What Technology Leadership in Higher Ed Really Means Today

Sophie White: Hey everyone. In this episode of EDUCAUSE Shop Talk, Jenay and I talk with Tara Hughes and Miloš Topić about the role of the modern technology leader in higher education. It was a really interesting conversation just to look at where we are now in terms of technology leadership, both at a unit level and then also as part of more strategic conversations about the direction that our institutions are going.

***

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

Jenay Robert: And I'm Jenay Robert. I am a research manager at EDUCAUSE and I'm your other host.

Sophie White: Great. We're really excited today to have two guests with us to talk about the essential responsibilities of chief information officers in higher ed and really what those responsibilities are, how CIOs can think about balancing these essential duties for kind of keeping the ship running while also considering really important concepts like how we innovate at the same time. So I'm thrilled to have with us today Miloš Topić and Tara Hughes. So I'll introduce them and then we will jump into it. Miloš Topić is the Vice President for Information Technology and Chief Digital Officer at Grand Valley State University, where he leads technology, digital transformation, and innovation to help shape the future of higher education. He's a passionate advocate for courageous leadership, believing that technology creates the greatest impact when it empowers people, transforms how organizations work, and turns bold ideas into meaningful results. Thanks for being with us, Miloš.

Miloš Topić: Thank you very much.

Sophie White: Great. And I love your bio. I'm inspired just reading that. Courageous Leadership.

Miloš Topić: I don't know who wrote that. I don't know who wrote it. It made me sound a lot better than I am.

Sophie White: Well, it worked. It left an impact already, so thanks for that. Next up, we have Tara Hughes. Tara is the associate vice president for information technology and chief information officer at California State University, Monterey Bay, where she leads the university's technology strategy. She also serves as chair of the EDUCAUSE Board of Directors and Chair of the California State University CIO Council. Tara, thanks for being with us.

Tara Hughes: Thank you.

Sophie White: And you are busy. I love that you have this very important role and then also had to be chair of a few other things at the same time. Thanks for spending some time with us today.

Tara Hughes: Oh, it's a pleasure.

Sophie White: Great. So to jump into this conversation, I'd love to hear, Tara, from you and Jenay, my understanding is you had a conversation at our EDUCAUSE AI summit where you were basically, let me know if I'm paraphrasing this incorrectly, but basically talking about how CIOs have so many important roles. And what's often overlooked is that you also have to do things like keep these technology elements running, explain to stakeholders why things like installing cameras at a university can be a complicated business, even though everyone wants to talk about what's this latest AI robot thing that we're hearing in the news and our president might be interested in. So can you talk a little bit about why you wanted to have this conversation today and where you think we should go from here?

Tara Hughes: Yeah. So first I should probably say I was maybe more lamenting to Jenay might be the more accurate way to describe that conversation. But I think one of the things that's really been pressing on my mind, especially recently with just the constant pace of technology evolving, and there's lots of flashy technology that I think is pretty easy for folks to talk about. It's the thing that gets people the most excited. And usually it's on the front page of different articles and top of mind for folks. And so I think that's the easy stuff to some degree. I think some of the harder work is behind the scenes to support that within the institution and the infrastructure and security and governance and budget discipline and all of these things that really are the scaffolding to support that innovation to really be able to be effective. But it's the stuff that seems to be overlooked or just not prized in the same way.

And I thought, "Man, if I'm feeling this way, surely I am not alone in this." And that there are other leaders within higher ed IT that are experiencing these same things. And Jenay was super supportive and encouraging and saying, "Yeah, that sounds like something we should talk about." So I'm super grateful for her support and encouragement in that, but it is definitely something that I think is what we would maybe consider the vegetables of what we have to eat and everyone wants to have cake, which is the flashy technology. And sometimes I think as a CIO, my job is to make sure that we have a balanced diet.

Jenay Robert: I love that. Yeah. And it really stood out to me in that conversation because I think it's so relatable to everybody. This is not a conversation that's just for CIOs. This is a conversation for all of us who are showing up to work every day and people, whether it's my family members who think, "Oh, you get to go speak at conferences for work." And I'm like, "That's like 10 times a year I do that thing and that's what you think is the coolest part of my job and that's fine." But yeah, I think we all have our vegetables to eat with our jobs. And sometimes that's the thing that we have to really focus on getting the most support for, the most training for. It's perhaps what people rely on us the most for. So I really was excited to have this conversation.

Sophie White: Miloš, what do you think? Does this resonate with you as a CIO or do you feel like you're able to talk about the cake part more? Is that representative of what you do?

Miloš Topić: I mean, cakes are so much more fun than vegetables. Yeah, I think Tara's spot on. It's the balance between making sure that the trains run on time. They have to run on time. They have to be safe and reliable. And they are often simply an assumption across most modern universities. It's just a thing. The engineering brilliance and complexity to get electricity to every single building in every single room is astonishing. Nobody cares. You flip the switch. It's supposed to be on. If it's not on, why isn't it on? Oh, incompetence. Oh, this, all facilities, we've all done it.

On the other hand, you can't do the shiny and pretty things or vegetables. I haven't used that analogy before, but I might moving forward. Are extremely important. Getting to the cake is important because the foundation is critical. However, we have to change some of the operating and funding and reporting models across modern universities in order for these things to become a reality. Way too many universities still funds two, three, 4 percent of operating budget for tech. And that is not enough when 95 percent of what we do has it in its thread, in its fabric in some way.

Sophie White: I think that's a really great point. And I'm curious if you have other specific examples of how universities should change this operating budgetary perspective or if there are models that you've found helpful. One of my roles at EDUCAUSE is I support our showcase series, and we just did a webinar last week on measured approaches to new technologies that partly had to do with purchasing and procurement. So how we can think thoughtfully about technology investments. And that was really eye-opening to me to think about how in a higher ed environment that often is resource constrained, we're hearing from a lot of institutions that there are budgetary challenges and also that the price of everything and the amount of work that needs to be done by staff is really ballooning. So I guess how can you think about balancing these operational costs with making sure there's budget for these innovation items as well?

Miloš Topić: We tend to fund the things we really believe are our priorities. So if we say X is our priority, but it's not funded, then it's not our priority. We stop calling it that. Let's have honest, we're all adults. We've all been doing this for a long, long time with advanced degrees. I was fortunate enough when I was completing my PhD many years ago, my research was on the role of CIOs in driving innovation in higher ed, because I'm so passionate about it. And I talk to so many colleagues coast to coast who are three circles removed from the senior leadership table, from the cabinet, from the executive team, who have no contact with boards of trustees, who have no say in strategic allocation of financial priorities and so forth, capital investments, and et cetera. But yet they're expected to be Houdinis and come up with these amazing solutions on a drop of a hat, often informed of what's needed at 5:15 on a Friday, and they're supposed to go live at 8:00 a.m. on Monday.

We have to at some point obviously do a better job at advocating for ourselves and our teams and our organizations, but we also have to call a spade a spade. If it's not realistic, if it's not supported, if it's not funded, those are the tough conversations that we have to lead. And on the other hand, I'm somewhat fortunate that the president that I report to and the university that I work for decided to name this role as I was being recruited for it six years ago, actually six years ago today, that it's a chief digital officer. Because CIO often is looked at amongst our colleagues and peers as career is over. And we're trying not to do that because of all these challenges historically of where CIOs have been. So having an ability to both influence the capabilities and future of the university at the same time owning your own portion of the enterprise I think is really critical.

So having tough conversations, being honest, and understanding the team collective stats are more important than individual ones.

Jenay Robert: What's your take, Tara, on the team collective stats angle? I really hung onto that in what Miloš said. I think that's a really important distinction between when you're at that frontline level of your career versus when you're in that CIO seat. I think that's a really important shift in focus.

Tara Hughes: Yeah, you kind of got me through the heart with the career is over.

Jenay Robert: She was recovering from that.

Miloš Topić: Visceral reaction.

Tara Hughes: And I would actually say that I hope that we are changing that norm and that we start to see younger CIOs. I mean, I know that I'm a little bit more on the younger spectrum of that, but I think we need to have a fresher perspective in this seat. And you can call it CIO, CTO, chief digital officer, whatever you call it. It's having the right perspective that is willing to consider something new and broader than what maybe the previous generation CIOs were asked to give. I think for that team and collective, one of the things that I've been really camping out on is helping the team understand the financial component to the story that we're telling, both to not just leadership, but to anyone that we're supporting, but then also the story that they're telling themselves and making sure that that story is accurate and rooted in reality.

Sometimes it's not that money isn't available, it's that we haven't told the right story and we haven't been able to connect the dots for folks to know that that's a worthy investment to make. And that's partly on leadership who is in those tables, but it's also about making sure that this is a multi-pronged approach and that we are empowering everyone to be able to carry that story forward. It is not enough for one individual to be the representative of telling that story and understanding it. And then being able to understand how do the doors go? What does impact how they get allocated? And when you're thinking of innovation, it is never just the out-of-the-box item that people are wanting to get. There is often multiple dependencies that are either going to make or break that implementation. And so again, being able to understand top to bottom, what does it really take to not just launch it, but then sustain it and support it and create opportunities to even leverage that tool beyond what you're initially thinking because I certainly think that's the way that we're moving and how vendors are certainly thinking about their products.

I think that takes a long view that perhaps we have not cultivated within our own organizations. And certainly it starts with us, but I don't think it ends with us.

Sophie White: I'm curious, do you have specific strategies that you use to train or inform your team on how to communicate? I think I'm thinking from the perspective of you're earlier in your career. We talked earlier, both of you have at various times been part of the EDUCAUSE Young Professionals Advisory Committee. So you have been in this seat before where I'm thinking someone who's maybe new to their higher ed technology career, maybe they work in a support role, they have to do their day-to-day ticketing, making sure they're solving problems. Then at the same time you're saying, "But we need you to communicate strategically about our technology implementation." How do you train your team to care about that, to do that type of work? Is there some type of performance measurement that you do? I'm just trying to think of how can we from the top to bottom make sure that our IT teams are taking this really to heart?

Miloš Topić: Where does one begin? Huh?

Sophie White: I know it's a tough question. Sorry if I stumped you.

Miloš Topić: No, I'll jump in if you don't mind. So it's an ongoing set of expectations with a little bit of leniency for errors and mistakes since we all make them. There was a research, I keep citing this. I came across it many, many years ago by pure chance. Someone was presenting in New York. They had the slide which says 85 percent of your financial and career success depends on your ability to speak, lead, inspire, motivate, and sell. And I'm like, ooh, that's kind of interesting. So I did a little bit of research and it was a research that was funded by the Carnegie Foundation conducted by a couple of engineering faculty in I think 1918, so over a hundred years ago. And if you extrapolate, certain things haven't changed. Technical functional things are critically important, but at the pace of change, especially today compared to a hundred years ago, is so fast with such velocity that knowing how to treat people the right way, inspire, communicate, listen, process, sell, present, negotiate is a lot more important for one's future growth and career.

Now having said that, it's really important to acknowledge where people are today on their journeys. I've had an example, multiple experiences in my life where I wanted to advance, help someone grow to a higher role or a different role. An individual came to me and said, look, I appreciate it, but I'm old. I mean, I'm old, I'm done. I'm going to retire in a year. And I'm really good at what I do, and I would love to continue doing this for another year and that I'm going to go, I'm gone fishing. So you know what? I appreciate the self-awareness and candid conversation. Cool, let's do that. But those who have many, many years or decades ahead of them, if they want to grow, you have to give them experiences, coaching, and put them in the opportunities to make these mistakes and learn from. So create that.

Now also what's really important is often historically, I've been doing this since the '90s.

Wow, it's been a long time. What's really interesting, IT has always been seen as a back office. Order takers, they are somewhere generally in a room without windows, might be a little bit moldy, and we'll just give them requirements and have them go execute things. That is not how a modern IT organization should operate today. And they should be led by a person who doesn't allow that. Because in life generally, you get what you tolerate. And if you tolerate other areas to mistreat your folks, that's what you get. So that leader needs to stand up and set standards and set performance, set the expectations. I've had many times in senior leadership teams, not my current university, some of the other ones, where tech failed and people immediately turn to me, I'm like, "I'm not your tech support. What do you want me to do in front of all the..." I'm a VP just like all of you.

You want me to go crawl under the desk to plug cables in? I'm like, "I can make the call for you." And I'm sure we're all capable in this room as senior leaders and executives to keep moving forward until the screen comes back on. So you got to set certain standards and expectations and then carry them forward, but give people opportunities to fail, learn, improve, and keep moving forward.

Tara Hughes: Yeah, I agree. There's a lot of different threads to pull on what you said. There's some good nuggets. I think one of the things that is really important if we're thinking in the context of a university, in order to understand how the strategy even applies, you have to understand the university. And so getting out of your cubicle and participating in events, interacting with students, these are seemingly so basic that I think sometimes they're easy to overlook. We just assume that those things are happening or should be happening. And I don't know that we're explicit enough to both encourage and carve out the time with our staff to tell them this is a good use of your time, not just solving problems and providing support, though it is, but also to understand the way that the university functions and who is at the heart of it and what are the things that they're interested in.

Because I can tell you a strategy, and if you don't know who it impacts and what they're doing day-to-day, it's really hard to understand why that strategy exists in the first place. But then on the other hand, being a better communicator. And I think for any leader in IT, we probably could all stand to improve in our communication in one way or another. And I am very much at the center of that. But really being able to communicate often to the point where we think we're over-communicating, but it really can't be overstated that people need to hear it and they need to hear it multiple times in different ways that this is the strategy and this is why it's the strategy, and this is how it's going to help the campus move forward. The one thing that I thought is interesting, and this might just be a me thing, but I've talked to some female CIOs, and I'm taking a little bit of a pivot.

I had a CIO tell me when I first stepped into the role to not try to improve if a technology failed, to not try to provide help desk support. And I have a really famous story I've told elsewhere where I did not listen to that and failed spectacularly and very visibly. But one of the pressures that I felt, particularly as a female CIO, was that I was not given the generous benefit of the doubt that I understand what makes up IT. And so sometimes the challenge of wanting to prove that I know how to turn it off and turn it back on again so that I can demonstrate that I deserve to be in this seat, at least for me, is a very real challenge that even now I'm much more comfortable at saying, "Hey, let me call someone from the help desk and they can help us out." But I would say it's an internal pressure that I have had to pay attention to and kind of internally coach myself that this is not the moment, nor is it the appropriate way for me to demonstrate my competence, but it's a very felt challenge.

And I've talked to female CIOs who wear exclusively dresses so that they're not tempted to crawl under the table and try to troubleshoot. I don't go that far, but it is just something that I have certainly had to become much more conscious of the longer that I've sat in this role and kind of learned through experience.

Jenay Robert: I appreciate you bringing that angle to it because obviously I'm not a CIO, but even I've gotten this advice in my career about leading with your technical expertise because then people understand that you've earned your way to your position and they take you more seriously. And then you get advice that's conflicting with that sometimes where people say you don't have to push your expertise in people's faces. Your credentials speak for themselves. The fact that you're here speaks for itself and you can just be yourself at work. And I think as women, we often get this competing advice that we don't know what to do. What is the right thing to do when you show up at work every day? And I don't have an answer to that, so I just appreciate you bringing the complexity to that issue.

Sophie White: Yeah, I completely agree. And I think that's a challenge of leadership is when is it helpful to show that you're there supporting the team, you're in the trenches with everyone else? And when is it more helpful for you to step back and say, "My team has this day-to-day technical expertise, so I should let them thrive." I had a conversation actually with Sandeep Sidhu, who also is involved in this community. And she had a story about a similar experience, I think, where she was really involved in some type of. I was a tech fiasco at her university and eventually she, I don't want to tell her story, but she eventually decided, actually, I'm making this worse by being the CIO in this situation and dynamics are different because I'm here and I need to just take a step back and let people do what they're great at, which is why I hired them.

And that's a real challenge. And I know that it's different too, depending on institutional type and size. At a small university, if you're a leader, you may have to wear a lot of hats. Where a large university, you may be able to delegate quite a bit more. So I guess if that's bringing anything up for folks, I'm curious. Oh, my internet might be not working so great. Speaking of tech issues, but I'm curious, how do you decide when should my technical expertise be used right now and when am I actually maybe making a situation worse and need to step back?

Miloš Topić: So from my perspective, I want to first acknowledge the bias and things that you have brought forward. They are real, and it's not just in higher ed, it's not just in IT. Many years ago, I don't know if she's going to appreciate this when she sees the video, but I'm going to say it anyway. My wife is a lawyer, an attorney. She was in New York in a big firm, and she walked in with another female associate into a conference room. And these high-powered attorneys and clients from the other side thought that they were there to take the coffee order.

Tara Hughes: Yeah.

Miloš Topić: They were in for a rude awakening when she sat across the table and found out she's the opposing counsel. But this is New York City several years ago. So the biases and things absolutely exist and they should be acknowledged. When it comes to what you do, if it's something simple like, Hey, push a button, push this thing, whatever, help out. But the reason why I don't go into high-end troubleshooting, it's not because of me. It's because of the person who will take my role when I leave.

Again, coming back to, I've been in this for a long time across multiple universities and outside higher ed. And to me, it's very frustrating to have people who work around the clock who come in at nights and weekends and do server and data center and networking upgrades and all kinds of work while everybody else is asleep. So we wouldn't disturb them in their days to be treated as anything other than equal. So I do it for the team. I don't do it for myself. Or I do it for the person who's going to come in after me. Because I always want to work myself out of my job and go do something else because I like to build. I like to solve problems. And I don't want somebody who's going to come in after me to say, "Well, our previous CIO is just delivering boxes with computers and laptops for us." I go, "No, no, no."

We have a team. There's a person or a group or individuals who do that. That's not what I'm going to do. Because if I'm going to come in and then my contributions on strategy and impact and relationship with the board and senior leadership team has to be seen as one of the equals, not somebody who's a level or two below. So that's why I do it most of the time. Obviously, if it's something small, I'm not going to watch my colleague suffer for too long. Maybe I'll have a little chuckle and then I'll fix it. But I'm not going to hide, roll up my sleeves, troubleshooting anymore. I did maybe twenty years ago, not today.

Tara Hughes: That's a great point. And I think that, man, whoever follows after you is going to send a note of appreciation, I think for setting the stage of what are really good expectations of that role. I think the other thing that I would say is I wasn't hired to do that. And if they were looking for me to be in that role, I would've been hired for a different job. I was hired for other skills and competencies. And frankly, they're overpaying me if they want me to do something else. So I want to honor their investment and be the person that they though they hired and do the job that they hope and expect for me to do and bring my unique flavor to that role, which is not necessarily rooted in being the most technical person in the room.

Sophie White: I love that. I feel like I've heard so much from folks in their careers about addressing things like imposter syndrome and just being able to tell yourself, "They hired me for a reason, so I'm going to do what I was hired to do." It's just such a great way to combat that. I'm curious, and Jenay, you might have other thoughts, but I know we've been having some conversations at EDUCAUSE about the role of technology in terms of strategic direction of institutions. Especially with the advent of AI right now, we're seeing how influential technology in general is to the direction of higher ed. I know we've done some research on even things like reporting lines if a CIO reports to a president versus reports to a different leader at an institution, for example. So I'm curious, do you all have thoughts on how you explain the strategic role of an IT leader?

And then maybe how can you explain why these essential duties should be prioritized to someone like an institutional president or a board who wants to only do the innovation side maybe, but needs to be reminded of why these foundational things are also important and worth investing in?

Miloš Topić: My perception of a CIO in today's world is not as a chief technologist. It's someone and I, and I'm very fortunate to have a president who leads our university who sees all members of this Senior leadership team is enterprise leaders who then happen to have a primary function. So I don't come in as the head tech person. I come as an enterprise leader and a strategist who happens to lead technology and digital. CFO comes as an enterprise leader and strategist who happens to lead finance, marketing, branding, and so on. So having that mindset and the approach and having a president who you report to really matters, really, really matters. And as you're advancing through your career, always look to hire your boss, if you will. Do your research, figure out who you're going to because that daily relationship will provide a lot of upsides and opportunities for growth and learning and advancement and respect or not because I've experienced them both.

Come to the reporting lines. I've reported in my career to academic deans. I've reported to CFOs. I've reported to provosts. I've reported to presidents. I prefer reporting to the president for a variety of reasons because in today's world, I've said this a couple universities ago and I'm still in touch with my colleagues from back then and they still didn't provide me an answer. And I said in one of the cabinet meetings, half jokingly, because people were looking to cut and eliminate and reallocate or reprioritize and all these other things. And we're going down these different areas and look for opportunities. And I said, "I would love someone here to give me one area, function, department, center, institute, division, university as a whole, that will perform better without tech than with. Go." That was probably a decade ago. And back then we weren't as impactful and as relevant as we are today and AI didn't take over and so forth.

So it's important to understand where we are, what the university needs, what are the priorities and objectives, really figure out what the goals are of, again, the person you report to, solve the problems your boss has and keeps them up at night. And one of two things happen in your life and your career. One, you grow and advance and get more relevance because they realize that, one is surround themselves with smart people who make their lives easier. Or two, they take all your credit and don't give you any acknowledgement and now you have a different decision to make. Again, I've experienced both in my career. So it's important to understand and help people understand that technology's here to help. We're not a tech company, we're an academic university, we're an educational institution, but we are a golden thread that connects everything across the whole fabric.

I see CIOs and technology leaders as orchestrators of opportunities. If you look at hub and spoke model, we're at the center of everybody's business. Whether they want us to be in it or not, I know what marketing's doing in branding and finance and athletics and facilities and everybody else. So then sometimes you connect them with each other and find a way how do you provide service? And then finally, and most importantly, you have to deliver. Because if you're asking for opportunities and you get them and you fail and you keep failing and you keep failing, those opportunities will eventually go away. So you have to be good at what you do and actually deliver on the promises you've made.

Tara Hughes: There's a lot of good truth bombs there. I think that for the way that every organization is certainly going to have a different framework and it really is very contextual and it depends on the president and their preferences and how they like to work and who they want to work with and how they want to organize their time. I think one of the things that I've learned is that's not necessarily personal whether you report to them or not. And I think it's a really important seed of truth to carry with you. I've reported to presidents, I've not. I've reported to CFOs. And I do think that the advice of solving your boss's problems, and if there's a boss above them, helping solve their problems helps tell a really important story and sometimes helps tell the story of why you need to be involved in conversations at that higher level.

Because sometimes if you're involved at that level, you can help either prevent or at least strategize on how to address things before they balloon into something more significant of a problem.

For me, I think that it's really important for a CIO to understand the people behind every single thing that's happening related to technology. And so if you're not understanding why the provost cares about a software that they're wanting to implement, if you're not understanding why students don't want AI, you've got to understand top to bottom how people are engaging with it. And again, it's less about the technology itself necessarily and more about its impact. And I do agree that technology is the great connector of us all and in a lot of ways to our great peril in certain respects. And so I think that you've got to be able to keep humans at the center of everything that you're doing. And if you are technology focused only, you're not seeing the right picture. You're too myopic in what you're understanding technology's role on your campus.

And I think the other side of that then is that my role is to be a conduit between IT and whoever else that I am working with and engaging with, whether that's at the highest senior leadership table or somewhere in between. And being able to relate back to IT. Here's their concerns as much as you're able to share, but really being able to be a representative of them back to your team and your team and IT's needs and concerns and perspectives and what's happening not just at this institution, but across higher ed, what are the impacts? I mean, I think to some degree, that's one of the most important things that EDUCAUSE provides is the ability to connect outside of our own institutions and understand what's happening at scale. And how do I bring that knowledge back to the team that I lead and the folks that I report up to and help them understand that as well?

Jenay Robert: I imagine this telling the story of the human side of technology decisions or the impact on people of certain technologies maybe is harder at times than others. Is that true? Are there some technologies that are like you're getting back to our vegetable kind of thing here? Which I feel terrible. I feel like between us and the news lately, vegetables are getting a pretty bad rub. I love vegetables for one part.

Sophie White: I love vegetables.

Jenay Robert: Yeah. But is that one of the more challenging kind of unsung hero elements of your job is telling that story? Are there certain cases where that's especially difficult? And do you have advice for people listening who are in that position to tell that story?

Tara Hughes: I'll go first this time because I've been punting too much. I think one of the stories that I think can be more challenging to tell is about infrastructure because oftentimes it's not seen, but it is felt. And you start to get pretty techie when you start talking about server infrastructure and life cycle and you can lose people pretty quickly. I had at an institution that I was previously at where we had to replace some outdated server infrastructure and it was going to cost a pretty penny. And to be able to put that into terms that the president and the CFO could understand the gravity of where we found ourselves and why we needed to make that investment and its impact meant that I had to think of things from the president is at any given moment worrying about a legal issue, about a safety issue, about all other things that are happening across the institution.

And so I have to be able to understand where they're coming from and how to help them see that this is a priority and its eventual impact, if not immediate impact. From the CFO, I guess I'll cut myself off and say it's understanding your audience. And so the CFO is going to be looking at the numbers and the sustainability of if that has to be in the operating budget.

Every single person has an angle with which they see the world and make sense of it. And part of my job is understanding that angle and then telling the story so that they can see it in how it relates within their world and their perspective. I think maybe the other thing that is challenging is that there is a little bit of. The level of technology that is in people's hands today is significantly different than it was twenty years ago. And so people don't have to go to IT for a technology. They can discover it on their own as they're scrolling their phone on Instagram or in the app store or a million other ways. And so I think that part of the problem is we can either become overly confident in how much technology any one of us think we know and understand. Even my kids who are in their college years, they've grown up with technology.

That's very different than my husband who grew up putting computers together and understands what makes the technology work. And so I think there is a little bit of a challenge in being able to help people understand what makes the motor hum and why they should care about that because things do seem really easy and very consumable. And sometimes that paints the picture that things are far easier than they are. And if you're not careful in how you tell your story and understanding your audience, it will quickly come across as dismissive and becoming the department of no.

Jenay Robert: My background isn't originally from the teaching and learning world. And so I see a parallel here where we always say people think that they can critique teaching in a certain way or can easily do teaching because they've been taught for how many years of their life. And so they think this is easy. I've seen this happen day in and day out for a large portion of my life for some individuals. And it must be kind of similar in that regard. Okay, I've got the cell phone in my hand that does all the things I'm asking you to accomplish for me at work. It's this easy. Why can't you do it? That's really interesting. I appreciate the perspective. I never thought of it that way.

Miloš Topić: I think both Jenay and Tara made great points. A couple things to add because there's different audiences. So I think you should always start with why. I don't want to force tech on anybody just to have tech. Why are we doing this? And then in today's world, we have a lot of these human-centered blah, blah, blah. I'm like, well, I've always done tech for humans. I've never done it for plants or vegetables or cakes. It's always been to help hopefully lives of people and make them easier and better. So why are we doing this? Understand, listen and empathize with where they are on that journey. While I do have personal and work, while I do have two phones, I take notes. And when people see meaning it's like, wait, you have a notebook and a pen? And I go, yeah. I left my stone tablet at home, because I just feel like it helps me think and memorize better.

I wear an analog watch, because just in my role doesn't mean I have to be in the matrix somewhere. How do we figure out why are we doing tech? What's the value? What's the benefit? And how it will hopefully, once adopted, make lives of people easier and better? On the other hand, when it comes to your colleagues, CFO and others have always held great relationships with CFOs because they control the purse strings and I spend the most. So I'm like, okay, we have to build that relationship from the beginning. But generally I try to, in every exchange we have, and I don't always succeed, and I'm aware of that, but I try to give more than I take. Because if I look for ways to make things better for you and your procurement and accounts payable and accounts receivable and HR and so forth and whatever, down the road when we have a need, it's a lot more difficult for you to say no, to just say no.

You want to find a way to work because our team has developed solutions and delivered value to you and the areas you lead. So they almost kind of, in a sense, feel like they owe you. So it's always people, focus on people first, they matter the most, and have a very clear why. Why are we doing this, whatever that is, solution, architecture, infrastructure, application, and what's the expected value?

Jenay Robert: I think that relationship builds trust too, right? Because maybe it's not even all the time about, I feel like I owe you, but it's more like, "Hey, I know you. I know about these decisions. You've made great decisions in the past, and I'm not seeing it this time. Maybe I should ask a few more questions to make sure, am I really disagreeing with you? Are you missing the mark this time?" I think that that trust just kind of gets you places.

Miloš Topić: And part of that trust, thank you for saying that. Part of that trust, the other side of that coin is really transparently owning mistakes. I make a lot of them. And like I said, if you talk to my kids and my wife, probably more than I'm willing to acknowledge. But if you really go and say, "Hey, we crashed them." I'd said this recently, we had a senior leadership series of meetings, and there was a particular initiative for the president gave this really nice eloquent introduction. And when she was done, I said, "Wow, you made that sound like it wasn't a catastrophic failure that it has been." And everybody was shocked for a second. Then everybody laughed, and everybody realized that we're all people and we're all humans, and we made mistakes, and I own that one, and we're going to find a way how do we fix it and make it better?

Because that also builds credibility and trust. None of us are perfect. None of us are 100 percent accurate in our predictions or decisions or executions. And when you do make mistakes, you need to be among the first ones to step upfront in front of everybody, raise your hand and go, "That one's on me. I failed. I made a mistake, and here's how I'm going to fix it moving forward." That resonates, and sadly, in today's world, is a very rare occurrence.

Tara Hughes: I agree. And it really speaks to operating with integrity. And I think if you do that, a lot of other things become a lot less complicated in your decision-making and the things that you say and do. I think the other point that's worth making is that this becomes a stewardship issue, which again, goes back to the vegetables. Being a good steward of your resources means that when I do go to the CFO and I have an ask, I'm not being greedy about the ask I'm making. I have proven that I'm a good steward of my resources. I care about what's best for the institution, and asking that why. And that if I'm asking for something, it's because there has been a lot of thought and strategy and deliberation that has gone into this is where I think we need to go next, and that you can trust that I'm going to steward that project well and that resource well from beginning to end.

Because if I'm not considered a good steward, if I'm not taking care of the resources that I'm entrusted, then I don't have that trust. And I'm not able to do the flashy things because I haven't built a solid foundation in which I can use as a platform to do all of the other flashy and exciting things. But I do think the devil is in the details. It's being a good steward even in these small, seemingly insignificant things like even your line item of a thousand dollars. How you steward that resource tells a greater story that you might not think about, but does, I think, have a connecting thread to how you operate and what your integrity looks like when no one's watching.

Sophie White: Yeah, I think that's such a great point. Last year we talked with the outgoing leaders of the CIO community group at EDUCAUSE. And one of the things that stuck with me was stewardship, but also how proving trust and building trust through things like small wins when there's a stakeholder that has what to you would be a small project, but it makes a really big impact on that, delivering that with excellence. And then when you have a bigger project at stake, people trust you to do that well. So it takes time and it takes a lot of patience, which in this fast-paced world, we've talked about the rate of change can be really hard. But I think that going back to that foundational element of technology, but also building trust among members of the institution is so important.