The Modern Era of IT Strategic Planning

Sophie White: Hello everyone and welcome to our EDUCAUSE Shop Talk. It is strategize your strategy planning for the year ahead. I'm Sophie White. I'm one of the hosts for today's discussion, and I'm a content marketing and program manager here at EDUCAUSE.

Jenay Robert: My name is Jenay Robert. I am a senior researcher here at EDUCAUSE, and I will be your other host.

Sophie White: Great. We're so excited today to have two special guests with us. So I'll introduce them for you here and then we'll jump into the discussion. First off, we have Ed Puckett. Ed is an enterprise senior IT project manager at Kansas State University. He has twenty-plus years of experience in academic IT and previous experience includes director roles in managing online learning and learning management systems, applications development, web content management, and countless integration and implementations projects. Ed's greatest joy was building a PMO from the ground up at UH Clear Lake. Ed's Professional certifications include a PMP, professional scrum master, and balanced scorecard professional, and his passions include the intersection of strategic planning and IT portfolios as well as getting up at 5 a.m. to jump in a cold pool and swim 3,000 yards, four to five times a week. That is truly impressive. We could talk about that in a minute, but thanks for being here, Ed. Next up,

Ed Puckett: Happy to hear.

Sophie White: Great. Jason Maslanka is the chief technology officer and deputy CIO at the University of Illinois Chicago, a 35,000 student research one university in the heart of Chicago. In his twenty-plus year career in higher ed, Jason has led projects in everything from physical infrastructure to security to business process improvement and written countless strategic plans. Today he's trying to stay one step ahead of AI and keep providing human value as long as possible. Love that. And we can talk about the role of humans too. We also found out Jason's really slacking compared to Ed because he gets up at 6 a.m. and plays tennis a few times a week. So thank you both for being with us.

Jason Maslanka: Thank you.

Ed Puckett: Yes, thank you.

Sophie White: Ed, so you're swimming, are you training for a race or something or is this just something that lifestyle-

Ed Puckett: Hobby on the side just to stay healthy and to have goals to keep me healthy. I'm a US master swimmer and so a lot of people get impressed with that phrase. All the master's means is that you're eighteen or over. So most of us have swum when we were in high school or college, and so that's the thing you can do to channel that energy, to stay in touch with the sport. So I do compete in swim meets, went to US MS Nationals last year and I just find it's a great outlet for getting exercise, discharging stress, and it is also a metaphor that I use now related to work and projects and things like that which we can get into if it comes up at our discussion.

Sophie White: Great. I don't want to steal your thunder, but I'm curious what the metaphor from swimming to IT and strategic planning could be.

Ed Puckett: So we can do that now. You'll hear this a lot. Leaders will come in and they'll say, you'll hear phrases such as we're here to work hard and we're here to work fast. And that sets the pace and the cadence. Everyone starts working hard and everyone starts working fast. We want to be successful and we certainly want the university to be successful. The metaphor I use though is, and this happened to me last year, we had a change in coaches and our workouts were structured that it was all sprint work, all swim hard and swim fast and you'd think cool, that would help you get faster. But what was actually happening is as you swim hard and fast and all of your workouts day after day, things start happening. You lose your feel of the water, your ability to pivot on the long axis of your stroke.

I know this is EDUCAUSE, so we're going to learn a little bit about swimming here. Your ability to pivot, you start to lose that things get sloppy. Your foot turns aren't sharp and therefore then all of a sudden you start actually swimming slower because you're not focusing on not only the strength but the endurance and the technique. And so it was an actual lesson learned last year that I've thought, wow, this actually applies to what we do at work. We just constantly slam out projects project after project after project, and we're working hard, we're working fast, we're meeting these deadlines. There's a better way to think about how these projects relate to what we're doing strategically in our universities.

Sophie White: I love that metaphor, so making sure that we're slowing down in order to consider the strategic direction that we're going, making sure that the fundamentals and the foundations are good before we go into that is so important. Yeah, we can come up with a lot of metaphors for that. I am recording this after being on vacation and I was in Costa Rica last week and did some surfing and I found there was a minute where I found myself, I kept falling off of the waves and I realized that I was rushing into my popping up, that I needed to slow down, make sure that the foundations were set and then I started surfing on them so we could keep going with these water metaphors. But I think it's so important as we think about strategic planning to have our foundation shored up.

Ed Puckett: There's so many metaphors in the sports sector that you can apply and they often do. Yeah,

Jason Maslanka: I just turn off my brain and hit tennis balls as hard as I can for an hour in the morning. So that's probably not a good metaphor. I'll reserve my role in this.

Sophie White: I guess we could go with that. Sometimes you have to snap into emergency mode. I was an English major, so I really love thinking of metaphors and applying them to anything. But let's talk about strategic planning a little bit. So both of you represent different institutions. I'm curious, we're coming toward the end of 2025, how are you thinking about what 2026 looks like for your institutions and are there any priorities right now that you're actively planning for? Can you tell us a little bit about those and maybe what the planning process has looked like?

Jason Maslanka: Yeah, I can jump in. I think like everyone else, the number one thing that seems to be on people's minds is AI. And that is really important obviously in figuring out what our institutional enablement process will be and how we're going to use the technology and our research functions and our teaching and learning functions and our business functions and all that. It is great. What I'm finding is that it's also leading to other conversations which maybe are a few years older and pre-AI in terms of business process improvement and just what our entire application ecosystem looks like. So it's a great sort of conversation starter, for lack of a better word, because it's in the news and so everyone wants to talk about that. It's all over the EDUCAUSE top 10, but it's also leading to other conversations that get back at the heart of our regular institutional priorities, student success and engaging with the community and research enablement and this and that. So I think that's what the process looks like right now. We're not in the midst of any sort of formal strategic planning at this moment, but the conversations that happen as part of the budget process and all the things that we all do every year are sort of framed by AI even when AI has nothing to do with any given conversation.

Ed Puckett: Yeah, I would say we have case, we have the typical strategic objectives that a university would have. It would be the thing those are going to run their course for in the next five years or so. It could be the ways you increase enrollment, improve the student experience, applied learning, improve engagement from your alumni, your sponsors, things like that. My role though as a senior IT project manager is the projects get chosen based upon which of the strategic objectives that they're going to align to. So I'm getting a lot, all sorts of projects. I've worked about four or five at any one time where I'm focusing on just personally for my own professional growth or focus if you will, is in the process of presenting for the workshop at EDUCAUSE for this annual conference forced me to re-dive into use some of the swimming metaphor re-dive into the strategic planning coursework that I took the balanced scorecard process and you present a workshop and you end up learning more sometimes than the participants do as you prepare yourself for that presentation.

And it caused me to look at strategic planning or refocus on how strategic planning is working or not working. So I was looking at a lot of different university plans and they hit all those things that I rattled off, increase enrollment, increase engagement, increase student experience, but very few of 'em dive into where the balance scorecard framework would say is the third or fourth tier of where you need to be on a strategic plan. And by that I mean most strategic objectives can be classified in the four categories. There'll be the customer stakeholder ones that are focused on that, the financial stewardship, there'll be a third tier that's kind of internal processes and then another one that's organizational capacity. And so you'll have these great big bodacious goals that are important to have, but very few of 'em then support those big bodacious goals with what are we doing internally to support, what strategic objectives are we putting in place to support these wonderful efforts in terms of improving infrastructure, preparing the organization through training or their focus on how they're using technology.

And so as I continue to, how does this apply to us? So when we're looking at AI and everyone is looking at, well, what can we do with AI? Great AI has some wonderful applications, but as we choose our AI solutions, what are we doing to hit that third and fourth tier to have strategic objectives that address those things? How are we improving our infrastructure to support AI if we're going to host it onsite, what are we doing with our employee base to say, alright, this is how we're going to, this is how AI works, this is the things we can do with AI. There's a lot of change management that needs to happen with AI because let's face it, AI people have a lot of opinions about it, good and bad, and they all need to be addressed. So yeah, in broad strokes, you're just thinking about how you use AI strategically and what are you putting in place to support that development across all four of those strategic categories.

Jenay Robert: I'm curious if some of these strategic conversations related to AI, is there an intentionality behind shifting the conversation from the bright shiny thing to let's take a step back and look at this from a strategic position or is the tail wagging the dog, I guess is the question? What are you two seeing both at your institutions but among the broader community?

Jason Maslanka: I think it's well put, the tail is wagging the dog to start the conversation. At least that's my goal. Some of these conversations haven't happened in recent years. There have been federal government changes, there have been budgetary concerns at the local level. There's been shifting dynamics about student enrollment. All those sorts of macro things have existed for some number of years now. And so some of those strategic conversations that you're referencing haven't been happening maybe at the level that they should be or that I would like to as an IT leader. And so to use the shiny object to restart those conversations I think is a strategy. Whether I thought of it one day as a strategy or it just sort of happened, it's what has happened. But I think after you get past that initial hump of getting the right people in the room to have the conversation, you get back to basics that Ed was sort of referencing as well, what are the UIC has five strategic priorities from our chancellor's office? Which one of these are we aligning to? What are we working towards when it comes to the AI conversation or the underlying infrastructure, whatever else it may be? What are we aligning to? Is it student success? That's number one for us, probably always will be. That is a constant and so how are we aligning to that? And so I think that the conversation gets away from the shiny thing and becomes notably more baseline than it was initially.

Ed Puckett: I would add, we always pick on the phrase it's the shiny thing syndrome. It's IT. The shiny thing means more work for IT. But I would say all new technology starts with the shiny thing syndrome because it's there and people like, here it is now, what can we do with this? And so to Jason's point and what can we do to put those foundations in place? What problems are we trying to solve would be another way to look at that and where can AI help us in solving those problems rather than let's just get it for the sake of getting it.

Jenay Robert: I love the reframing of the shiny thing. I like that reframing. I think. And to Jason's point, we can use those initial conversations to turn and yeah, that's great. Sorry Jason, what were you going to say?

Jason Maslanka: No, no, no. There's just a reality to the world that I think good IT leaders recognize what people who aren't in our sphere of IT are seeing and know about and care about. And when something is on the Today Show or whatever people watch in the morning or in mass media that is going to influence all the people who are not super interested in reading our weekly IT update emails with application updates and things. People don't know what we necessarily do any given week. Hopefully we have an impact. That's the goal, but they're not paying the kind of attention that we are. That's why we're in this field. And so if we can attach to those things that they know about because it's all over everything, then I think we have a better chance of success and having the conversation at the end of the day we want to have or that we think has an impact on those strategic priorities.

Sophie White: I love that framing of how we can use these for better or worse depending on how you feel about them, these popular technology solutions that are in the media for our own foundational elements of IT. And that's one of the challenges I feel like we see with the work that we do that you hear often that if something's working well, no one's talking about it. It's when it breaks that you hear more. So how can we maybe reframe that narrative to attach ourselves to the things people want to hear about? And I think we had a Shop Talk that we recorded at the EDUCAUSE annual conference with Mark McCormack and Crista Copp about the EDUCAUSE Top 10. And one thing I thought was interesting was that they talked about AI becoming a conversation that's cross-cutting all of these other IT issues that we're starting to talk a little bit less about AI in and of itself as much as how does AI integrate into all of these other conversations that we're having.

I'd love to hear a little bit more about this change management element and I'll mention this Shop Talk discussion. It really pairs with the EDUCAUSE showcase series. It's a series where we curate different resources related to important issues in higher ed and technology. We have one releasing in December, 2025 related to strategic planning and one of the core resources in that is an EDUCAUSE Review article about change fatigue and then how we can use what the authors call an energy commitment model as a framework for interventions on teams. Basically, I won't rephrase the author's work, they did a lot of research but basically looking at how teams address change, how change fatigue has been widespread as the pace of change in higher ed and technology really accelerates and how you can support teams through that. They called out that it's different than burnout, but we see some similar symptoms of employee behaviors as it relates to change. So I'm curious, how are you two supporting your teams as we think about this accelerating rate of change in higher ed and technology and do you have any tips that you can share with our listeners today?

Ed Puckett: Goodness. So project management role, every project we take on and that I get the honor of shepherding creates change, right, and each of those resource teams have maybe multiple projects that they're working on. So my first response to that question would be is just recognizing that any one project team that I'm needing is possibly working on two or three other projects and also operational activity. And so it's important to be realistic about what it is that we're expecting in terms of our scope and our timelines and making sure that the project team has an opportunity to weigh in on what they can deliver and when they can deliver it rather than inheriting a project with these deadlines that we have already been predetermined. Let's just get this thing in place now because this is what we want and this is when we need it.

Jason Maslanka: Yeah, I mean I think at some level the article's super interesting and I certainly recommend everyone read it and there's some unique terminology that I certainly hadn't come across in the past, but I also think at the end of the day this does speak to going back to my intro, which was sort of tongue in cheek, but the human value that we still have in this world is good managers, good leaders, good supervisors know their staff and we can all put together a matrix of work or we can track work depending on what sort of environment you work in and all that's great and data is wonderful, but knowing your staff and what keeps them motivated, what helps to prevent burnout, what the right mix of difficult things and overt change that really drain people and new and exciting projects that maybe excite people. Understanding that balance and finding it for individuals and small teams I think will always be important.

At the end of the day we're talking about human beings and it's hard when you're talking about a few hundred people to do this, but that's why we have management layers and management structures and that's why we don't have just a giant flat organization. If two hundred people reported to me we're all robots, I think it would work a lot differently. We could just issue commands and move forward. But I know that in the case of our development team, let's say the idea of building a platform to enable AI for students is exciting. And so while it may be work that we didn't know we were going to take on or we don't necessarily have the bandwidth to take on, it's probably going to work out okay because people are excited about what that means about their learning opportunities about what this means for their future. In other cases, if we're just talking about continuing to support duplicative applications in our enterprise applications group, that is just pure work. No one necessarily sees the value, we're just dealing with history that's much more likely to lead to that sort of fatigue. So I do just want to bring in that human piece, know your staff, talk to them, understand it doesn't mean everyone could just do whatever they want. That's not how jobs work unfortunately. But at the end of the day, finding that right balance I think is really key.

Sophie White: I love bringing that back to leadership and in the Top 10, the theme this year was human connection. So how even in the midst of all of these technologies that are trying to be substitutes for human connection in a way, how does it come back to understanding your team as a leader? And I love that point of even in a big organization like yours, you're representing a large R1 research institution. You can create layers that still build that human connection in among a larger organization.

Jenay Robert: This also makes me think about this question of pace of change. One of the big pieces of research we do at EDUCAUSE that's forward thinking in addition to the top 10 is our horizon reports and something we've talked a lot about on the horizon team is as the pace of change is increasing so much, it's becoming harder and harder to plan for the future. Even with these traditional scenario planning sort of approaches, which is what we do with the horizon report, which take into account multiple versions of the future, it's getting harder and harder to find data that are stable enough to kind of put into that process. So for anyone who's familiar with this strategic foresight approach to planning for the future, you bring together trends that are happening in the present and you imagine intersections of those trends that extend into the future in some way. And so for us, with those trends changing so rapidly by the time we've worked through the process of this planning, sometimes those trends have just done an about face. And I'm curious how you two are handling this sort of instability in your planning processes or as your projects are rolling out.

Jason Maslanka: Yeah, I mean do think there's a disconnect in IT specifically and maybe in IT more than ever before, I hesitate to use that sort of language, but it feels that way sometimes between the sort of institutional strategic plan or even a college strategic plan or whatever it may be and any sort of strategic plan that comes out of IT, I am increasingly feeling like I just don't know that IT needs its own strategic plan. We need goals, we need enablement methodologies for the strategies and the business needs and the institutional priorities that everyone else has. And I don't mean that to put IT a rung below those other groups. I mean it to say that everything that we do changes so much that I'm not sure anything resembling and I've written them, I can think back to 10 years ago whatever role I had writing a five year strategic plan for IT specifically, and even then by year five it was a bit nonsensical.

And so I think adaptability on how we plan in IT is really important and it's going to look different than it may look for an institution which could have a 20 year plan if we're going to change from, if you're an institution trying to become an R1 from an R2, that's a lengthy journey. If you're trying to grow enrollment or create a new online program that is a ten-year journey that is really significant. There's nothing I could tell you today about ten years from now in IT other than that it will be important and exist and I hope I work in it. But outside of that I could not tell you a specific thing about what we'll be doing ten years from now.

Ed Puckett: Yeah, I was just thinking about this last week that AI comes along and I don't want to say it really took Steve that people really started talking about like 2022 and if you think about five year strategic plans, most universities started theirs in 2020 because that was the thing they could capitalize on the phrase 2020 vision if they wanted to create that five year plan. And so their strategic plans were already in motion and then bam, here comes AI and read an article the other day that talked about the idea of strategic plans being seven or five years that actually could be challenged. Maybe these strategic plans need to be three years. I personally just feel my heart rate go up on that. It takes a lot of effort to put together strategic plans. It's groups of people getting together at universities, having those hard conversations, figuring out what they're going to focus on. You don't push out a strategic plan in a month. It takes some time. So a three year strategic plan, by the time you've published it, it's time to turn around and work on the next one. That said I had another point and I lost my train of thought on that, so you'll have to come back to me on that one.

Jason Maslanka: I was going to say I can also add very specific examples. I started in this role as the university CTO about five years ago, a little over. And while I was doing the listening tour at the beginning and hearing what everyone had to say, I was relatively convinced that, and again this isn't a top level strategic plan priority, but nonetheless I was relatively convinced that we were going to move away from all of our data center space. We have three today, two and a half if we're being honest and that we would move away from them. And now I just signed a form this morning about expanding the substation electrical power that comes into our main data center to expand it by another megawatt in support of possible research needs and GPUs and all those sorts of things. And that's, so four years ago I was thinking about giving those spaces back to the campus and turning them into something else. And today we're trying to figure out how much power we can cram into the 20,000 square feet that we have. And I don't think that was a misstep on anyone's part. That is just the reality of what has changed in a short period of time.

Ed Puckett: And I remember the thought it was to echo what Jason was saying, a good university strategic plan incorporates IT into the strategic plan and facilities and HR because all these things are needed in order to improve not only university's technology, but to get the university where it needs to go. You think about IT, technology, yes, we need that. IT needs facilities to support these systems that we're putting in the hardware and then every time we make a change that involves having the employee force retool and learn new things. And I could keep going across all the service departments. So that's the thing that made it all quick for me was just learning the whole balance scorecard strategic planning process, which specifically talks about how a good strategic plan an institution has, one it's balanced and into line to incorporate all the pieces of that university, getting them working together rather than having a strategic plan for this department. Another one for this department, yet a third for this department

Sophie White: That makes me think of it. We recorded a Shop Talk podcast earlier this year with Michelle Norin and Jesse Minton who are formerly the CIO community group leaders. We talked a lot there about the role of IT leadership and how it relates to the leadership of an institution and how IT leaders are starting to be part of the strategic planning related to the institution as a whole and where technology can't really be separated now from the institutional mission. So I think it makes a lot of sense now that we're looking at how does technology and technology leadership work in support of that larger strategic plan. Jason, I wanted to go back to your point about the data centers. I think that's really interesting and I'm curious if there are any leadership lessons here. I'm thinking about how can leaders instill confidence in their teams and manage these change conversations when you're continuously getting new information and sometimes having to change the direction of IT in general. Maybe I'm thinking about this, I read Adam Grant's Think Again book recently, which I think is a great example of why leaders need to be able to take in new information and maybe even change their mind about something that they'd previously thought. How do you lead a team when you do have to make a big pivot of that type or change the direction in the middle of a project and do you have any lessons that you can tell us about?

Jason Maslanka: Yeah, I mean I think primarily I would say with kindness and recognition of their humanity, and I apply that to all things I do, but I think it's especially true when you're talking about something that if you look at our data center operations staff, it's two and some graduate students, so it's a small team and this is everything they do. They're testing generators, that is their life, they love it, they care for our facilities. And so to just sort of flippantly come in and be like, let's close 'em all. Yeah, it's not going to work. That makes people worried about not only their jobs but specifically the thing that they care about and have spent so much time on it. So you can't be flip about it is number one. But number two I think is that transparency and honesty and bringing in all the stakeholders necessary from day one is really important.

And so being transparent about the reality of the world, asking them questions, trying to get their expertise. I mean stakeholders and people with autonomy in certain areas want to be engaged in things. That's why many of us work in higher ed. We're not there to just perform tasks. We are there to be a part of this community. And so I think yes, it sounds a bit trite maybe, but at the end of the day, transparency and full honesty and not hiding the reality from people that something that they do and is important may be changing, offering opportunities for people to re-skill kind of too specific a term there. I don't necessarily mean it in that way, but where else can people be engaged and where are they important in the broader scheme of everything we're doing? So yeah, that is definitely what was done during this time and now they are a team that is expanding and has taken on more importance ever. And so you see how quickly things change and I think the more that you can also hang on to which it helps to be in these roles for a period of time or have experience at other institutions and I lean on our CIO who's been at a few institutions to bring in stories from other times, other places where something along these lines happen. When I was at here, this happened when I was at here. I think sharing those sorts of stories, anecdotes, if you will, is also incredibly important to the humanity part of this

Jenay Robert: As we talk about the huge amount of work that goes into strategic planning, and I especially hear both of you highlighting the need for flexibility and responsiveness as time goes on and not being too rigid about playing that plan out. I'm curious what you think are some things about the traditional strategic planning process that perhaps need to evolve with the times. Are there some things we need to stop doing? Are there some things that we need to lean into even more? I mean I think we always knew flexibility was important in strategic planning, but now it's just really sort of hitting us in the face. You have no choice, you have to be flexible. Are there other elements like that that you see shifting as the times change?

Ed Puckett: That's a tough question.

Jenay Robert: Well you just have to solve all the world's problems right now in the next twenty minutes. It's not a big deal.

Ed Puckett: You fold in world peace. The only thing I could come back to then is consider can the institution create strategic plans that are either shorter term or build in some space for flexibility because that's the only way you're going to be able to respond to these technologies that come along as quick, fast, and hard as AI for example. So that's the only answer I have.

Jason Maslanka: Yeah, it's interesting. I wouldn't say quarrel but maybe a counter to the premise of the question is that I don't know if we always have known that flexibility was as important as it is today. And that was in part of the question, I can think back ten years to a strategic plan at the institutional level that we're talking about. Roman numeral one section, one section a, section A one. I mean it was incredibly detailed trying to, we were down to the work plan level and that was supposedly part of a strategic plan. And so I do think we have transitioned, and I don't want to say it's ten years, maybe it's fifteen and I can only speak to my institution, but we certainly do not have that anymore. There is no expectation that the university's strategic plan is down six indents into describing what a very small team would do.

So I think we have changed a bit and that's positive. I think really focusing in on buy-in for those top level priorities is probably number one. And some institutions do it really well, some institutions less so. But to have everyone at the university recognizing their role and where their project fits into this overarching strategic priority is really where you're going to have success, at least at that top level of the strategic plan. Attempting to plan what those individuals do. And I can only speak to IT, I don't know enough about the other disciplines or verticals at the university to speak to them, but I have a feeling that we're all sort of in the same boat there. Even enrollment management, that could be a top level priority. We want to grow by 15 percent, whatever the number is. But when you get into that department and the people who are actually running the CRM and contacting students and having that work directed by the top level strategic plan I don't think is a strategy. Hiring the right people who know what eighteen-year olds today, how they're making their college decision, which is very different than it was five years ago, ten years, fifty years ago. Certainly having those people do their job and align to the priority is number one. So yeah, I think we have moved in the right direction, but probably even more so good leadership, good priorities, buy-in and get the right people in their jobs to do work well.

Ed Puckett: I would say for that number one, then I would add the second level would then just be having good IT governance, how so that new projects can come forward and people can say, yes, project X now comes in, this one is actually more important because of whatever's going on and we can now insert that into the project portfolio and assign people to do that.

Jason Maslanka: Yes, and it speaks to the importance of people in Ed's role to business analysts to governance in general. And I think also alignment maybe a place that we have also advanced in higher ed in general is the recognition that things cost money especially in IT. And so you can have strategic priorities and you can have these ideas, you can even have a plan, but unless it's aligned to the budget process, yes, sometimes things don't have an explicit cost, but most things do. And so I think taking maybe this strategic priority process as a planning process and then aligning it to a budget process to governance to portfolio management that some version of that is probably the right way to be flexible but also align to a set of goals more so than attempting to map it all out in a fifty page PDF that people won't align to in eighteen months,

Jenay Robert: I have a budget question, but I don't want to ask it until I give Sophie a chance. If you have another question queued up.

Sophie White: You can go first, Jenay.

Jenay Robert: Only because, so I had up a lot of the AI related research from EDUCAUSE and I've said recently I've heard more in the last three months about ROI of AI tools and educational technology in general than I have in the last three years. And I think that speaking of this shiny object getting us into some conversations we should have had in more depth in the past, a lot of people are starting to get very serious about how are we measuring ROI of these tools when we're budgeting so much money because they're so expensive. What it brings up for me is I'm not sure that I've heard the same level of ROI conversation for other recent emerging technologies. I don't know in the last five to ten years. Yes, people ask it but not in such an earnest way and that could just be my experience and the research that I've been doing.

So I would love to know, especially from a strategic planning process, thinking about aligning that process with budgeting and then what are you seeing or what are your institutions planning in terms of then closing that loop or continuing that loop continuously as the case may be, where we're evaluating what the return looks like and it doesn't have to be dollars and cents. I want to really emphasize that in the conversations I've been having about ROI with our community, people are not necessarily just saying we have to see the financial return. It could be student engagement is increasing, it could be employee satisfaction is increasing, there are other things we can get out of that, but what are you two seeing in that area?

Jason Maslanka: Do you think the conversations come on or an to answer a question or the question but because it's new money in a sense, there is an expectation for the last twenty-five years that you're going to have an ERP that exists. And so when you get to that time, the conversation is really about is that ERP the best in class and can we afford it? So you're sort of building in the ROI conversation a bit, whereas this is new money. We haven't spent anything on AI in the past and so now people are, I think the macro conversation is about reducing employee how it's in corporate America, you're not going to see that as much in higher ed, I don't think. That's just not the way we're wired, but the macro conversations about that, so I think ROI is kind of wired into it. I don't think we have a clue what the ROI is on AI investment and I'm not sure anyone higher ed does, to be quite honest. We'll try to figure it out. I don't exactly know how to, but it is definitely, I would agree with you coming up eight times more. That's a made up measure, but eight times more than it has ever come up in any other previous conversation. Network infrastructure, data center, enhancements, ERP, anything along those lines

Ed Puckett: Where I was going with an answer. I love the fact that you started to answer the question with another question. I think that's where we need to be playing in that space, but AI and we keep coming back to AI, but it is an interesting beast of technology. I don't know, it's Jason's point that we know how to use it. We all have some ideas. We all know that we can go and talk to generative AI and get some answers and we can have it write things for us and then the new agentic AI and talk about those processes, how it can do things for us. So but what do we, have we really it is just hard to, even as I stutter over this answer, that's indicative of the fact that I don't know that we know how to calculate what we're going to get back from it yet, particularly in the academic world.

Jason Maslanka: Yeah, I do wonder if people, and I was not, I am aging but not that rapidly and I wonder if people in the age of computer desktops being in offices, were having the same conversation that this is sort of a sea change of what can exist in the workplace and so we're going to replace paper and typewriters with these desktop computers. Were people having this ROI conversation or was it just a flood of change and it's like, here we go. I do think when it comes to AI, at least this is my best guess so far, that answer is a little more interesting in the micro than it is in the macro being the whole university level. And so to get to enable, I think I said this earlier and it's one of my focus points to enable people with those tools in HR and then to do some measurement within HR of the impact on their processes, I think can be impactful to do an overall measurement. I do liken it to the internet or computers, these sort of massive things as opposed to maybe the last ten years of new technology, which yes, better data warehouses. I'm not going to be able to just name off the top of my head like new technology shifts, cloud, things like that. Those are all great, but I liken this one more too. The really big shifts, the internet, computers, AI.

Ed Puckett: Where I thought Jason was going to go when he started talking about desktops is you remember a leader of a major computer company back when desktop computing first started to come to be made a comment. I don't have it handy, but it was something like this would never go into a household. We wouldn't see this, but we're all carrying personal computers and putting them in our pockets these days. And moreover, we probably have in addition to that phone, we've got a laptop and a tablet and so it's everywhere. And so the point I think is that when these new technologies come, yeah, there you go. I've got two screens right here in front of me. I've never thought when I was in college that technology would be like this. The point being is that I don't think we know when new technologies come out. It's almost too early to ask what the ROI is, which is why I want to go back to what I had said before, which is AI is great, it's here to stay. It's not going away, but what problems do we want to solve? And can AI help us with those problems. It's another tool. We could pull out the tool bag

Jason Maslanka: And nothing has changed since the dawn of work in the world of defining a problem, a business need, whatever it may be, and solving it in the most efficient way possible, that is a problem as old as time. Our job as IT professionals is just to figure out the newest or best, I'm hopeful, maybe not the newest in many cases, but the best tool to help people solve those problems.

Sophie White: Great. I wouldn't say we solved all the world's problems, but I think that's a great place to wrap up for now. Thanks for that, Jason. This was a fascinating conversation. Thank you, Jason. Thank you, Ed. I also want to call out that Ed is a leader of our EDUCAUSE community group on project management. Thank you, ed, for doing that really important work.