can we see progress on that, deliver progress to the university, but also have teams feel like they're moving toward iterative milestones? Because it's challenge if you're on a long-term thing that takes forever to accomplish and you don't see that sort of progress back to people seeing their value and how they're contributing. And so some of our structure of thinking about strategic planning and even how we approach initiatives and prioritization is being redone based on that agile method that we have to get to is we've got themes, but we've got to be agile within that. And how do we think about that?

Mike Richichi: It makes me think about at Baruch we have, we've just started our five-year strategic plan last fall, and part of that process is the cabinet developing annual college focused goals that are related to the themes of the strategic plan. So it's not just, oh, we released a strategic plan. It's a five-year plan. The thing I've been really impressed about what we're doing at Baruch is that we're actually saying, this is a year one initiative. This is a year two, this is a year three initiatives. And we know that and we actually went through that planning process. And the impulses, I think for people can be often to say, well, everything, we should just do everything all at once. Well, no, it's a five year plan. Use all five years, know that there are year one plans and there are year four plans. And I think it's a very effective way to tackle this. And what I hope we would do at the end of that is assess how we did go back to our strategic goals and be able to say, we accomplished this one. We've done that in the annual goals. So we do at the end of fiscal 24 that we implemented 80% of the goals in the college focused goals, and then we took those to build the college focused goals for fiscal year 25, and we'll assess that and we'll continue to do that. And that's I think a really important way to ensure that progress is been,

Sophie White: I love breaking that down into more manageable timelines. And I think kind of going back to this idea, there was an example Brené Brown shared earlier about the person who's serving food at St. Jude saying, I'm curing cancer, which I loved. I think in this example, working with your staff to understand maybe you can't be transparent about every element of what's involved in meeting the strategic plan, but they understand what the strategic goal is and how that impacts the mission of the university. Maybe you're helping with student success, maybe you're helping with retention, all of this that these different things that they're working with you on, that's the end goal of it.

Mike Richichi: I think that's the ultimate goal of higher education. And so I always ground our work in the thought that we are here to have students come into Baruch and leave Baruch with something they didn't have and an opportunity to succeed that they didn't have before. And that's why we do everything we do. So when I'm sitting there installing wireless access points, I'm not doing it because it's fun to install wireless access points, although it's, but it's really about making sure we're providing the best possible experience to our students and that we're supporting them on every step of their journey so that when they graduate from Baruch and they leave Baruch, they have the resources they need to succeed in.

Brendan Post: And I think building on that, and one of the things that we try to do is to tell the stories more and make it more personal. And that's come up a couple of times in conversations today or even in the general session, is every individual or every student is a story and they have a story and how are we supporting that journey and story that they're having and how can we help our teams see that? Because when we do sometimes the work in just sort of aggregate, you can get detached from where you're having that impact or where that sort of differential is occurring. And so how we think about that and tell that, whether it's how we do service or network support or support academic coursework, how do we find those stories, hear those stories, and then use those to help us resonate and to make progress and to make it more real for everyone? Because that's what we're trying to do from a higher education is be transformative and help people build the strengths to have an impact on humanity and society in a positive way. And so can we remind ourselves of that, that we're doing our part as the IT organization in leading that effort.

Sophie White: Not that. Absolutely. So I think we have just a couple minutes left and then we'll turn it over to our live audience for questions in a bit. But I have kind of a lightning round question for you all. So we're in 2024 right now. We're thinking ahead to future planning. If there's one thing in 2025 that you're most excited for as it relates to your role in technology and higher ed, what would it be? Sorry if I stumped you or one project goal that you've set a part of your strategic plan.

Mike Richichi: I think, and it's going to sound like a copout answer, but I think thinking about AI, But I'm going to make it more fun. I think we're going to see a shift in how AI is being considered in our discipline. And I think that change, I think there's going to be somewhat of a bubble burst perhaps, and I think that change will be interesting to see because then we're all going to have to, we're all challenged by AI and the promises of it now, but I think maybe in 2025 we'll see a more realistic assessment of what AI is currently at, where it's going, and we'll be able to now respond to a reality that right now I think it's really easy to get caught up in the hype. So I want to be at the point where AI is understood and it's real and it's there, but it's not going to transform everything. It's just the thing that we're going to do and we're going to do it well and it's going to help, but it's not the be all on end all.

Brendan Post: Yeah, I mean to build on that, I mean, I think I'm excited and my team is excited about where some of that can help us just from a service standpoint initially. I mean, we're not going to solve all the problems overnight and we're still learning how it goes, but where we can take it and use it for hyper-personalization for our customers and self-service, true self-service and true automation of issue remediation and request fulfillment so that we can enable people to be successful quicker. There's too much lag sometimes in the way that we have to deliver our services. These technologies give us a lot of promise in terms of cutting down that response time and that curve and being able to do that because I think one, it'll help our communities be able to accomplish what they're trying to do much faster, whether they be faculty, staff or students, but also hopefully gives us the promise of getting capacity back within our organizations because we'll move out of some of that mundane or rote tasks and be able to focus more time and energy on the strategic. And if we can see that come to fruition in the next 12 to 18 to 24 months, even in small ways, that's going to give us a lot of momentum for the future.

Jenay Robert: What are you most excited by Sophie? Oh, no, you turned the question on Me too. I'm a researcher. I'm curious. I can answer first. You can go first. Let me think about it. Yeah, so we published, I'll jump on the AI talk because it also top of mind for me. We published a landscape study this year about ai, and we have another one planned in early 2025. So I'm really excited to see kind of longitudinally what's going on and see some of those data. But more importantly, I'm really excited about the conversations that we've been having at the annual conference, even just the first day, and I count yesterday as day zero, but around really refocusing on humanity and what it means to be human and what it means to be a person in our space because I think AI has alerted us to a lot of that remembering to return back to that humanity. So let's why I'm excited about it.

Sophie White: That's great. I was going to say I was going to steal your, I studied, I got a master's in English literature and I love studying the humanities, and it's been really fun for me to see how all this AI conversation is all of a sudden turning to the humanities again and what makes us human. And it's been kind of a fun existential conversation to have.

But I think I am really inspired by being here at the EDUCAUSE annual conference and the community that we're building, and I kind of feel like people are maybe even appreciating that a little bit more now that we're seeing AI kind of take over some things that were traditionally human -- people are really appreciating the human elements of how we connect and come together as community and kind of what the unique ways that when we meet in person, what we can do together. So that's exciting to me, and I think I'm feeling this sense of community everywhere. All right. So from here, thank you all to the live audience for being here for the discussion today. We want to turn it over for a few minutes to your question and answer. So Kelly has a microphone that she will bring around. Just raise your hand if you have a question and we'll answer it.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: You spent the first time or the first part of the podcast today talking about change and resistance to change and how people in it and education are. So we're very resistant to change. Then we started focusing on ai. Do you see part of people's resistance to change in the future stemming from AI being worried about ai, replacing them, replacing their importance to an organization? Is that part of what makes it difficult to implement

Mike Richichi: Change? It probably can be, but I think Brendan made a really good point earlier about the use of ai, especially in our discipline in it. We have way too much work to do and not enough people to do it. So if you're honest and you're rational about it, any addition of AI to our workloads merely brings that down. It doesn't get it to the point where we can start eliminating people. It just gets us to the point where maybe we could actually do a little bit more and be a little bit better and a little bit more productive. I think we're realistically after this conversation especially, we're a long way away from AI completely replacing people in the workplace because all it's doing, it's shifting some of the tasks that we just don't have time for anyway, and then we have the time to do perhaps the other important things that we're not doing because we now have allowed AI to do something.

Brendan Post: I mean, I think to build on it, one of the conversations that I'm trying to have with team members is a refocus on where their value add is as a team member and what their skillset and subject matter expertise is. So if I've got senior engineers who have great experience and can bring pieces together of a puzzle, but they're spending a lot of time on repetitive tasks where there's not a value add in that discussion as opposed to giving them the space and the creativity to value engineer that in a different way using different tools, can I convince them that that's where their strengths are? I see that and I know that, and sometimes it's a reminder to them of that because they've gotten lost because we just had the repetitive nature of it and where that's going to go in the future. Bringing all these things together, integrating across multiple tiers within the IT organization, we still need all these people.

It's one of the conversations we have. It's not going to replace anybody, as we've said. We don't have enough staff resources as it is, but we need folks to feel comfortable living into whatever the roles either they should be doing today or that we need them to do in the future. And that fits back a little bit to how do we have honest conversations about that, do the professional development, understand that we may have to invest in folks to help them realize that and feel confident in it, but navigate that with them, kind of to your question, right? It's not recognize it to Mike's term, be compassionate about that, but how can we help them build on that and come along on the journey? I think that we're all interested in going on that journey together, and if we can all come together to do that, it's going to be much more beneficial to have us all on that together.

Mike Richichi: A thing I just thought about was the idea that, I've talked to a lot of educators and they're worried about chat GBT writing student papers, and they'll say to me that chat GBT could write a C paper, maybe a B paper maybe, but they can't write a paper yet. And I don't think a generated AI model could ever do that. Honestly. I think we're going to have to talk about a different AI paradigm if we go beyond that. So for now, at least, if you want an A paper, maybe Chad GPT starts some of it for you, but you're still going to need a human with the insight and perspective and wisdom of a human to get you to that level. And I don't know, I'll presume that Brendan doesn't want to do C-level work in his organization. Neither do I. So we're going to need, AI can be there to get us to that point. We need humans to get there.

Jenay Robert: Thank you very much for that question because it did not even make me think of, I had not thought of this until you asked the question, which I've been traveling around the world literally talking about AI for the last year, and I haven't had anybody ask me about it replacing their job. I've had people ask me about it replacing other people's jobs. I don't know what that means yet, because it just occurred to me when you asked the question, but I think that's a really interesting question to ponder. Is our community really worried about being replaced? Are we thinking perhaps more about our students' future jobs or our neighbor's jobs? I mean, what is it really? I think maybe we need to get some clarity around that, but thanks. That was great.

Sophie White: Yeah, I think that's a question for an entire other podcast. That's a great one.