People-First Leadership in Higher Ed

Sophie White: Hi everyone. I'm really excited for you to check out this next episode of EDUCAUSE Shop Talk. In this one we talk with Dave Weil and Andrea Childress about putting people first. So how we're supporting our higher education workforce. A few things that they talked about that I really loved were how we can relate our operational work at institutions to the institutional mission. That's really a key part of how we are driving the sense of belonging, motivation among the workforce. Also, how trust and intentional collaboration can really support us through these tough times. It can help when we have to say no to projects. That's not always something we like doing in higher education. It can also really help as we're looking at adapting workload pressures and dealing with resource constraints in higher ed. And then they also talk about AI, how that relates to the workforce, how we're upskilling our folks and how we are making sure that work is augmented by AI, but humans aren't replaced by it.

I really love the conversation. One thing that's sticking out to me is Dave has a great example of how at Ithaca College where he works, there's a hallway outside of his office that features student workers who've worked in the IT department before and what they're doing now and just connecting all of the student employment to the future of the workforce and how this connects to the students that we're serving, I thought really was a great example of why we do the work that we do in higher ed. So check it out. Enjoy. Let us know what you think.

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Hello everyone and welcome to EDUCAUSE Shop Talk. I'm Sophie White, I'm a content marketing and program manager here at EDUCAUSE, and I am one of the hosts for today's podcast.

Jenay Robert: And I'm Jenay Robert. I'm a senior researcher at EDUCAUSE and I'll be your other host.

Sophie White: Great. So we're really excited today to be talking to you about putting people first. This topic really came about as part of the 2025 EDUCAUSE top 10. We're diving into the conversation more in an EDUCAUSE Showcase that is releasing in August 2025. And we think that this is a really important topic as we're thinking about supporting our higher education workforce, supporting our employees, especially in this age of AI, a lot of chaos around resource constraints related to institutions and really making sure that folks are supported and feel a sense of belonging at work. So I'm really excited to have with us here today, two really fantastic leaders in this space representing higher education institutions. So we have Dave Weil and Andrea Childress with us. I'll introduce them and then we will dive into it. So Dave Weil, as of this past July, congratulations, Dave on your new role is the senior Vice President for strategic services and initiatives and Chief Information Officer at Ithaca College where he oversees human resources, IT, analytics and AI, and leads institution-wide strategic initiatives. Dave is the recipient of the 2024 EDUCAUSE Leadership Award and helped to develop the EDUCAUSE executive leaders program and the Senior Directors Institute. Dave regularly writes and presents on leadership, digital transformation, AI and the evolving role of technology in higher education. So thanks Dave, and thanks for all you do with EDUCAUSE too. I know you do a lot for us.

David Weil: Thanks.

Sophie White: And Andrea Childress is assistant Vice President of the Nebraska Student Information System for Information Technology Services and the University of Nebraska at Kearney Chief Information Officer. She's worked at UNK for thirty-one years starting as assist programmer and analyst, then information Security officer, campus CIO, NU system AVP for this SIS. The NU1 IT initiative in 2017 combined over three hundred staff to span three campuses, scaled services and created a culture of collaboration to standardize services and reduce costs. So you have done a lot, Andrea too in your long tenure. So thank you and thanks for being with us today.

Andrea Childress: Thank you. It's great to be here.

Sophie White: Great. So just want to dive in. I'm curious to hear why you two are excited to talk about this topic. Why do you think this is relevant now in higher education and what are kind of your initial thoughts about putting people first in higher ed?

Andrea Childress: I can start if that's okay, Dave.

Jenay Robert: Sure.

Andrea Childress: I think in the thirty-one years I've been here, I say this all the time that I've seen more change in the last five years than in the prior twenty-five, right? I feel like the pace of change is getting so quick and on top of that, we have other pressures out from external perspective or perception of higher education value. We have budget pressures. We're all dealing with all of these things. And the bottom line is we can't do most of what we do without our people. And so regardless of what's going on around us, we all have to be agile. We all have to deal with chaos in different ways. And so I think it's really important that we have people, we have good people, we promote people, we train people and we develop them so that they're happy and we are happy with them. So I mean, I always say it all the time, my staff makes me look good every day. It's not I'm a great leader, it's because I have great people. And so it's just such a high value that we try to put on them these days.

David Weil: Yeah, I mean, so I'm just meeting Andrea for the first time now. No pressure on us to communicate well, but people first. So I hear you've been at your institution for thirty-two years. I've been at my institution for over thirty years as well. And if you think about it, what is it about our journeys that sort of allowed us to stay at our institutions for so long? And I would imagine, again, I don't know your background, but that you were given opportunities. You were given opportunities to show your skills and you felt that the institution cared. You felt you had a chance to grow. You felt that the work you were doing was important. And I'm sure there's so many other factors that go into that, but as we think about our organizations, I like to say, yeah, I may be the head of it, but I lead people. I don't lead the technology. I lead the people that implement the technology. I lead the people that work with faculty or work with staff and students. And I really think as people first, I was so excited when I heard the title of this conversation. I think it's so critical we can't achieve anything without our people.

Sophie White: Yeah, I think that's a really good point. And I'm curious, so I love your mentioning of your long tenures and what that means in terms of how your institutions have supported you. Thinking back maybe earlier in your career when you were newer to higher education IT, are there any specific mentors that stand out to you or specific strategies that leaders took that really made you feel like you belonged and wanted to stay there for a long time? Or just curious if there's something standing out from those early days?

Andrea Childress: Yeah, I think for me, I've had, like Dave said, I've had a lot of opportunity. One thing I love about higher education technology, and maybe it's like this everywhere, but there's something always changing. There's always something new. We're not just counting pennies and the bottom line dollar. We're trying to do something that I think is very important. And I did eventually decide or figure out in my life, my mother was a school teacher in grade school and my father taught at a community college when I was growing up. And so I feel like it is in my blood a little bit. And I didn't know that when I started working here, I was looking for a corporate job. And then I landed here and have been very happy. And I think I've learned over time that it is because I feel like what we do makes the world a better place and the mission of our institutions. And that's why I come here every day and I enjoy all the people that I work with. But that's probably the bottom line for me.

And honestly, this is not, no one put me up to this, but I remember the very first EDUCAUSE conference I went to in Denver and I heard, I don't know who it was, I don't remember. It was a very long time ago. I heard someone speak and I remember being inspired and I thought to myself, that's what I want to do as I change in my career and whatever I end up doing, I want to be inspiring to some people the way this person just in one presentation has inspired me. And so I've kind of just gotten more into it. I love learning about culture and I try to help myself become more inspiring in different ways. And a lot of that has to do with spending time with EDUCAUSE counterparts and colleagues and a lot of other ways as well. So I think that's what my story is.

David Weil: I think there's so much to dig into. One of the things is being focused on our mission and connecting the work we do with those we serve. And I think from an early stage in my career, I saw the value of the work that we were doing. I saw the impact that would have on people. I saw the impact that it had on our students, on our staff, on our faculty. And I think that inspired me and I think it continues to inspire the team. And as I have grown and my responsibilities have gotten bigger over the years, I still try to build those connections, not just for myself but for the team. But you asked what was one of the things that allowed me to stay and grow here. And it's something that I call, I received the gift of opportunity repeatedly where I remember one of the vice presidents at the time invited me to sit on the all college budget committee.

I was an associate director. I was pretty far down in the organization at the time, but he saw something or he wanted to give me an opportunity. And so he opened the door for me and he said, Dave, come sit on the budget committee. And it gave me an opportunity to grow sort of beyond my role and see how the college was working at that high level. And at the same time, it allowed other people to see me and to have that opportunity to see that. So I think about our role as leaders and supporting our people. What are those gifts of opportunity that we could provide people? Because I think that really creates that sense of belonging and it helps foster someone's commitment there. And there's a lot of things we can look at, but that's just one off the top of my head.

Jenay Robert: As you two were talking. And now as I was thinking of how we started this conversation with the rate of change of the world and in higher ed, I started to think a little bit about the institutional resilience work that we've been doing at EDUCAUSE recently, so we published a framework, I don't know, it's been a few weeks now. And I think today as of the recording of this, we just published a quick poll about institutional resilience. But what was kind of echoing in my mind as you two were talking was this element of trustworthiness that resilient institutions are trustworthy. And the way that our expert panelists unpacked that, I'm actually going to read what they said because I think that this really well aligns to what we're talking about. That trust, collaboration, cooperation, empathy, and inclusion, characterize the relationship between individuals and the institution. Leaders support a culture of trust by adhering to consistent principles and values. Individuals feel safety and belonging at their institution. And emotional and digital trust are both seen as critical values. And to me that means not only can I trust what we're doing with our technology, I can also trust all of the people that make up this institution because we're all here for the same reason. We have that same end goal to make the world a better place.

Sophie White: It brings me back, Jenay too. We had an institutional resilience Shop Talk conversation earlier this summer. Jackie Malcolm Bailey and John Dunning were our guests on that one. And in that one we were talking, I think a lot about the poly crises that we're seeing. We talked about that in the EDUCAUSE Horizon Report across environmental, political, all of these different fields, technological with AI's advancement. But they really brought it back to how can we center our work around the mission and how can we use all of these changes that we're seeing as an opportunity? Jackie said, to bounce forward, so to transform ourselves and use all of these changes as an opportunity for good to see what we can do in higher ed. And that all comes back to the mission. So I love that. And I think it's so inspiring as you think about supporting a larger workforce at the institutions too.

David Weil: Mission and vision, at the end of the day, it's about building culture and trust is a piece of that. And I think the more people are aligned or understand the institution and where you're heading, I think the better off you are. Over the years I've seen mission and vision statements come and go and you spend a lot of time, there's a lot of excitement around that. And then it gets put on a shelf and you forget it. The department here at Ithaca really was not serving the institution well. We had a lot of turnover. There was silos and it wasn't functioning that well. And so when I came into the role, I was charged with, okay, let's rebuild this organization. And one of the things we did early on, take out the playbook, okay, write a mission vision statement. But what I've done ever since then is literally at every department meeting, I put a slide up with our mission and vision statement and I read it.

And I was doing that and it's now been about eight years. And I asked the team about three years ago, I said, do I really need to keep doing this? And they said yes, because it's an opportunity to remind us of why we are here and what our role is. And usually I would read it to be a trusted strategic partner to support our educational mission. And then I would cite examples of that. So it's just a way that whether it's through a mission or vision statement or else or other factors, it's a way to remind us of why we are here. And then that builds that sense of community, which I think ultimately leads to that trust and that sense of belonging.

Jenay Robert: Kind of reminds me of that story. I feel like this is a story people tell, or maybe it's just something I heard once and now I've made it out to be bigger than it is. So correct me if I'm getting it wrong. But the story about someone who works at a hospital and they work in sort of like an administrative role or a janitorial role or something like that. And somebody says, what do you do for a living? And they say, I cure cancer. And the idea is that what you do for a living is really more connected to the mission of the institution or the organization than it is to what you do on a day-to-day basis. I mean, when we're talking about putting people first though, in terms of workforce, I think the challenge is helping people see that sometimes and supporting them in that because the day-to-day is still really important. That's how we get the mission done. But Dave, I think that's a great way to tie that into it in an operational way.

David Weil: Yeah. Lemme just give you one more example that I'll leave it, but if I were to turn my camera and show you out my office door, there's a long hallway here, and that hallway probably has at least a dozen large posters on it of former student employees of the IT organization. And each one talks about what they're doing now and how their work with us in IT helped prepare them for their career path. And I mean there are people at major companies and they talk about their experience back here, and that's very intentional so that our staff, when they're walking down the hallway, they see how their interactions with our student employees and the experiences they give them really make a difference. And again, it's trying to reinforce the why, why are we here? And it's more than just making sure our access points are working, which they need to be, and that our network is secure, which it must be, but it's also to develop that.

Andrea Childress: I love that. We do something. We don't have a hallway with photos and stories like that, but we talk frequently about how many of us in IT across the three campuses that we have consolidated IT across. We talk about how many of us were student workers when we were students here, and it's over half of us. I mean, it is a huge number of the three hundred that we have because why do you stay here? When we hire new people, we like to explain, you're sitting here on this interview committee and together we have eighty-nine years of experience. And so if you have questions about what it's like to work here, these are the people to ask. And we get some great questions and we all really share about ourselves and why we're here and why we stay here and so on. And it is all about the culture and the people and the organization and the trust and the inclusiveness that we feel when we're here. So I think it runs pretty deep here in Nebraska as well.

David Weil: Some of this, I deeply believe in everything I said, and some of it is necessity as well because it's a very competitive market out there for talent. And unfortunately, I cannot pay top dollar. I wish I could. I have people that I would gladly do that for. And so I need people to feel a sense of purpose and mission and that their work matters. It's not just to fill the pockets of a shareholder, but it's to change lives. Back to your comment earlier, Janay, about I cure cancer. And I think that aspect, those are ultimately the employees that I think are the lifelong dedicated employees and that really lean in and will work that extra hour because they see the difference that it makes.

Andrea Childress: Yeah, I agree. I think in those same kinds of conversations when we talk about how long so many of us have worked here, the sense of belonging and we have hiring principles, and one of them has to do with why you want to work here. You can't predict what someone's going to do, but if someone has a tie, it's very hard to recruit somebody to come to Nebraska from a coast. They have to have a reason that they want to be here. And so one of our hiring principals is, why do you want to work in higher education? And here specifically? And so it's a little bit of a way for us to say, okay, this person really wants to be here and they have all these other criteria as well. And then they would definitely have a leg up over someone who just kind of wants a stepping stone, and you can kind of tell by their answer to that question. So that's one of the things we do try to screen for. That's great.

Sophie White: I have a question for you, Andrea. I'm thinking about, you mentioned the OneIT initiative, which the way I'm reading it, combined services across multiple institutions as part of the system. I'm thinking about in this age that we're in, we are hearing about resource constraints in higher ed, we're hearing about systems getting creative with how they're sharing their services. How did you do that and still create this sense of belonging at scale? So looking at folks across multiple campuses, working together maybe who aren't even physically in the same place. Do you have strategies for how you can do something like that and still make sure that folks are feeling that sense of community?

Andrea Childress: Yeah, there's many things. And looking back on it, I can say not everyone was on board. As you can imagine when you're implementing any change, you'll have people that just don't buy in and there's nothing you can do to get them to buy in. And so ultimately they end up leaving and then you're changing the organization by hiring a new person. And so we did have a number of that, a fair number of folks who did that. But the other reason I think a lot of the way we've been able to build the culture across three different cities and institutions is it largely started with just expectations. We had from the top an expectation that my campus at Kearney here is the smallest campus. And so the CIO at the time who was here, who said things like, if there's a security incident at Kearney, it impacts all of us.

It's not a Kearney problem, it's all of our problem. And so there was very much an expectation that it doesn't matter which campus it is, we're one team, we're doing the same things, and we've worked really, really hard to just make our teams work that way. Now, of course, you have to have boots on the ground at every campus and every geographical location, but every day those people, they might be wherever they are, but they're on Zoom with their whole team at some point in discussing what's going on around the state. And the other part, the angle that was hard for us once we got the people working in that way, we had the campuses saying, wait, you're taking resources away from me. But they weren't understanding how they were gaining the resources from the other campuses to help support. And so I tell this story all the time.

We had about twenty-four people on this campus in IT that did every aspect of IT. And we had to reallocate roles to build what we called security in the early 2000s, right, those security work. And so when there was a problem that one person was all we had to sort of delve into and figure out what the security issue was. And once we reorganized, we had about twenty-five people that would jump on a Zoom call and deal with whatever, whether it was phishing or something bigger, it didn't matter. And I tell that story all the time because I'm like, there's more people doing security work for the University of Nebraska now than we had at Kearney. And when something happens here, they all work on it. And so I mean, you just have to repeat yourself unfortunately over and over. But helping people understand the way this change has impacted not only our campus but the other campuses.

It's funny because you got to know three different cultures, right? Kearney and Lincoln and Omaha, they had three different cultures. So I'd say all the time, my job is to figure out how to leverage this bigger organization for the benefit of my campus, but also bring the best of my campus to the larger organization. And so I just preached that and people eventually start to get it. But yeah, I would say it started off with a lot of top-down expectation. And I do remember there was a point where our top leader was saying, the bottom line is do you believe that this will make a difference? Do you believe you can live in this organization? Because if not, it's going to be hard for you to want to be here after this. I mean, he didn't exactly say it like that, but that's kind of the gist.

David Weil: Do you ever bring them together? Does everyone ever physically get in the same location? Maybe once a year or something?

Andrea Childress: Not all three hundred people in one time, but we do have an annual picnic on each campus and they're on different days. So several people travel because all I have people that report to me in Lincoln and Omaha and people here report to other people in Lincoln, Omaha instead of me and that kind of thing. So if you're on a team, you might travel or your team might decide which picnic I want to prioritize getting together at. So the teams will do in-person events periodically, and then the leadership teams more frequently. So we have a senior leadership team, we have an extended leaders, and those teams are getting together at least quarterly in person. So yes, but we haven't done the whole every single person.

David Weil: I mean, that's a big investment in time people. So we don't have a system, Ithaca as its own institution, but I have hybrid and fully remote and still trying to wrestle with how do you build culture and achieve everything we were talking about when you have some people on campus and can see the students walking around and interact with them. And then I have people in probably six different states doing that. And it is a bit of a challenge, but I think we do that through creative use of Zoom. And I do bring everyone to campus. It's sixty-three people, so I bring everyone to campus once a year and to try to build that. But real kudos to you and your team for the way that you sort of build that we are one organization out of those separate parts.

Andrea Childress: Yeah, thank you. And I think sixty-three people is not too big of a number to require or ask an annual meeting like that. And I do think it makes a big difference. I mean, every time you get together you say, we ask ourselves, was this worth it? Was this meeting worth this commute? And we always agree just because you might just go out to lunch, you might just have hallway conversation, you just get a little bit more out of it than you do with the world of Zoom. But then we still also encourage people to have coffee meetings on Zoom in the morning, and so time to talk about whatever you want, not just work. And so I think that's important too. Otherwise you just don't get to know your people. And then we do have an organization called Crew, which stands for creating really engaged workers. And so it's volunteers on each campus that plan social events really, so lunches or happy hours or coffees. And we make sure that they're advertised across all three cities because sometimes people are working on site at a different city than they're from, and they just happen to be there on a day. There's a lunch. And so we want to make sure everybody knows what's going on. And so that group does a great job, and that's been fun.

David Weil: That's cool. Well, we do bring everyone together. We do it over three days and we program it like we would at conference. We have keynote sessions and then breakouts and then social. And then the first year we did that, the staff actually then started their own thread and said, well, we're going to go and meet at this local group pub or whatever and did that. And so it's really something now people look forward to.

Andrea Childress: I also think one of the things we've initiated over the years is a mentoring process. And sometimes we start an initiative and people get paired up with people and that we maybe don't bring in new relationships for a year or so. It falls off of our radar, but some people keep it up and some people don't. But I think that's been really helpful. I call it therapy for your work problems. You just, it's a chance to get to know someone really well, talk about one or more specific things about work that are going on and just get an outside opinion with other people that will care what the outcome is or just might know someone or a way forward that the person with the problem isn't thinking about. So anyway, I think the mentoring is really important to you.

David Weil: Absolutely do it. Sorry.

Andrea Childress: No, go ahead. Yeah,

Jenay Robert: Please.

David Weil: I was just going to say, do you do it outside of the IT organization? Do you have mentors from across the institution or is it just within the OneIT?

Andrea Childress: Within IT as we're just doing it internally. My campus has mentorships available to mentor or mentee outside across divisions too. Probably the other campuses do as well. We haven't really discussed making sure people are leveraging those, but we do it internally. Cool. You use mentoring at your campus?

David Weil: We don't do it as much as I would like. A number of people have taken part in the EDUCAUSE programs, but within the organization, no. And sixty-three, it's a good number to work with, but it's not three-hundred in terms of resources and stuff.

Sophie White: Yeah. Andrea, your comment about therapy for work problems resonated with me and it made me think of one question I have, which is, so we released three EDUCAUSE workforce reports this summer targeted toward teaching and learning professionals, IT leadership and cybersecurity and privacy across all of them. We're definitely seeing overloaded workloads and also mental health concerns. The IT leadership one in particular actually noted that leaders are overwhelmed in higher education. So I'm curious, how are you both addressing these challenges around workload and capacity for your employees, but also the need to get these core IT functions done, and how do you support your teams through that challenge?

Andrea Childress: I don't have an answer. It's tricky part, right? I think you have to use a number of techniques, and I think one of the ways that it's helpful is just make sure you talk about it. Listen, I understand burnout is a problem. I don't want people to get burned out, and you all know that there's these big things that we have to do. And so the times when between the big things, maybe there's a potential to be more flexible and maybe if you just ask, we could work something out for you, whatever. I mean, it's just important to talk about it. And it's not one size fits all. So when someone says, well, that's not fair. That person gets to do this. Well, life's not fair either, so if you needed something, I would be happy to help you too. And so at that point, you're relying on the trust of the individuals getting the work done and that kind of thing. But we've already talked about trust, right? It's one of those elements of a good culture. So again, you just have to build that trust in as many ways as you can.

David Weil: I wish I had a great answer for that as well. It's like, next question please. But I don't really want to make light of it because it is so important. And we're very fortunate if a college in the summer, we get restorative Fridays, which is that college, all college employees have Fridays off, or if you have to work on Friday, I have to staff this service desk. They then take Monday off so that you get a three day non-work break. And it's wonderful. It's wonderful because it just creates this environment. And some people use it to catch up a little bit on work, but you really try to honor it. I think it's also how you react to problems, missed deadlines, if things go wrong. I think that contributes to mental health. Our staff is very motivated and they want things to work right, but problems pop up and things do go wrong.

And I think trying to take that into account and be even keeled, I think goes a long way as well. And also acting as the blocker to say, yeah, we will say no or we won't do that is important, but there's never ending pressures and project lists. And I'll go to a cabinet meeting and come back and it's like, well, guess what we're doing next week? And everyone's like, we already know what we're doing. I was like, well, guess what? It's changing a little bit because this is a priority or something like that. And just recognizing the impact that has on people.

Sophie White: What lessons do you have in being a blocker? That one's really interesting to me. And how do you work with other stakeholders who are outside of IT to say, no, we aren't doing this project and still make sure that you're supporting the institution's mission. I think that's a really tricky conversation to have.

David Weil: It's a very tricky conversation, and I think I don't have any secret weapons, but it's about relationships. It's about back to the T word to the trust to say, wow, okay, yeah, you need to do that. Well, sometimes the conversation is, well, we were doing this for you, so you want us to, we can pause that and move over to this, but these are the implications for that. I think we're fortunate here at Ithaca that the CIO does sit on the cabinet, so the ability to hear what's coming down the road a little bit more and to have those conversations, we always try to do it and well, we can't work on that now and here's a resource that might help, or here's a way to get through it.

Because we also know one of the worst things to do is to over promise and to say, well just submit a ticket and then I can't bother with you now, submit a ticket. So they do that and then eight months later be, well, I submitted a ticket and you never got back to me. So that also breaks the trust. I think you have to be brutally honest too. You say, we're just not going to be able to get to this. You could put in the ticket, but this is not going to happen. I dunno, Andrea, do you have any magic weapons?

Andrea Childress: Well, it's not magic, but I a hundred percent agree with you that it's about relationships and you need to build those relationships before you have to say no. Right? Then it's not They believe you. They trust that you're telling them the truth when you've already helped them understand your objectives and you're trying to understand their objectives. And we actually use a graph impact versus effort. And so when we're trying to decide what to resource with the limited capacity we have, we'll put these things on a chart and we have definitions of what those impact and effort criteria are, and then we talk about it amongst the team that's work, doing the work or planning to do the work, and we decide where we think it belongs, and then we share that with those stakeholders and we explain, this is why yours isn't going to be done this year, possibly maybe next year. Or then they go, oh, okay, I see what you're saying. Or they grumble about it, whatever the case may be, but at least they're a little bit more informed and can swallow that pill. Right? So just again, that transparency, that trust in you're exactly right. Relationships are what it's all about.

David Weil: Another aspect, and it's a broad area here, but at least at Ithaca College, we've seen the role of IT evolve over the years. And so EDUCAUSE talks about the integrative CIO, this concept that it's less about the technology and more about the services and how we can help our institutions succeed and to achieve that, the tech has to work. Obviously it's a baseline, but how we provide that tech I think has changed a little bit with the advent of software as a service and cloud and all of that. And so where I'm going with this is we are constantly looking at our org design, our organizational structure, and to say, where do we need to enhance our roles or add capacity and where can we maybe cut back? And if you really were to map it out over the last ten years, our core technical skills is probably reduced and our service skills and offerings has increased.

So process redesign, project managers, business analysts, customer service folks, we've staffed up. And so that changes how we interact with the institution and I think allows us to find ways to say yes, because we're trying to use technical solutions that may not be quite as technically complex, but we can help people rethink processes and stuff. I'm not sure that all makes as much sense as it did in my head before I was going to say it, but I think it's really looking at the evolving IT organization is also another way that you can help with the work that's coming in.

Andrea Childress: Yes, I inherited a team a few years ago and then people left and for the first, well, maybe not the first time, I shouldn't say that, but for a while I was asking the leadership of that team, what else can we do with that position if we didn't put it exactly where it was? How can we do that work and what else could we utilize that position for? And so I tried to let the ownership of that position land at the leadership level, not the team leader level. So then that kind of just forced people's hand to sort of be brutally honest about what they felt like their team's capacity really, really was. And then we did hit a point where I said, you're telling me that you feel like you're not meeting the needs, but I'm not hearing that from our stakeholders. So I think you're thinking about the past and not the future and the way we're trying to evolve this team. So how do we get people to think about what we can become, not let's staff up exactly how we were in the past. Those days might be gone now. And so if you need me to say no, then help me understand what those arguments are, and I'm happy to do it. I will do, that's my job. Help you not feel that pressure if it's maybe not as real as you think.

Jenay Robert: Yeah. So while we're talking about workloads and workflows and efficiency, I'm going to do it forty-five minutes in. This may be a record we're going to bring up AI brace yourself, everyone. So that's the big question. And this is in part selfishly because I'm embarking on one of our next research studies that's going to be looking at the use of AI for business operations at institutions. So there's a lot of questions swirling in my head about what's happening at our institutions. Are you seeing anything even being piloted yet? Are you working on any of that at your institutions? What's the vibe as the kids say?

Andrea Childress: Dave, I don't know if you want to take this first.

David Weil: Sure, go ahead. So we've spent the last two or three years I think, piloting, exploring, learning. We've everything from working with faculty on how they want to integrate AI to their curriculums, their classes, to how can we use AI to leverage institutional data to really help our students and our staff. And we've had a number of successes. We've had some things that didn't pan out since we're talking about people. That aspect of the AI conversation, I really put a lot of value in the P word pilot. I think piloting allows you to experiment and to try things with an expectation that may not be perfect. It's a pilot and that really helped us learn a lot. But we're getting ready to put together what we're calling AI vision for 2030, which is really going to be a four or five year plan on how we're going to look at using AI in four pillars, AI for student success, AI for student experience, AI to help prepare our students for an AI infused workplace, and then AI to help with operational effectiveness and efficiencies.

So we're sort of moving now from this pilot phase to this actual how can we scale it? But then the next question is, well, who's going to do all that? It's like what staff of teams do we have? And that's something we're looking at and whether we have to augment some of our existing resources to do that or say no to some things or whatever, because we believe that thoughtful, intentional implementation of AI, emphasis on those two words, thoughtful and intentional, can add ethical in there is really going to make a difference. And the last thing I just want to say is we're also looking at this from the perspective that we don't want AI to replace the human to human. We really want it to enhance the human to human, which is what we're all about.

Andrea Childress: Awesome. So I'll share a little about what we're doing as well, but I think there's going to be a difference in what you just described or what we are doing because I feel like we're in defense mode. It's coming at us from all angles, and we don't have that capacity today to respond to every angle. And so people are just buying it, trying to use it, asking us for data to throw into it, throw it at, and we're like, oh gosh, how are we going to handle all of this? And so we're just trying the best we can at this point. And of course, we already run tools that are putting in new features, so then we're skilling up and trying to support those features and trying to help in that way. But we're not, we always say in IT, we're not driving the business.

The business experts should be driving the business and we're here in support of them. And so it's a weird spot to be. And when it comes to this AI, which is such a technical advancement, so we do have a project that we've just kicked off where we're putting down three years and trying to figure out how do we organize, what are the most important things we need to do today so that ITS is a place that's leveraged for support of any AI initiative that the business wants and needs, which includes, we're talking about data governance in that regard. Everybody has data governance today, but now you add AI on top of that. So what's different about that type of a governance? And maybe it's a way for us to beef up the data governance that probably isn't exactly what we would really want in the first place.

But I feel like in the bigger system type of role, it's just very complicated because there's just pockets of people trying to do things everywhere. And it's not, maybe there is a strategic direction driving what those people are doing, but it doesn't feel like it because maybe we're just not there yet to have it from that type of a system level. So there's a lot of grapevine, oh, I'm hearing this, I'm seeing that. How are we going to respond to this? How do we prevent everyone from just buying the latest tool that says it has AI and impacting our capacity to support whatever that tool is. So it's a real problem. No, it's not a problem. We're all excited about it, but just dealing with this newness of it, the cutting edge of it is difficult right now. But again, we're trying to get organized and we are going to be, this is not a secret.

We're going to be beginning in the next month or so, an AI challenge for our own staff. So all three hundred of our staff can be empowered to think about how they can utilize AI for their own job, for their own teams, for teams that they serve, for the constituents, and just brainstorm and come up with things that make sense to pilot, make sense to try that we can all get behind and sort of champion if we think it could be really impactful. And every conversation I ran, the answer when we talk about it is, well, we can decide something today, but then tomorrow it's going to change. So it's fun, but it's also difficult. So that's how I feel about it. But I mean, we're trying to get there.

David Weil: One of the things we did at the fairly early on is we set up playtime and we call it that AI playtime, let's explore. And so for a number of months, we would all get together and people would share how they were playing with AI. And it just was a way that the whole organization had a sort of felt it was okay to experiment and build that.

Andrea Childress: Yeah, I love that.

Sophie White: Yeah, I think that's a great example. Our last conversation was more on the teaching and learning perspective on how to use AI. So we were talking to folks with academic leadership backgrounds, faculty, librarians, and one of the takeaways was really you have to make sure that you get your hands dirty and actually play with it and understand how it works, because we can talk so much about these larger issues of how it relates to people, but you have to understand the day-to-day too, to see what it's capable of. And this conversation's flown by, there's so much we can chat about, but we are getting to the end of our time. So would love to just wrap up and hear from the two of you with all these big changes that we're talking about in terms of higher education, in terms of AI and its acceleration, how are you returning back to this idea of putting people first? Is there maybe one tip or one takeaway that you want the audience to think about as they consider people putting people first in 2025?

Andrea Childress: I mean, I think AI is a natural way to put people first by training them, getting them to professional development opportunities where they can get their hands dirty. And so that one is like it's falling in our lap in that regard because people, especially younger people, they're so excited about it and they really want to work with it. So I think it's naturally fitting in very well.

David Weil: I think it goes back to what I said earlier in that we lead people, and I think we often forget that we focus on the problems, we focus on other aspects, but at the end of the day, all of us got up this morning, we may have eaten breakfast, may have exercised, hopefully brushed our teeth, and we had this idea of what we were going to do today because we're all people. And I think sometimes we forget that. And so as we look at our organizations large or small, try to take a moment to connect, to really lean in and to remember that that individual who's working on that particular project that's either having success or not having a success, got up to date to come and contribute to that. And we all nod our heads and we say, yes, and I'm sitting here saying this, and I realize, I'm sure I don't do that all the time because I'm focused on this outcome that I'm trying to achieve or this project or this next conversation that I need to have. But I think if we just remind ourselves, because we can do amazing things. We all have amazing staff, so let's support 'em and be there for them.

Sophie White: I think that's such an inspirational note to end on. And I think it's so important sometimes with the pace of change we're looking at just to take a pause. And like you just said, Dave, appreciate the people behind all of the work. So thank you for bringing us home with that. And thank you Andrea and Dave for the fantastic conversation today.