That’s the question sitting underneath my conversation with David Robinson, newly appointed executive leader at Technological University Dublin.
Not “what’s the new AI tool.” Not “what’s the next platform.”
Just a simple, uncomfortable question: if data, AI, cybersecurity, and business continuity now shape nearly every strategic decision an institution makes, why does technology leadership still sit outside the room where those decisions get made?
David’s new role overseeing technology, strategy and planning, governance, risk and compliance, libraries, project management, and sustainability intelligence is what happens when an institution actually answers that question differently.
Technology Has Become an Executive Issue, Not Just an IT Issue
Cybersecurity used to be filed under “IT problem.” So did data quality. So did system outages.
David’s point is that this filing system no longer works. Resilience and business continuity aren’t technical footnotes anymore; they’re leadership questions. When he pressed a colleague on his executive team to estimate how much of their work touched technology or data in some way, even indirectly, the number was far higher than anyone expected.
That’s the shift. Technology stopped being a service the institution consumes and became the infrastructure every other decision runs on.
Fragmentation Is the Real Cost Nobody Puts a Number On
Ask most institutions if their data is fragmented and they’ll say “somewhat.” Ask them to make a confident, real-time decision based on that data, and the cracks show immediately.
David described an institution, not unique to his, where different parts define the same terms differently, record information differently, and run on different systems. The result isn’t just inefficiency. It’s an inability to compare performance, manage compliance, or make a decision at the executive level with any real confidence.
Fragmentation isn’t a technology problem. It’s a decision-making problem wearing a technology costume.
Governance Has to Come Off the Shelf
Most people’s mental image of “governance” is a binder. Or a slide deck reviewed once a year. Or a committee that meets quietly in the background.
David wants to break that image entirely. His goal is governance that’s visible and active every day, dashboards instead of documents, workflows instead of static policy, risk registers people actually check instead of remembering ten days before an audit.
The distinction matters: governance that lives in a binder protects the institution from blame. Governance that lives in daily workflows protects the institution from risk. Those are not the same thing.
Technology Leaders Have to Understand the Whole Institution, Not Just Their Function
The most surprising thing David said wasn’t about technology at all. It was about preparing for the interview for this new role and realizing how much he already understood about libraries, project governance, and sustainability, areas he’d never formally run.
Technology has become so entwined with every function that a technology leader who only knows technology is already behind. David’s advice to CIOs and aspiring CIOs was blunt: don’t assume your knowledge stops at your job description. It almost certainly doesn’t.
Letting Go Is the Hardest Leadership Skill in the New Role
After twenty-five years running technology functions, David’s honest answer about his biggest personal challenge wasn’t strategic. It was personal: separating himself from the day-to-day technology decisions he’s spent a career making.
That’s a harder discipline than it sounds. It means trusting someone else with decisions he used to own outright, and showing up with real attention for libraries, sustainability, and project governance; functions that aren’t his instinct yet, but are now just as much his responsibility as IT ever was.
AI Is Accelerating the Need for a Technology Voice at the Table
David doesn’t think AI is optional or distant. He thinks it’s arriving fast, and that it’s only as good as the data underneath it.
That’s why he sees institutions without real technology representation at the executive level as increasingly exposed, not because they’re behind on tools, but because they lack the governance, standardization, and data trust that make AI usable at all. The institutions that solved for good data early are the ones who’ll be able to use AI responsibly. The rest will be playing catch-up on a foundation, not a feature.
A Final Thought
None of this is really about title, and it isn’t really about location.
It’s about a question every institution will eventually have to answer: does technology leadership get a seat at the table where strategy is decided, or does it wait to be handed strategy after the fact?
The institutions that figure this out early won’t just be more efficient. They’ll be the ones capable of making good decisions with the technology everyone else is still just adopting.
- Wayne
Subscribe to TRANSFORMED wherever you get your podcasts to hear from higher ed leaders as soon as new episodes drop.
