Joe Gottlieb (00:02):

Welcome to transformed a Higher Digital podcast focused on the new whys, the new whats and the new hows in higher ed. In each episode, you will experience hosts and guests pulling for the resurgence of higher ed while identifying and discussing the best practices needed to accomplish that resurgence culture, strategy and tactics planning, and execution people, process and technology. It's all on the menu because that's, what's required to truly transform. Hello and welcome to transform a Higher Digital podcast focused on the new whys, the new whats and the new hows in higher ed. My name is Joe Gottlieb, President and CTO of Higher Digital, and today I am joined by Ed Evans, CIO of Texas A and M University Corpus Christi. Ed, welcome to transformed.

Ed Evans (00:55):

Thanks Joe. I'm happy to be here today. What do you wanna talk about?

Joe Gottlieb (00:59):

Well, glad you asked. I eventually wanna talk about driving organizational engagement to facilitate change, but first tell me a bit about your personal journey and, and how it has shaped your perspective and passion on the work that you're doing.

Ed Evans (01:14):

Well, I I've been in IT for about 25 years now started out at Purdue University, doing desktop support in some of the colleges moved into the central it organization there, and I, I, I think from my experience at Purdue, one of the things I really took away was there can be these gaps. We have to work across on campus, right? When you're, when you're, if you're in a department, you might not always be aware of the things that are going on centrally. And so how do you, how do we work to bring people together as we're, as we're supporting systems, as we're trying to work efficiently and effectively? I moved in 2014 down to Texas A and M, Corpus Christi, much smaller institution, right? The Purdue regional campus. And, and I, I would say here a, a personal experience has really shaped me in my view of the work that we do, right.

Ed Evans (02:06):

My, my daughter, my daughter had a, had a little bit of a health crisis a year ago, spent some time in the hospital and, and had to work with a neurosurgeon very, very quickly. And as I'm watching him work work and take care of her, of course, he's using lots of technology in the hospital. And I, I think how, how does this affect me back in my daily job, right? Cause that's, this is what we should be doing at a, at a Hispanic serving institution at a minority serving institution. And I'm thinking I want him to not have to spend any extra time using those it systems so that he can change the, literally change the life of my daughter. And, and I think that all worked out while she's doing really well at this point. Right. But it, it, it makes me think about how I approach my job.

Joe Gottlieb (02:55):

Wow. That's a, it's amazing that you were, first of all, touched upon experience like that, and so glad your daughter's doing well, but it, it sounds to me like it really brought you to a place where you saw in an extreme scenario, how important it was you think about people flying an aircraft or something, right. How important it was for the systems to work well, for them to be intuitive. And you didn't want that user to be dealing with any noise or any ambiguity or, or confusion. Right. So, and even though that's an extreme, right, it's what we kind of all want as users of the systems we need to employ to do our jobs. And it's what probably leaders should all want for all of their users that they've asked to perform a variety of tasks. Many of them quite specialized in their various departments and fields. And you think about at a higher ed institution, lots of different specialization going on there, we'd like their systems to work and their processes to be effective and intuitive. So how do we get there? That seems to be a, a noble pursuit. So

Ed Evans (04:00):

I certainly think it is <laugh>,

Joe Gottlieb (04:03):

That's why we're in that business. And so I, you know, what, you and I, in our previous conversations, we were kidding about this notion you raised, which was, you know, remember that movie field of dreams, where it was all the, the, the mantra of the movie was build it and they will come build this mythical baseball field. And the, the baseball giants will come forth and play. And that's kind of the way it was operating for a long time. Wasn't it?

Ed Evans (04:27):

Oh, I, I, I think so. And I still think we operate that way sometimes. Right. We're just going to design, deploy, roll out these incredible systems and then magically people will just be attracted to them. They'll want to start they'll wanna start working differently using this great technology that we've rolled out. But I, I think increasingly we need to take a little bit different approach to that, right?

Joe Gottlieb (04:50):

Yeah. I mean, we do not have that infinite wisdom that would allow us to take our specialized craft in it and anticipate all the, the business requirements all the nuances of where those processes exist and how they, how they, how they function in a departmentally, for example. Right. Mm-hmm <affirmative>, so it's really stimulating that understanding so that I think that's the user understanding side of it. What about the part that involves, well, let's stick there for a moment. Right. So what have you seen, what are, what have you seen be necessary to sort of, to, to become more effective as in an approach other than the field of dreams approach

Ed Evans (05:33):

<Laugh>? Well, I, I think we have to understand the people that we're working with. I even just this morning, I was having a conversation with some of our faculty and, you know, we hire them because they're great biologists because they're great chemists because they're great researchers in whatever their field is. And we don't ex we don't hire them because they're great technologists necessarily, right. The, the systems have to support them in the work that they want to do. So we've gotta really think about, about our, our whole organization as a collection of individuals. So often I think when we're rolling out systems, we say, well, it's going to affect faculty this way, or it's going to affect administrative people this way. Well, well, what if we stopped and realized maybe maybe our engineering faculty have a different perspective than our rhetoric faculty, for instance, right.

Ed Evans (06:24):

They're probably gonna perceive the world a little bit differently. There might be different ways. We need to engage them when we're deploying out, when we're deploying it systems, whether they're for the whole campus or for particular department, the way we approach that conversation might need to be might need to be customized. And, and by the way, we're, we have to approach it from, from different perspectives to not just employees, but as project managers, they, they have a different approach as change sponsors, not just project sponsors, but, but change sponsors, that's different. And, and really a tough job that I think people have across campus are the ones in middle management. Right? Cause you get to deal with all the changes coming from above, as well as all the people who are kind of grumbling below you when changes, inflicted upon them. And so how do we empower all those different groups with the, with the information that they need help bridge those gaps in, in between departments and, and processes that I mentioned earlier and work to improve everybody's job.

Joe Gottlieb (07:28):

Yeah. Well, well, there's a lot of things. I think it sounds like you've, you, you you've triggered there. One is that there's a, there's a diversity of user and we could call them personas or what have you, but there's a diversity of users that have to be served. And so to me, this is just good practice. I often talk about how the best it organizations really are acting like it, service vendors, right. Where they really understand who their customers are and it, as an it organization, they're, they're a lot of different types of people serving in a lot of different types of departments, trying to, trying to unify their work towards, let's say a, a, a vision, a mission, a set of strategic goals, but also daily operations. So I think one of the other key things apart from the, the diversity of users we're trying to serve is then also the difference between operations.

Joe Gottlieb (08:27):

I E, the things we understand, we're asking everyone to go do and repeat in their job day to day, and what systems support that. And then how are we changing that? How are we evolving to do the next new things? Right. So how have you thought about the, those different types of work? I E keeping the lights on keeping things as much the same and as recognizable as possible, and really defending the recognizability, the intuitiveness, the, the, the, the look and feel of that, which is already a part of the ongoing operation versus how you think about new things, you would do, how you fit it back into that hole, but first seek to understand what it is and how to prioritize, how many of those things you can do in the first place.

Ed Evans (09:14):

Yeah. Well, there's, there's a lot in that. I think Joe well, we'll start with the first piece, right? I, I think when you're talking about those operational activities, I mean, I tend to refer to them with my staff as operational credibility, what is, what we must be credible in the operations that we're delivering. And when I first came here and, and started introducing that language here at anum Corpus Christi my staff said, well, how will we know if we're operationally credible? I said, it's a good question. The first, the first indicator, I mean, we could go build dashboards and have all kinds of key performance metrics, I think. But the first indicator' gonna be when I walk across campus and have a meeting with the Dean, if it starts out something like my email, wasn't working this morning, it, it changes the whole discussion, right.

Ed Evans (10:00):

I never get to have that strategic conversation about where we're going, how we can engage with them if we're not credible in our operations. And right, and, and that's, that's a major loss if we're not having those strategic kinds of conversations, we're a research to university hoping to aspiring to be research one, one day, but we're growing in research. And so we need people pushing the bounds of what we're of what we're doing and, and delivering on campus whether that's in our research, whether that's in our ability to recruit and retain students we, we have to be always raising the bar in terms of the services that we're delivering and the way we leverage technology to to support them. So it comes down to priorities. I think, I mean, if we've achieved operational credibility, then the rest comes down to priorities.

Joe Gottlieb (10:56):

Okay. So for a moment back to that operational credibility, right. So that's just about really just making sure that your users, aren't distracted by fundamentals that, you know, should be good and in place. Right. So the example of my emails busted, you know, things that are expected almost like the, you know, the utilities flowing just fine. Thank you very much, right? Yeah. Then you get to have the B the, the more interesting conversation where it's like, Hey, I'm glad you're here. You know, there's some things we've been wrestling with on, on this. And it's, you're, you're starting at a higher abstraction level. You're starting at a higher strategic Val level, a higher value level. Right. Okay. So then you, you mentioned prioritization. Totally agree that then it's a matter of saying all, we've gotta prioritize what else we can do. And, and don't, we also, before we even get into that, don't, we also have to prioritize the mix between new things and old things. Like, how have you, how have you thought about that before, right. Where, like, you know, this, this part of my organization is having to be devoted to getting fundamental things, right. Making the operations are working fine. And then this rest of the organization can be focused on doing the net new things. Have you seen ways to arbitrate that?

Ed Evans (12:17):

Well, I, I think that here, here's the way I approach it. Right. And I, I have seen a few places where maybe you set aside special project teams. And I don't mean more like skunkworks teams, right. They're always working on the innovative ideas. And I, I think from my perspective, I ask my staff always to be engaged in that continuous improvement activity, right. Whether it's whether it's something in your own individual work group and team, or engaging across campus to, to shadow somebody understand how their, how their job works, but look for opportunities for continuous improvement regardless of where, where you are. But in the, in the end, we, we have to have an engaged leadership for going to, if we're gonna do it right. It's great to push things down at, at the lowest reasonable level in the organization facilitate conversations and, and, and make sure we're moving work efficiently, but we've gotta have engaged leadership across campus in order to drive those kinds of priorities.

Joe Gottlieb (13:22):

Okay. So I think you were wo leading into a potential position about rather than segregating your teams, mm-hmm <affirmative> right between old stuff and new stuff, per se. It's, I think it's, it's good practice to keep your teams together and keep them always moving things forward. But I would say a lot of that goes into incrementally improving current systems by good housekeeping, you know, seeing things yourself before others see it, or being responsive with user feedback. All that's all good. Right then. And, and so there's a certain amount of the, of resource that has to go into that. And to me, to me, and I want to get your reaction to this, if let's say the organization is really behind on that stuff. And there's a lot of, there's a lot of catch up to do, maybe when you got to Corpus Christi, where there was some of this, I don't know, I don't wanna put words in your mouth, but sometimes you've gotta devote a fair amount of, of your, your team to making, making, making sure that the first com part of the conversation, isn't my email was down this morning, so you can't get to the better one.

Joe Gottlieb (14:36):

Right. And so you get to a place where you work that down, but even that it's, that's a priority. So then sometimes you're defending that priority to get things right. To then earn a, you know, earn the opportunity to do more interesting things. And you're having to delay some of those things or get more budget, and we all know that's hard, right. So if this is a zero sum game, and it typically is it's about then managing relationships and the priority of getting certain things. Right. Right.

Ed Evans (15:04):

Yeah. Well, it, it, it always starts with the people. Right. And, and I think, I, I, I guess in my experience, what I would, what I would say is if you're at a point where you have those operational problems, operational challenges, and you're, and, and that's just where the conversation takes place, as you're walking into, into the offices of your colleagues across campus, they're probably gonna be behind you getting that resolved. Yeah. Right. They're, they're interested in having reliable services. And so yes. Is it a pain point if we can't take on more strategic initiatives, if we, if we don't have that operational credibility. Sure. But it's also a, it's also a pain point. If I can't access my email. I mean, think about it. When you, when you walked into your office before we started the podcast, you just flipped the switch. Right? You didn't, you didn't think, gee, I hope my light turns on whenever I flipped the switch, you just turned the switch on and you assumed lights were going to light up and the magic was gonna happen. That's the way the technology has to work too.

Joe Gottlieb (16:05):

Yeah, no, it's a good, it's a good analogy. So I like that. And, and look at the end of the day, if, if we're behind a bit on the fundamentals as an it organization, or as an institution, let's just say at the end of the day, we have to share an understanding that that's the case. That's the state of affairs right now. And we all agree, let's get those basics done. Right. Because in many scenarios we might find ourselves, I've seen this many times, right. Where sure. There are issues still with the basic systems, let's say email. But there's so many requests that people are pounding the table to get fulfilled. They're also having selective awareness about those other things that are competing for those resources. And so you started this whole paragraph with, it's all about getting up to leadership and engaging the, the ultimate, the, the, the reality of the situation and helping to prioritize the sequence of how to manage it. Right. And

Ed Evans (17:08):

I, and, and somebody has to make the decision. Right. I, I, I think there could be about four ways that decision gets made. I mean, hopefully what we're, what we're talking about here is it's a, it's a partnership between it and between our, our colleagues across campus, right. Our executives across campus, and we are reaching those priorities together.

Joe Gottlieb (17:32):

Yep. I

Ed Evans (17:32):

Mean, I, I, I, I think there could be, although I've never been in an organization like this, there could be a place where there's not strong it leadership. And and maybe I, I haven't been in one, but I have seen a few where certain functions that maybe strategic gets spun off separately from the core it organization. Right. Because for whatever reason. And so there's more of a business driven approach to to some of that strategic work that's happening. I I've been in several organizations where the it leader is, is strong and helps helps set business priorities, but often maybe it's showing up the table and saying, we need to do some of these things. I, I, I don't think that that's the best approach necessarily that it's always taking the lead on those business opportunities. I think the partnership is much more effective and, you know, and I don't rule it out that there could just be a situation where it is just totally acquiescing and maybe business isn't leading, we're all taking the path of least resistance. And certainly we're not achieving our organizational goals if that's the case.

Joe Gottlieb (18:36):

I think a lot of organizations found themselves in that situation over the last 20, 30 years, I'm old. So I've seen some history. And, and I think some of it came out of the need to, by acquiescing. It's a, it's a useful term that you use, right? And sometimes acquiescing was all about pandering or, or serving constituencies or stakeholders. Right. Even when we knew that they were asking for things that maybe wouldn't make sense or wouldn't be sustainable, and we're gonna come back to that, I want to get into the topic of, of customizing technology versus alternatives to that. But before we go there you know, I like how you've staked out these different postures that might be taken, because I do think they, they shed light on, on how we might navigate this in a, in a, in an effective way.

Joe Gottlieb (19:36):

So at the end of the day, we want leadership to be engaged under great, great conditions. They might get it from the beginning and they're really driving good choices on the, you know, the things that would allow us to prioritize under maybe less proactive circumstances. Maybe we can help them get there by orchestrating those, the, the needs for us to be guided. Right. So if we are, if we are sharing upstream, the hard decision points that we're confronting, because we've got a lot of requests for how to use our finite resources, well, then maybe they can engage in response to that. Mm-Hmm, <affirmative> the, the, the, those are at least two working models, I think. And, and they, would, they at least give us a couple of options, even when leadership isn't just so profoundly, transcendently proactive, cuz they not always are. Right. Okay. But the bad scenarios are when we're letting the politics rule the situation I E the loudest voice wins, or we are merely acquiescing and trying to serve everyone and then other bad things happen or we get so prescriptive where we just seize control and say, this is what you're gonna get, you know? It's like, you, you know, I think you said this earlier in our prior discussion the model T came in, you know, you like as long as you like black. Right. Right.

Ed Evans (21:04):

I, I, I, I, I think, you know, if you talk about over, over time, right. I, I think we've seen both scenarios particularly as organizations have had mainframes on campus and they're highly customized and maybe it's the burger king experience. Right. You can have it your way. Versus now, as we shift services to the cloud, where oftentimes again, right, that's the, that's the end result you can you can have kinda like T you can have any color you want, as long as it's black. You, you must adapt your business process, your business function in order to work in those in those new systems. Or it's gonna be very, you're, you're gonna have a tough life. I mean,

Joe Gottlieb (21:45):

Well, yeah. So now let's get, come to that, that topic, right. Which is on these extremes, we have either the overly prescriptive where you're really just dictating what it's gonna be, and that doesn't feel right to the users.

Ed Evans (22:00):

Nope, no, sorry. <Inaudible>

Joe Gottlieb (22:02):

Right. And, and the opposite is I will act wees to whatever you ask for, but therefore I, I abandon my responsibility. I abdicate my responsibility to advise on things like technology, architecture, sustainable technology delivery, right. Mm-Hmm, <affirmative> ongoing change management. And so I, I, if I'm insecure and I just want, I wanna let you be right. We, we both, we both might be very distressed with the results of that decision.

Ed Evans (22:38):

Yeah. It's, it's not sustainable. Right. We, we end up with lots of technical debt that we have to then figure out how to service. And it keeps us from being the agile organization that we, that we must be if we're gonna, if we're gonna move forward in in really advance our, our, our business.

Joe Gottlieb (22:59):

And right. And so you've, you've made a very useful historical reference that I think taints one of the methods, one of the approaches based upon how it worked in history in the past. So the mainframe world was, everything was customized and, and that set up a pattern for it being the business of building custom solutions. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> as, as the it organization evolved as the technology industry evolved more and more things started to become available as useful starting points so that not everything had to be customized. And if you fast forward today, well, I'll, I'll pause there along the way software that we could buy and then implement in the way that we wanted it to work. Definitely emulated that customization pattern that we saw in the mainframe in many scenarios and some more so than others, but it was, it was, it, it set the pattern even deeper. I think at a time when I think it organizations were still struggling to, to, to define their value in a, in a sustainable way. Right.

Ed Evans (24:13):

Well, and maybe maybe the contrast we should be making right is customization versus consumerization because how often do we even my expectation is, well, I can, I can download all the software I need and run my whole organization, just for my cell phone. That's about all I need, or I can run to best buy and, and buy storage. I'm sure we've all worked with people like that. Right. I can run to best buy or Walmart and pick up all the storage that I need in order to to, to run the business. Well there's still an enterprise way. We need to do things if we're gonna scale as an organization. It's, it's not quite the, it's not quite the same, but it it's, it's, it's a tough balance, right? The yeah. Flexibility versus the sustainability.

Joe Gottlieb (24:59):

Well, I love the notion of consumerization because it, a lot of consumer technologies like, well, I have to give a lot of credit to apple. They're not alone, but they really advanced the level of design that unlocked a level of adoption that was net new for us as, as, as consumers in an increasingly digital world. And I think what it did was it, we it's often spoken of in the technology industry, right. For, for, for solutions, it set a new expectation bar for what technology should look like in terms of its intuitiveness. Mm-Hmm, <affirmative> now your, your point also, I think triggers a thought about configurability. Most consumer technologies, aren't customized, they're pretty vanilla, but we can configure them to suit just enough of our preferences, like with notifications mm-hmm <affirmative> and, you know, the way we wanna name a thing here or a thing there, and the way we wanna make it our own.

Joe Gottlieb (26:02):

Right. But it keeps us in a box it's very sustainable. And so now the consumer world only happened. That was only possible because of SAS. And so software' a service represents an era in the technology industry now where there's great, great leverage for keeping many things the same and serving lots of users with the same software that's running in a, in a, in a, in a multitenant mode, I'm gonna get a little technical there. Right. but we can still configure it and consumerize it just enough with the best practice. And that becomes the, in the new approach. And I, I wanna pause there, cause I know you got something to add, but, but we're now in a new era.

Ed Evans (26:49):

Well, and, and, and I think that gives us the contrast, right? We talked earlier about if we build it, they will come and we can deploy. It's good at designing, deploying these very large complex systems. But if we're, if we're going to change, if we're going to adapt in order to work in this new environment, in this, in, in the cloud, in this SA based environment I think increasingly what's called, what's what I'm called to do. What my organization is called to do is help with the organizational change side of of that adaptation, right. Cause regardless of where the, where the technology lives, if we're not, and, and when I say we, I don't mean it, but as an organization, if we're not adopting it, if we're not using it effectively to achieve our business goals, to gain the value from which we, from which we, for the value from which we implemented it, right. If we're not, if we're not getting to that point, then really our, our our implementation was a lot of that.

Joe Gottlieb (28:02):

There's a lot of project failure out there, right? Mm-Hmm <affirmative>, I mean, I think Gartner says something like 50 to 75% of projects either fail or, or produce a level of rework that, you know, makes them very inefficient. And, and so I wanna then come back to this, if, you know, if the mainframe world was all customized, mm-hmm, <affirmative>, we're just learning it from the very beginning. The on-premise software world was another version of that. That was way more rich with the possibility and got us even deeper into our own repre, you know, respective solutions. We want to take advantage of SAS because it's the new model for technology delivery that we know will be funded. Okay. That's the, I, I think a key point. So then as, as purveyors of it services within institutions, right? Our job is to select is to help the organization, select the vendors that we believe are the best bets for the sources of that innovation. We're betting on their R and D teams to take us to where those systems need to go. Now we do need to make these systems our own, but we need to do that within the boundary of baseline automation plus configurability. Absolutely.

Joe Gottlieb (29:14):

That, that we engage our stakeholders that are owning these processes in the departments and say, Hey, look, there's some room for you to make this your own, but I wanna facilitate the process whereby you help me pick these vendors. We pick which ones in which areas to fill gaps in priority order. You're part of that process. Now we're gonna only configure. We're not gonna customize because we're gonna lean on these folks to keep us moving forward. Right. So exactly that becomes the new dance that we have to, we have to orchestrate with these stakeholders knowing, well, I'll come back full circle that our users, they vary so much and there's these specializations to address. So does that, are you finding that, that approach a make sense and B is plausible in practice?

Ed Evans (30:06):

Does it make sense? Yes. And I think we're growing in, in how that works out, right? It's a little, it's a little unique to each organization. I, I think and I, and I'm gonna come back to, we've gotta engage people at all levels of the organization for them to really understand why it, why, why we're changing. Right, right. And to, and to help drive the change. I can implement a project. I'm, I'm good at rolling out technology, but I have to have that partnership with the leaders across campus. If if, if they're gonna fully realize the, the new ways of working from, from deploying a new system. So right. If I'm some, at some level, it comes down to business process, it comes down to specifications, but I'm only when I'm rolling when I'm figuring those things out and how we plug into a new system or, or which new system best achieves those.

Ed Evans (31:01):

I'm still only working with part of that business partners organization, right. Maybe their leader, maybe some other analysts or or processors or something like that to to know how they work and what's gonna meet their goals the best. But then once that technology, once that new capability comes online, their whole organization's gonna have to leverage it. Right. If, if we're looking at a CRM for student recruitment or something like that, we're, we're gonna have to effectively have everybody on board. And that's the, that's that organizational change management part of it. Right. We've got the technology deployed, but now everybody in the organization's gotta be on board with how do we work differently? Because our processes of change moving from system one to system two.

Joe Gottlieb (31:45):

Yep. So you need that. You need that level of engagement to make sure that it's actually produces the value that you seek from the beginning. Exactly. And if you zoom up on all those choices that need to be made, you need leadership to engage, to make the hard choices about which of those things to even move forward, knowing you have finite resources and knowing that it would be better to get one thing done. Right. And then move on to the next right. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> so that's like that's doing complete things rather than incremental progress on portions of things that get a lot of attention. All right. Well, let's, let's bring it home for, for, are you for our listeners, ed? Let's give them three things that they can take away when thinking about this organizational engagement to facilitate change.

Ed Evans (32:35):

Well, first I, I think we've said it several times, right? It starts with the people. It, it's not just about the technology. It starts with the people and what they need to accomplish their, their job. Yep. We have to get the fundamentals, right? Give them the basics if we're gonna have a seat at the table for the next level of the discussion. Right. that's, I I'd say that's the second thing. And then third is really organizational change management and the change enablement that supports it. Right. It requires the whole organization. Just, just, just like you said, there in the, in the intro, right. We're we're talking about organizational engagement just of a few people,

Joe Gottlieb (33:17):

So true. And that's a great point to land on. I really appreciate you joining us today.

Ed Evans (33:24):

I've had a great time. Great discussion, Joe. Thank you so much.

Joe Gottlieb (33:27):

And thanks to our guests for joining us as well, have a great day. And we'll look forward to hosting you again on the next episode of transformed.