Tech Leadership’s Big Moment in Higher Ed

Sophie White: Hello everyone and welcome to EDUCAUSE Shop Talk. I'm Sophie White. I'm a content marketing and program manager with EDUCAUSE, and I am one of the co-hosts for today's episode.

Jenay Robert: Hi everyone, I'm Jenay Robert. I'm a senior researcher at EDUCAUSE and I'm your other host.

Sophie White: Beautiful. And we are thrilled today to have with us two special guests. We have Michele Norin and Jessie Minton. So I will tell you a bit about Michele and Jessie and then we will jump into it. So Michele Norin, our first guest is senior vice president and chief information officer. Michele is Rutgers' institutional leader for technology. Her chief responsibility is to provide leadership in the strategic adoption and use of information technology in support of the university's vision for excellence in research, teaching, outreach and lifelong learning. So thanks for being with us, Michele. I've actually been to New Brunswick, New Jersey, a couple of times and I remember having a really great bagel there. So I'm jealous of your bagels in New Jersey.

Michele Norin: A lot of good bagels around here for sure.

Sophie White: True. Jessie Minton is our other guest today. As the vice chancellor for technology and chief information officer at Washington University in St. Louis, Jessie spearheads the university's information technology strategy and manages the implementation of new and existing IT systems and services. She plays a crucial role in shaping comprehensive strategies for computing resources, ensuring support and oversight across all university campuses and their missions of teaching, learning, research and patient care. Thank you Jessie and Michele for being with us today.

Michele Norin: Glad to be here.

Sophie White: So Michele and Jessie also are our outgoing community group leaders for our CIO community group at EDUCAUSE. If you're not familiar with the community groups, they're a really great virtual space to connect with other folks across higher education technology and our EDUCAUSE community. Michele and Jessie have been serving since 2019 on the CIO community group. So they have seen the wild ride of COVID to COVID winding down, going from emergency remote teaching to the place that we are in 2025 today. So thank you for all the time that you have dedicated to that community. I'll tell you all a little bit about the CIO community group in case you're wondering and then we'll just jump into it. So the CIO community group is a group designed for a discussion of issues and challenges that affect chief information officers in higher ed, role of the CIO, financing and funding strategies, planning and organizing information resources within the institution, human resource issues, policies for networked information, and the future of higher education. So it's a really important group. We have a large and really active CIO community at EDUCAUSE and I'm really thrilled to have both of you with us today to talk about priorities of CIOs, what you're working on, what you're excited about, and any lessons that you've learned too from being community group leaders.

So let's jump into it. I guess Jessie and Michele, are there any burning issues that you want to just dive into today? Something that you're working on at your institution or you think that CIOs need to hear about during this time as we're looking at it in July, 2025?

Jessie Minton: You know what, I'm happy to sort of jump in. I think that if you had had this conversation with us a year ago, we'd be having a really different dialogue. I think that our priorities as institutions have really shifted in a number of ways as we're dealing with the demographic cliff is now here. We've been talking about that for a very long time and we're all having to contend with that. We're talking about a shifting policy landscape that has impacts on higher education and in our case here at Wash U on reimbursement for Medicaid and Medicare and patient care. And at least at our institution that's become an incredibly high priority is scenario planning and figuring out how to adapt to what I think is a seminal moment in higher education where things are fundamentally changing. And the dialogue we've been having for a long time about the affordability of higher ed and the value of a higher education degree has sort of reached a fever pitch. And in my opinion, I think that things are going to shift radically in the next few years. And I think the CIO is really at an interesting place, especially with the confluence of generative AI and as we move into agentic AI to be at a place to participate and drive transformation. Michele, what are you seeing from a state school perspective and what's your opinion on that?

Michele Norin: Well, I got lots of opinions about, I completely agree, Jessie, I think you outlined it very nicely in terms of just institutionally what are we grappling with? And I think when you put that lens on the last several years, first of all, I can't believe it's been six years since you and I have been leading the CIO community, so I'm still kind of coming to grips with that. But if you think about that time period of going through COVID, going through the sort of national and international situations, the demographic cliff, I mean I know for us as a state institution there are sometimes different aspects to consider when you're an institution that relies very heavily or maybe somewhat because I know that piece has been changing, but rely on state funding as part of your financial portfolio. And I know for us in New Jersey, we are very well supported by the state. In other states, that's been a changing landscape.

I know in Arizona it was a changing landscape there for sure. I think as an institution, when we think about how to prioritize, I know at least here in our discussions at the cabinet level when we talk about these financial pressures, these pressures around our enrollment, now we have pressures around our research portfolio. Oftentimes what I've observed is that there is a growing emphasis on the use of technology and wanting to leverage technology more. In fact, my colleagues utter those words when we talk about moments when we have to or shift or recalibrate our financial situations, sometimes we have to take a cut. Our strategy, the strategy in our non IT areas has been continues to be, and I think AI is a good example of this, we'll just use technology to fill those gaps now that we have because we have fewer resources or to create more capacity to do more.

And so it's great because there's recognition that technology can play that kind of a role. It's challenging when you think about are we positioned where we need to be to allow for that kind of democratization of the tools? And so I think as a state institution, I think there's a lot of similarity to our colleagues and the private institutions, but we still have those nuances of where does our funding actually come from. I think that's been leveling. I don't know Jessie if your view on this, but it feels like we've been leveling that playing field a bit in terms of just one form or another is a financial pressure now. So I think it's been definitely a topic as we think about what does that actually mean from a CIO perspective and where we're making our investments, what is the expectation of the institution? I know there's flavors as well, large institution to smaller institution, right? Those smaller institutions, I think this comes through in our CIO list. In some cases it's very much an issue, the demographic cliff and the ability to even stay alive as an institution. And so I think that's been a factor as well in some of that dialogue over time.

Jessie Minton: Yeah, I completely agree. I mean we've seen institutions closing over the last five years and it's continuing to happen and my opinion it will continue to happen as we sort of have to reckon with changing landscape, changing demographics. You made a really interesting point around the adoption of technology because it is an easy thing to say let's implement a technology to automate something. But as we all know, we are faced with upfront expenses in order to implement those things unless they happen to be something we already have in place and we're simply increasing adoption. And part of the challenge I think in my experience is that higher education is because we tend to have a culture of let a thousand flowers bloom. It also makes some barriers to when we look at opportunities at the enterprise and we want to take advantage of those technologically because our data is so diffuse and we don't always have good governance across the enterprise.

And if you think about it in that way, without taking steps to solve some of those things, if you for example, layer a large language model on bad data, you can suddenly automate insights that are really garbage at a staggering rate. And so we have to start to contend with some of those things and I think that we're all to whatever degree that we deal with some of those things, having to figure that out. And it's an interesting time to have to make upfront investment in order to be in a place where we can leapfrog and be competitive amidst different financial pressures. And it's not to the time that I spent in the tech sector before I moved into higher ed where they're very used to the idea that you cut in one area and invest in another. And it's happening now again with AI and we tend to lag in that way.

And I think all of us or the conversations we're having here at University Council are about how do we leverage these technologies and really take a step function forward in maturity in thinking about how we organize differently and take cost out of the institution. I agree that higher education has become incredibly expensive. We have to figure out how to deal with that and create that value if we want to survive. And I think part of that is a little bit of normalization, leveraging technology and keeping the diffuse nature in the academic space and in the research space where that really matters. But not so much in terms of that we have 15 platforms that do the same thing and we're supporting all of them.

Michele Norin: I completely agree. I just came from another meeting this morning where we were talking about data governance. And I think this is true for technology as well. We have a lot of tools. I mean we probably have every major tool there is. We have a lot of data and we've been working, like you said, Jessie, very diligently on consolidating that data, bringing it at least to a core so that we can integrate it, make it interoperable, make it accessible, and we've got a ways to go because like you we're distributed and so we're modernizing our tools. We've been working on that for a number of years now. We've got a major initiative to replace our business systems such as the never ending project. And so we have a lot of capability. What is, I think the next layer to truly leverage in the ways that maybe industry does a little bit better than higher ed is in the literacy of the community in how to leverage the tools.

It's one thing to use them to just handle a normal transaction or it's sort of the operation. It's another thing to trigger that thought process, that question that says I need to do this. How do I make sure this tool addresses that or is there something in this tool that I need to pay attention to that's going to help me be more productive or help me get something done faster or answer a question in a different way that might be in more informed. And AI is I think heightening this, that equation of how do we educate our community in a way that they're comfortable with just trial and error. Let's try the tools, see what the effect is that didn't work, move on to the next one or wow, that really worked and now I want to incorporate that so that I can stop doing something that's a little more routine and start spending more time with students or whatever that or is.

And it's true for the tools, it's true for the data, it's true for AI. And I think it's really just heightening this question for us about how do we help people be more literate, learn quicker, be more comfortable with the tools so that we truly are leveraging them in brand new ways. And that's the hard part. We can throw tools in there all day long, which we're good at in tech, right? We can raise this great tool, but if the community's not ready for it or they're not quite sure what to do, then it's a different story. You're only going to get so far.

Jessie Minton: For sure. One hundred percent think that the most challenging and interesting and dynamic part of what we do is the people aspect of technology, the generative AI boom, not withstanding most things that we do have a known solution to them.

I'm assuming it's an ERP project that you're embarking on at red work. Good luck. We've done those before. Lots of institutions have done those before. There's a pretty known set of players in the market. It's not the implementation of the tech that's hard. It's changing the business processes, getting the community to come along with change management, dealing with detractors, figuring out all those things. And those are the hard parts. And then you layer on and a relatively unknown future, the large language models in general of AI and Agentic are so interesting because there isn't a certainty even in how they work, even from the people who created them, which is a fascinating concept. And so we have to try to figure out how to enable our communities to use those things in an environment where no one really knows how they work and like you said it's the literacy piece and we layer on the data literacy, which has been a challenge for higher education to begin with. And then I think what's exciting about it for me is that it places technology squarely in the strategy realm.

Michele Norin: Completely agree. Yep.

Jessie Minton: And we as CIOs I think have this amazing opportunity to move into a strategic position if we weren't already viewed that way as the institution. There's so much of what we do that does have to be plumbing. The email has to work, the network has to be stable, all of those things have to happen. And people take that for granted, just like the light's working, but the pieces that are interesting and transformative and a place that we can really, really shine and show the power of. What I like to think about is technology being a force multiplier for the mission are in these strategic conversations. And you have to have the plumbing right in order to have that seat at the table for sure. Because if the network is broken and people can't rely on the basic services, they won't trust you with higher order things. But it's a fascinating and really engaging time to do this work.

Sophie White: Have you found, I'm thinking about how to bring IT to the table as a strategic partner at the institution, have you found that's naturally happening as we're seeing technology fitting into fill cracks in funding or due to the AI, all of the hype around AI and efficiencies? Or have you kind of had to take a proactive approach to selling yourself as strategic leaders in the institution? What has that looked like and do you have any tips for our audience in terms of how to lift up IT leaders as strategic partners at the institution?

Jessie Minton: That's interesting. I'm curious about your experience, Michele, but I've been very conscious when I have chosen to take a role to serve as CIO about the culture and the view of it as a strategic partner or as strictly operations. I think it's incredibly influenced by the culture of the institution. And if you're at an institution that isn't culturally ready to think about technology as that strategic partner, I think it's an uphill battle. Wash U I'm very fortunate, had when I was recruited, had really this transformative goal around IT to move us to a place that we are leveraging technology as a strategic advantage in all three aspects of the mission from patient care to research to academics. And I think it's really hard to do that in an institution that doesn't want you at the table. There's a lot of barriers. My thoughts on it are that you have to start small if you happen to find yourself at that institution. And you also know fundamentally as a CIO that in order for that institution to succeed, they've got to look at technology as a piece of the strategy. And I think you can find small ways to suggest technology solutions to institutional problems and start to demonstrate those. And you have to make sure that your operations are spot on and that your shop runs really well. But for me that's a big piece of the kind of institution in which I want to be.

Michele Norin: I agree with that and I think it's Sophie, to your question as well, I think it's all of the above. I think the institutional leadership, and I'm just going to say the president, whatever that top level executive is for the institution, it does take an acknowledgement that about the role that technology plays at an institution. And I do think that sentiment is changing. We've been in this business for a long time and I think there's definitely more visibility and definitely more recognition. But it takes that top executive to understand that, to support it and then to sort of be open to the fact that one of the seats at that table, at that cabinet level table should be or needs to be or could be the CIO or whatever that lead IT person is. So it takes that level of openness, but it also takes the CIO being able to show up in a way that truly is strategic.

And you're absolutely right Jessie. If you can't get the basics right, it's going to be hard to make the case for the fact that you're the person that can be there to really think big picture. Because of that trust factor, people need to be, the community needs to feel like they can rely on the basic operations to work well and that your support organization is responding well and showing up well as a partner for the community. So you have to work at getting that baseline in place to then sort build up your credibility in if you have to make the case for positioning yourself at that table. But you can't get there without the president making the seat at the table. So I think it's been shifting. I know as a CIO who's sort of not been at that table and now at an institution where I have the opportunity to be at that table, I always sort of came at this role, not so much worrying about that table.

The CIO has to work across the entire institution. And so whether you're at the cabinet table or not, you still have to have relationships with the CFO, with your facilities lead, with your deans, your academic leadership, your vice president for research, whatever those roles, however they're titled, it's usually the same roles and you have to have a relationship with those roles. So I always tried to not be so worried about where I report, whether I have a seat at the table, but more focused on I can't do my job or represent technology without having those core relationships. And so I spend a lot of time on being out there and connecting and talking about our goals and plans and learning and listening and really trying to represent technology in a way that doesn't get caught up in where I report. And I think that's been helpful.

And I think that's an important aspect for anyone who's in this role or aspiring to be in these roles, is that network is critically important. I'm not always the one advocating for a particular tool these days. I'm not. I used to be, right? Jessie used to be like, you're in there all the time trying to make the case. Now it's almost a river perverse, like whoa, I got a list. It's put on the list. So it's nice. It's good because you don't have to make the case for what the role technology plays. But I think elevating that thinking to, okay, is this a direction? How do we balance our investments? Yes, we have to make investments and these are trade-off investments. If you want to be effective in AI, you have to have the tools, you got to have the people, you have to have the resources, and you can't do it by yourself. So how do you make the case for that kind of investment? So anyway, I think it's a multi-pronged approach. I will always advocate for that, the CIO being represented at that cabinet level. I just think it's important these days. And you cannot, there are not institutions that can operate without technology. You have to have technology

Period. And it's important for executive leadership to accept that and to some degree create that expectation of strategy and make sure you've got your CIO in that mix, definitely advocate for that.

Jessie Minton: Couldn't agree more that the relationship piece is so important. And then directly related to that is our ability to communicate.

Yes, completely agree.

We have to be able to meet people where they are, communicate with deans, communicate with the CFO, understand the finances in a way that you can talk to them in a way that makes sense about resources, be able to get in front of the board, be able to capture the attention of your president or chancellor in the limited time they may have to spend with you and create advocates in others because they believe in you. And then when the conversation about technology arises, you're not trying to make a case to folks who don't know you, don't believe in you don't understand. But one of the things that I think we're constantly trying to, I think I know Michele well enough to know that this is a priority for her as well, is to instill those communication skills in all levels of our IT staff. We have to be able to communicate in a way that resonates with whichever stakeholder you happen to be in front of. And no matter how good you are, even at developing the vision, the strategy executing, if you can't communicate it, no one knows and you've already lost.

Sophie White: It's so important. We're actually, I may be pulling the cat out of the bag a little bit, but I'm working on this project right now at EDUCAUSE with Veronica Diaz, she runs our professional learning department and we have a lot of really interesting data from early career professionals about various different competencies that they evaluated after taking our new managers institute. And one of the ones I found was really interesting was communication as an area for improvement in early career professionals. Because a lot of folks said things like, oh, I understand how to cater my messaging towards different audiences, but when it comes to something like I feel comfortable having a direct conversation with someone about an issue, those numbers went way down. And just thinking about how important building those communication skills is and how being a courageous and empathetic leader so that you can have those kind of conversations even when they aren't the most fun or comfortable is so important. So I love that you emphasize that. It's something I'm working on right now with our young professionals advisory committee too. So thanks for that.

Jenay Robert: And I have my horizon hat on thinking about how current trends impact the future. So if anyone's listening doesn't know what the horizon report is, that's where we look at current trends in various buckets, various categories, social, technological, environmental, economic, and political. And then we think about how those may intersect, work together, work against each other, and impact the future. And so my question is around how current trends, it doesn't have to be horizon trends, just what you're seeing in society, in technology, in the economy. Do you think that current trends are accelerating this cultural shift at institutions where those presidents are seeing the CIO as more of that strategic partner because of what's happening in the world? Or do you think that maybe will happen in the near future? Or is that not really just the direction things are going yet?

Michele Norin: I mean, I think we've been creeping our way along that direction. I think just related to even what we were just touching on in terms of how is that as the CIO role or even just technology viewed within an institution, I think that's going to change. I mean, I think the AI cycle right now is putting a lot of pressure on that exact question, that shift. And I think that, I hope that it does lead to an expansion of CIOs having seats at those tables. I think AI is so tricky right now because there's a lot of hype around it, but there's a lot of reality around it as well. And so those of us that are, we're all trying to sort of navigate our approach. And I know for us, questions are popping up from every angle of our institution. It's coming up through the instructors, our faculty.

I've got questions coming up through the research community, our business operation areas, our administrative departments want to use AI. We want to use AI to deal with our contracts faster. And it's just coming up everywhere. And then those questions bubble up to their respective leaders. For us, it has actually landed at the cabinet table. And so if I were not in the room, where does it go from there? So I know because I am in the room, at least we're in a presidential transition. So maybe this will shift a little bit, but I know in the previous version of our president, for him, it's like, oh my gosh, I'm so glad the CIO's in the room because there's someone in here who can actually for the moment coordinate. So it becomes a landing place and it's an opportunity for me to say, look, let's just think about this as our approach.

So I hope that that technology, because it's moving so quickly, will just heighten that need to be more visible, even more so, it is going to heighten the need for visibility. If it hasn't already, it will because the tools and the capabilities that are coming from industry, it is on a time scale we've never seen before. And that's not just higher ed. That's like everyone who's in this space. So there's some hype in there and it feels a lot faster than it probably actually is, but even at that rate, it is faster. Jessie, chime in. I am sure you see this too, but it's like every day there's some new headline about something going on in this space.

Jessie Minton: There's something every day, higher ed is typically much slower than the private sector to adopt and respond to these kind of seismic shifts in technology. And I think that we're making probably the biggest effort that I've seen in my tenure as a CIO to adapt and try to keep up with AI. And it's a fascinating process, and I think that you're absolutely right, having the CIO at the table to have that conversation, unless you happen to be one of the rare institutions that had a CIO that moved into another executive role at the cabinet level, and there's just a very small handful of them. The other folks at that table don't have the knowledge to be able to talk about the things that are really important to reckon with that aren't technology, but that are barriers to adoption, business processes, data quality, all of the things that we have to be able to deal with that are the really challenging pieces and communicate that. And it's a really interesting opportunity for us. And if I think if your CIO isn't at the table at your institution, that's a hard, hard hill to climb. If your institution also simultaneously wants to become a leader or even stay current in this space, staying current right now is really hard, much less trying to take a leadership position.

Michele Norin: And the other thing too is that as institutions learn, we're all watching each other. We always compare notes. And if Jessie does something super creative where she's at and the respective roles learn about that, then they want to do the same thing. And so I think that speed of reality where we can actually start to show how the tools are going to be used with some outcomes, right? Like some tangible, measurable outcomes, that's just going to speed up the need for when are we going to do this? And we need the technology division to engage here. And so if you're not there, then you're going to be there pretty soon because the expectations are just going to grow as the reality starts to set in about what can actually be done with the tools. There's probably maybe a handful of institutions that are about at the front of that pack. Most of us are kind of in the middle and we're all watching and trying to look for those moments, the pilots, the trials to say, okay, well how did that turn out? And is that something our community's going to want to do and we want to do the same thing? So it just adds to that.

Jessie Minton: It does. One of the things that I'm finding super interesting right now is this notion of how do you create an AI strategy in this environment and culturally at your institution who leads it?

I think for us, we have a differentiated strategy by mission, our patient care strategy and what AI tools that we're adopting in Epic to reduce physician documentation time, for example. We have a pretty clear and robust governance structure around that. We have some investment around it. We have a chief health AI officer in the academic medical center. And then the research piece of it, from my perspective, our role is not to in any way, shape or form, try to dictate to researchers how they use AI, what their strategy should be. For me, at least at Wash U, our strategy is we have to be able to provide the enabling infrastructure, the computing resources, the tools, the cybersecurity to be able to enable them to go after whatever discovery they see fit. And very similarly in the academic space, we need to help educate our faculty about the art of the possible, but we certainly aren't telling them how they ought to teach. And that can be a delicate dance when you get out of the administrative space, which for me, I think of as almost a separate domain with a defined strategy that's much more likely to be led out of the CIO's office than a research academic strategy. I'm curious how you're thinking about that, Michele, because for me here, one strategy to rule them all is a fool's errand.

Michele Norin: For me strategy is I'm defining it more as how we're going to approach building our framework. So tried to keep it high level enough to where our process and approach, our end goal is to have an ecosystem and a framework that will support or respond to the aspects of our mission. Just like you said, Jessie, our patient care research, instruction and learning and then administration. And so try not to be too specific and give ourselves some space, some runway to learn to try to figure out what we do here. So what I did was we laid out that vision and then I've got working groups. I've got, it's up to five or six now where we pulled together folks from the various aspects. I got a research working group. I've got teaching and learning clinical in a healthcare administration, and then I've got a technical working group and then infrastructure working group, and then a steering group.

And those groups are made up of experts from their respective work theme. So I've got researchers in there, I've got faculty in there, instructors. And what we've asked them to do is to first of all be landing places for all the questions to think about how do we run some pilots? What kinds of guardrails do we need to start thinking about? Do we need big P policies around any of these? What kind of guidance should we provide faculty in the classroom that is sensitive? We usually say, well, it's up to the faculty in the classroom, but some of 'em are like, we don't know what to do. And the students now have a voice and they're like, well, what is the rule here for what we can do to use the technology? And we're all over the map on our opinions. So we're just trying to create a process for planning, thinking, learning, and then hopefully that it'll set the stage for informing ourselves about what should our ultimate strategy be or what our approach is going to be. But for now, we just need to sort of keep it wide open and try to connect the dots without being constraining, but yet not letting it be the wild. Everybody gets to do whatever they want. It can't be either of those. And so that's kind of the approach because I agree with you, we don't know enough to actually declare this. We think we're going to need a framework and an ecosystem. Now how do we learn and give our so that we can figure out what that should look like in the end?

Sophie White: I love that example. It's really difficult. I love that example. I think we've been struggling a lot. Our last shop talk was about institutional resilience and managing risk, but just looking at this balance of innovation and governance and when do you prioritize each one? And I like your approach, Michele, of we're going to create some governance that allows for innovation, but also sets guidelines to that innovation aside and in the space that we are in the world and the pace of technology and AI right now, I feel like that feels like the right place to be until we know more. So thank you for illustrating that

And we were commenting on the side, Jessie, I loved your comment about one strategy to rule them all as a fool's errand. There's so much. And as a Lord of the Rings fan, any reference to one ring to rule them all is fun for me. But I think this was a really great discussion and appreciate all of your time. I think we could go on forever about all of these tensions between governance, innovation for all of our thousands of college presidents listening, make sure you're putting your IT folks in the cabinet. That's what we're hearing, I think loud and clear throughout this conversation. So thank you both for being part of the conversation today and for leading our CIO group for six years with such creativity and flexibility as we've gone through all of these wild world events together. And I can't to see what's next for that community. Jenay, anything else you want to add before we wrap up?

Jenay Robert: Just another thank you so much for your time and your leadership, and I don't know if people always realize how much EDUCAUSE relies on the collaboration with our members and that we truly are so member led and you two are just such appreciated and I don't know, beacons of light members for the work you've done over the last six years. Not that this is starting to feel like a goodbye party, and I don't want, I know, but

Sophie White: I don't know how that happen.

Jenay Robert: Yeah. Yes, I know. But whoever's coming into the CG as the next leader is big shoes to fill, so for sure. Thank you.