Joe Gottlieb:

Welcome to TRANSFORMED, a Higher Digital podcast focused on the new why’s, the new what’s, and the new how’s in higher ed. In each episode, you’ll experience hosts and guests pulling for the resurgence of higher ed, 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, welcome and thanks for joining us for another episode of TRANSFORMED. My name’s Joe Gottlieb, president and CTO of Higher Digital, and today recording live at EDUCAUSE 23 in Chicago. I am joined by Tom Andriola, Vice Chancellor and Chief Digital Officer at University of California Irvine. Tom, welcome to TRANSFORMED.

Tom Andriola:

Thank you. Glad to be here.

Joe Gottlieb:

And by the way, what the heck is EDUCAUSE 23?

Tom Andriola:

Yeah, why don’t we start right there? Right. So EDUCAUSE is the higher education technology association. It’s global in nature. We got about 20,000 people here in Chicago at the annual conference. You can see everything from educational technologies to customer relationship management, to virtual reality learning environments. Pretty much it’s the place to be if you’re in the higher education industry and you’re doing something with tech.

Joe Gottlieb:

Sounds good. Glad we’re both here. Yeah.

Tom Andriola:

Yeah. It’s been a lot of fun kind of walking around. Hey, guess what they’re talking about here, AI.

Joe Gottlieb:

I’ll bet, I’ll bet.

Tom Andriola:

What do we, what do we wanna talk about today?

Joe Gottlieb:

I’m really glad you asked, Tom. I would love to talk about how you are using alignment as a catalyst for positive change that spans people, culture, technology, and data. But before we get into that, tell us a little bit about your background and trajectory and, and how you developed this passion for the work that you do.

Tom Andriola:

Yeah, I love the topic you picked for today. So, I’ll give you a real quick on my background, right. So I have a very kind of interesting blend that I’ve come out of, um, you know, have been involved in technology since very early in my career. Was trained as an engineer, but really moved out of engineering very quickly because I can’t fix anything as my wife will attest to <laugh>. And, uh, so I got into the world of, you know, a little bit of programming, project management, spent some years in consulting, and then the internet happened and I had this great opportunity to be inside, let’s say the last great technology media movement, of how that changed our society. And over a couple of decades now, it really has transformed everything that we do. And we’re heading towards that type of period again.

Tom Andriola:

And then I became a CIO early in my career, I described myself as a recovering CIO on step eight of the process. I did healthcare for quite a number of years. And then was fortunate enough to flip over from being the functional executive to being a business executive. Mm-Hmm. Through a set of conversations and, you know, just doing a really good job on certain things and demonstrating kind of a business mindset. So I was a general manager of healthcare software and software as a service platforms globally for Phillips. A lot of people know the company Phillips, out of the Netherlands.

Joe Gottlieb:

Sure.

Tom Andriola:

Uh, and I did that for seven years and got a chance to live in Europe, got a chance to live in Asia and doing that. And then when we returned to the US I was looking for the next challenge. And that’s when the University of California found me. And at the time, they were looking for a CIO and I wasn’t sure I wanted to go back to that kind of role, but they wanted a strategic, a business minded strategic CIO who could help the university figure out, well, how is technology strategically gonna change what a university does? And that’s the kind of role that I’ve been in, in the two roles that the University of California has given me the last four years here at UC, Irvine, in a role that we created called the Chief Digital Officer. Why that, why that name? It’s like, well, we wanted to say digital is technology plus data.

Joe Gottlieb:

Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>

Tom Andriola:

So I have a responsibility kind of looking across both products. Uh, and then, because when we talk about, you know, uh, growth improvement, progress technology is always part of the conversation, right? No one is doing more manual stuff to get better, uh, you know, than they were yesterday. But I really try to say technology for me is just a data generation mechanism. The value proposition is in the data. And the quick example, I’m like, when you go get AMRI on your knee, after you blow it out, that technology might be a Phillips MRI scanner, a Siemens MRI scanner. That’s technology. But the diagnosis that the doctor gives you is on the image. That’s the data. Right? So where’s the value proposition? It’s in the data.

Joe Gottlieb:

Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>.

Tom Andriola:

And so I try to teach people that when we look for insights, we look for better decisions, faster decisions, better experiences. We need to look to the data that we have. And so we’ve blended those topics and what it’s positioned me to be is at the forefront of the conversation for how’s the university gonna be different tomorrow in the way we teach and the way we do research and the way we care for patients. So it’s a fun role that touches on everything that you talked about. It’s about technology and data, but it ultimately works back to things like organization and culture as well. So I’m in a good position to talk about all the things on the list for today.

Joe Gottlieb:

Well, yeah, it sounds like you’re just the guy for the job, but what prompted that need? What prompted UC, Irvine’s awareness about this need? Speak to that.

Tom Andriola:

Yeah, so, you know, we had a leadership who understood that technology was going to create transformational shifts in what the university was gonna be. And, you know, and I was at the office of the president, which is kind of like a, a, you know, the headquarters function of the university. And I was doing these, what we called like peer reviews. Mm. They’re like advisory engagements to come help the, the campuses and the medical centers figure out if they were getting the right value from their technology functions. And I happened to work with Irvine, and working with the campus then led me to also work with the health system. And what they saw was, was that, you know, we need to be much more strategic around technology. Uh, and then we talked about what kind of role would you position in an organization to be able to have that type of impact. And one of the first things that I really could have told them from my experience, that’s not the chief information officer, because that person has a lot of things to make sure run, run well.

Joe Gottlieb:

<Mm-Hmm. affirmative>

Tom Andriola:

Run at a high level of reliability. They don’t have a lot of cycles left to truly be strategic and understand what’s going on with the market. Where is technology taking us? So we separated. So we have two chief information officers who are still in place. They’re incredibly talented CIOs, but you know, like we work together, right? They roll up to me organizationally, but more importantly, they work together because they’re working on the run and the incremental innovation that’s going on.

Joe Gottlieb:

Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>

Tom Andriola:

I spend a lot of time talking about transformationally, where are we going? Got it. So it was kind of started with strategic minded leaders who said, we need to prepare for a different future and a different trajectory that we’re gonna be on.

Joe Gottlieb:

Well, it sounds like an embarrassment of riches, um, uh, to be, to have there. It sounds lovely actually, because it sounds like with your two CIOs, you have a great focus on operational delivery, and yet there’s always incremental, uh, evolution of

Tom Andriola:

That.

Joe Gottlieb:

So, so there’s still some head room for them to be able to exercise that, but that frees you up to really chart courses and look for those broader changes.

Tom Andriola:

Yeah. Let me, let me interject, right? So Gartner has a model where they talk about run, grow, transform, right? And so what percentage of your portfolio activities are in those three? And most organizations struggle with way too much in run. Yep. They’d love a lot more in grow, innovate, and almost nothing can transform. Well, my role gets almost exclusively to start and spend time in the transform and then determine what things are we gonna go do that either stay in the transform bucket or inform a more strategically aligned innovation bucket.

Joe Gottlieb:

Got it. So I want to then dive right into the context of how we’re gonna look at this alignment work that you do. And in particular, I want to talk about the synergies that you’re pursuing across education and healthcare. So you’ve got this great dual background now having been in higher ed for a while with your background in healthcare, looking at the synergies between these two areas that happen to be under the purview of a large institution like Cal Irvine.

Tom Andriola:

Yeah. Yeah. No, it’s a great question, right?

Joe Gottlieb:

’cause

Tom Andriola:

Certainly, you know, my role benefits from having this perspective of both and being able to say there are some similarities where we can find synergy, but also being able to articulate on they’re very different industries. And what, there’s not a one size fits all, right? There couldn’t be one uber-CIO for UC, Irvine. It’s a bad solution to, uh, you know, to the challenges. You know, some of the similarities jump out is like, you know, both, both enterprises, you know, have kind of a research and education element to them. But, you know, healthcare, one of the differences, healthcare does a lot more in the translation realm. So there’s research and then translate into how it affects patient care. Believe it or not, we’re only just starting to do that in, in higher education. We’ve actually taken the translation model and dropped it into teaching and has it translate to the classroom.

Tom Andriola:

Um, you know, some of the, there’s this model of a very deep subject matter expert who we put on a pedestal in terms of their value to the organization. It’s the professor, and it’s the clinician is similarities in terms of the business model. Um, both of ’em are really late, and I don’t mean this in a completely negative way, but they’re late to the consumer mentality, right? It’s like, you know, if you, if I were to say higher education, healthcare, are they customer centric organizations? 99% of the population would say no. And so what that’s allowed for is a certain amount of disruption from organizations that are bringing more consumer friendly, uh, interface points. Um, and then these are two industries that are both struggling mightily with cybersecurity topics. You think about it, the value of data, healthcare organizations, research universities, lots of cyber issues.

Tom Andriola:

You know, the, the differences are in terms of what the organization stand for. Healthcare is a very lockdown environment technically. Right. You know, everything is standardized, everything is access controlled. Universities were designed to be very open. Mm-Hmm. You know, it’s, it’s, it’s, you know, they’re free public spaces and open collaboration, right? So we weren’t meant to lock down the data or lock down what applications people are using. Um, you know, I think the speed of the two industries is also very, very different. Education tends to be a little slow and lethargic, lethargic may be a bad word, but slow and methodical in the way it looks at change where healthcare is moving at a faster pace. And it’s always really hard even in business, right? When you have two very different velocities of two businesses that are in one portfolio. So those are some of the similarities and differences where I say the similarities are synergy points, where we should be kind of building commonality of solutions that we’re trying to develop and deploy, or partnerships we’re trying to create. But the difference is we gotta be different in respect to differences in a different business model.

Joe Gottlieb:

Makes a lot of sense. Um, okay. So then what are some of the challenges of tackling such an ambitious transformation across whatever you’ve described as two quite complex organizations operating in these two different verticals? So, as you approach the foothills of this effort, right? How do you think about that?

Tom Andriola:

Yeah, so I think, you know, first of all, both of ’em, you know, have aspects right now that kind of follow the, the parable of the boiling frog

Joe Gottlieb:

<laugh>,

Tom Andriola:

Right? Is like, it’s, you know, they’re in the water. Slowly, the temperature is being turned up. And that usually is in the form of external forces that are taking away your levers of maneuverability. And I won’t go into the details of each, but both of them really have that. So both have this understanding of that they need to evolve and change. And so, um, when you talk about, you know, kind of the need to change and the people sitting in the leadership roles who have to come up with what are those strategies and those pivots that we need to do all, both organizations struggle with, I call the, the tyranny of the urgent Mm-Hmm.

Joe Gottlieb:

<affirmative>,

Tom Andriola:

Which is, you know, just kinda running the, you know, running the ship is such a high percentage of time that the head space is just, there’s just not a lot of cycles left for that. And so, you know, and I was taught when I was coming up as an executive, right? The most important things to protect are your time. And most important things to spend your time on are strategy and talent, right? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And so what I see is that we struggle with those concepts because we’re tied into the tyranny of the urgent. And then as we get into, like, once we identify those things, it’s, you know, how do we operationalize the transformation efforts, right? I talk about four roles that I’m asked to kind of step into in different initiatives in, in different places, but I call it the activist, the evangelist, the catalyst in the orchestrator

Joe Gottlieb:

Real quick,

Tom Andriola:

The activist. That’s when you play the role of nobody’s listening, but we need to get people’s attention, right? That’s different from the evangelists. If you think about the evangelists sitting on top of the rock in the olden times, people are there because they wanna be

Joe Gottlieb:

Educated. Mm-Hmm.

Tom Andriola:

Right? So the evangelist is a little different role from the activist. The catalyst is how do you get the thing off to starting, right? How do you marshal the coalition of, of partners? ’cause nobody does things alone in an organization. You gotta find your peers that are

Joe Gottlieb:

Gonna

Tom Andriola:

Help start the march with you. How do you become that catalyst? And then once you have the ball rolling down the road, I call it the role of the orchestrator. It’s like, you know, uh, if I talk about student success and all of the different institutional leaders who are that I’m, you know, that I’m the orchestrator. I’m not the leader, I’m the orchestrator. ’cause to say my role is to own student success for the university is, it’s a ludicrous statement, but the head of undergraduate education, the undergraduate education, teaching and learning, enrollment management, student affairs, career services, I’m orchestrating that band of players. And collectively we are understanding what does student success mean to us and how are we gonna make it happen better than we have in the past.

Joe Gottlieb:

Love the way you’ve laid the dimensionality of that because, not just in terms of roles, but then in terms of strategy versus operations, the tyrannt of the urgent and how to be collaborative across these departments, which is so critical, particularly given the complexity of the two different organizations / verticals we’ve just talked about that are in play here. We talk a lot, you know, when we work with institutions, what we see constantly is this need to have direct mechanisms to balance strategic progress and operational urgency.

Tom Andriola:

Yes.

Joe Gottlieb:

In the context of finite resources. ’cause at the end of the day, you can say yes to all of it because, you know, you can’t say no to, to really any of it, but you can’t overwhelm yourself with all the yeses against your finite resources. So it’s a matter of determining how do I prioritize the things that I have to make strategic progress on? Well, I have to keep the lights on in certain ways that are fed by my operational urgencies with a constant eye towards the resources and not burning them out. Absolutely. That over overworking to the point where you’re gonna go through these dips in ability to deliver anything. Right. Is that something you, you see that as well?

Tom Andriola:

Yeah. I’ll, I’ll use the CIO context for this, right? So we have very specific program, like one of the most strategic programs we have is called Reduce the Run. Why? Because by reducing the run you free up capacity for the other two categories.

Joe Gottlieb:

Yeah. Right?

Tom Andriola:

So it’s not just about coming up with new strategic initiatives. To your point, the resources have to come from somewhere where in resource constrained environments, but if you reduce the run by 20%, you recover capacity to reallocate into the other parts of the portfolio. So you can’t focus just on strategy, you have to focus on the operational <inaudible>.

Joe Gottlieb:

And reducing the run, I imagine is all about automation and efficiency. If

Tom Andriola:

More and more that’s what’s coming. Yes. Right. Well,

Joe Gottlieb:

And even, even if we say, if we separate the automation part from the efficiency

Tom Andriola:

Part,

Joe Gottlieb:

It’s about understanding your processes. It’s about making

Tom Andriola:

Sure people know

Joe Gottlieb:

How to engage them. Right? It’s about pushing the fat outta those processes whenever you can. Right. So imagine that that reducing the run, the, the constructs, the handles you have to work with there are quite specific.

Tom Andriola:

Absolutely. And you know, and, and again, going back to my comment about, you know, you would, most people would not consider higher education, healthcare, uh, consumer-centric organizations. We were just in conversation earlier today talking about the use of chatbots, you know, and, and self-service applications with our students. We look at the utilization patterns of when they use these things and they use them between 11:00 PM and 2:00 AM So what office are we staffing on campus between 11 and 2:00 AM Right? It just goes to show you that, you know, by moving to more automated ways and taking advantage of some of these new tools for, you know, chat chatbots, maybe powered by generative ai, large language models, we’re serving our students better because we’re meeting them where they’re at.

Joe Gottlieb:

Yeah. Which

Tom Andriola:

It’s not what you and I are probably awake, but it’s when they’re awake trying to finish their assignment to submit it, uh, you know, before the deadline at 6:00 AM the next morning.

Joe Gottlieb:

That’s a great example. Alright, let’s talk about culture. Yeah. How would you describe the historic culture at Cal Irvine? And and what role do you see culture playing in this transformation?

Tom Andriola:

Yeah, so it’s interesting. We’re, we’re very much a split culture, right? I think, you know, on the, on the research side, you know, and even on what I would call on the healthcare side and what we do in kind of clinical research, we’re very much a pioneering spirit culture, right? Uh, you know, because as a research university, the role of research university is to push the boundary of discovery and understanding. Mm-Hmm.

Joe Gottlieb:

<affirmative>.

Tom Andriola:

Um, but then in the way that we run the enterprise, it’s a very kind of siloed mentality that everybody has a lane and thou shall not cross lanes.

Joe Gottlieb:

Hmm.

Tom Andriola:

And what that comes, you know, that, that ultimately creates this kind of calcified. Uh, and, and it’s what creates these very challenging experiences for a patient or for a students who have to navigate, you know, their, their experience is horizontal

Joe Gottlieb:

Across,

Tom Andriola:

Across

Joe Gottlieb:

Those, across

Tom Andriola:

The silos, right? And so they have this very fragmented, I have to figure it out, experience. And so, you know, the culture of, uh, of silos is something we have to figure out how to melt, uh, you know, those walls between groups. And again, the technologies that we’re playing with today are the things that give us the opportunity to do that.

Joe Gottlieb:

Interesting. Uh, you know, that to me that’s like, that’s a $64,000 question right there. Right? So how to engage those silos, which come from a reasonable place. It’s about specialization, it’s about understanding a part of the operation that you can bring great value to.

Tom Andriola:

Yes.

Joe Gottlieb:

And yet, what is often lacking in organizational structures and teams is this, is this mechanism whereby, and well, I think it sounds to me like the orchestration that you spoke to after all the other roles have been played, perhaps right? Where you, where you, you catalyze action and, and, and interest, and this is a little bit of a background, but it’s that orchestration where you’re saying, Hey, we can do fewer things well holistically if we if we come together Yeah. In the, in the name of the institution to do x perhaps to deliver that student and experience that’s not so bumpy across the stove

Tom Andriola:

Pipes. Yeah. I’ll, I’ll, I’ll give you what you and I in our careers dealt with in the last generation and, and in this generation’s version of that conversation. Right? So you and I were both in our careers earlier in our careers during the period of business process re-engineering, right?

Joe Gottlieb:

Yep.

Tom Andriola:

And large complex organizations would do things like create process owner roles. What was the purpose? It’s the person who owned the process across the silos and then had the responsibility for driving improvement to the process, understanding things like cycle times and handoffs. And it was a way of creating another dimension of the matrix. Yep. Okay. So what does that look like in the 2020, uh, plus era? It, we don’t focus on the process as much, even though you can say, we, we should we focus on the data? Mm-Hmm. It’s like, look, we focus the data and the conversation about what’s the outcome that we’re trying to create. And now that the world has been highly digitized and the interactions between people within the organization and with our customers is highly digitized, students are using electronic means to look at their lectures, do their assignments, do their research. Yeah. This is all data points for us now. And so the concept of our student success initiative is how do we bring together the data from each of the silos and build a longitudinal view of our students that starts the first time they request information about come potentially coming to UCI to the time they graduate and start in their first position. That’s now kind of a longitudinal, call it a customer relationship, you know?

Joe Gottlieb:

Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> management

Tom Andriola:

Model. I call it the longitudinal student journey, uh, that we’ve stitched through data, that conversation. That’s, that is what we mean by student success allows me to orchestrate the set of players to say we’re all in the same boat here. Yes. The data crosses our silos, the data’s now stitched together. It’s the common thing that we’ll have our conversation around about where we need to invest into the,

Joe Gottlieb:

I like what you’ve said up there now, now I wanna, I wanna challenge it with a, an attempt to connect something that you, you get to decide if you like it or not. Uh, so in the old days, we customized software to bend it to will, bend it to our will, right? Yes.

Tom Andriola:

I remember those days.

Joe Gottlieb:

We avoided changing the organization the way we do things

Tom Andriola:

By

Joe Gottlieb:

Dictating that the software ought to be customized to just automate what we do. So we don’t have to change in the SaaS world, the cloud world, that’s no longer available to us. And it’s a good thing because we, we, we dug ourselves some heavy, heavy, deep ditches with that, that trend in the past. Now we must pick vendors. Well, we must drive as much compatibility as we can in the portfolio of technologies we adopt, but at the end of the day, we have to adapt as enterprises around that which can be automated. And I want to use your data abstraction as the payoff punch for that same activity. Right? So if we’re picking, well, we’re assembling vendors in a portfolio that can deliver these streams of data, as you said, across the silos. And maybe

Tom Andriola:

We

Joe Gottlieb:

Have to just sign up for how to participate in that data flow Yeah.

Tom Andriola:

Based

Joe Gottlieb:

Upon someone who’s done a nice job architecting that flow. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> does that, does that track with your thinking?

Tom Andriola:

It does. It does. I would say, you know, two things have become a lot more important in this data centric era. One is things like, uh, you know, data models, data standards, data governance, right? So everything around the buckets that you’re putting your data into, who can see those buckets, how you define things is number one. The second is, and this comes back to your question of culture. One of the things that I’m wrestling with every day and talking with my colleagues about how do we build a data culture? How do we build a, a a culture of people who come to work every day and say, yes, I have experience. Yes, I have intuition, but another part of making decisions today is using the data that’s available to me as a complement to

Joe Gottlieb:

Mm-Hmm. Right.

Tom Andriola:

We’re not talking about data becomes a be all end all, and it’s an automated decision. We wanna talk more about data as an assistive player into the decision making, but the goal is still, I want to make a better decision tomorrow than I did yesterday. I want to make a faster decision tomorrow. I want to make a, uh, uh, I want to be able to scale my decisions and do three times the number because now data allows me to scale at a different rate. So, you know, data, data standards, data governance and a data-driven culture are real three things that are much different as I’ve been taking on the challenges in this role.

Joe Gottlieb:

Super interesting. Can we also add to that list, though, that need to change, right? So a change oriented culture, more comfort, comfort maybe is the wrong word, but more, more facility, more familiarity with change and what’s involved so that maybe that data can keep teaching us new things.

Tom Andriola:

Yeah. Yeah. I, my term for that is perpetual whitewater.

Joe Gottlieb:

Yes. Right?

Tom Andriola:

No organization stands still anymore. If you’re standing still, you’re falling behind or you know, or you’re, you’re headed toward, uh, extinction. And so, you know, trying to retrain the organization, you can imagine like the higher education institution, this is probably the biggest challenge is how do we think of the world is, is constantly throwing new challenges at us and we need to be agile, right? So perpetual whitewater is, is my term for that. And again, how, you know, how can these tools that we have help people,

Joe Gottlieb:

You

Tom Andriola:

Know, and this, you know, and technology is another great way of upskilling people, you know, to deal with perpetual whitewater, you can’t have the same skillset that you had two years ago. You have to be picking up new skills. It might be a new tool, it might be a new mindset and paradigm for how we organize work or how we think about what an individual does or what we put into a self-serve model. That’s why we’ve have people come to conferences because there, they say, well, hey, Michigan’s doing this. We should be thinking about that. Right? Yeah. And so the concept of agility comes from this mindset of things are constantly gonna change versus I gotta get through this project and then things can soft, can calm down.

Joe Gottlieb:

Yeah. Just doesn’t work that way. Right. Okay. So specifically, how are you facilitating alignment of, of not just key stakeholders across these groups as we’ve talked about them, but, but key populations of people that are, that are critical to this coming together and, and, and making it happen?

Tom Andriola:

Yeah. I, yeah, I, I was fortunate to one in my, my private sector career to have access to great resources in the form of my leadership development. That kind gave me access to the best minds in the academic setting to quote unquote learn, you know, learn frameworks. And then I had great leaders that I worked for who not only were good at executing and driving change, they were able to sit down and talk about it, you know, in kind of a, either a mentor relationship or a, or a, you know, manager direct report relationship. So I learned a, you know, a couple of things. One is, is that, you know, if you’re going to be responsible for making change happen, um, you have to think top down and bottom up. It doesn’t all come top down. It’s not all grassroots, but your strategy needs to really think about what can the top down approach add to creating the right climate for change to be able to happen.

Tom Andriola:

The bottoms up is a lot about not just the plethora of ideas coming from people closest to the work, but also touches on the risk-taking co uh, tolerance of the organization. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, right. Most organizations don’t innovate enough. When you start looking into the why, it’s not a lack of ideas. It’s a lack of tolerance for risk-taking, if I raise my hand, someone’s gonna slap me upside my head. Right? And so, how do you create a climate for people in the bottoms up approach where people are willing, you know, your early adopters jump right in your fence, sitters, watch the early adopters and say, the water looks safe, I’m gonna jump into, and then you’re 80% of the organization trying to move forward, right? And so Gary Hamill, who’s at the London, uh, school of of Economics, has this great thing he calls the change platform. Mm.

Joe Gottlieb:

Which

Tom Andriola:

I’ve kind of adopted as my way of thinking about how’s the top down element look? And then what’s the bottom up element look? And they meet in the middle. ’cause when you look at organizational stickiness mm,

Joe Gottlieb:

It’s

Tom Andriola:

Usually in the middle of the organization, right? So we attack that stickiness from both sides.

Joe Gottlieb:

Love it. Love it. Alright, well, let’s talk a little bit then about the plan. What are the key elements of this plan you have for this transformation?

Tom Andriola:

Yeah. Well, first of all, it’s not my plan, right? It, it’s the institution’s plan, right? It’s the plan around, you know, the strategic plan for UC, Irvine, and, and we do have a, a different strategic plan, uh, for the health system, right? So, you know, I come from a school of, uh, you know, for the elements that I’m organizationally responsible for, I don’t need my own plan, right? I’m not a big believer in having it, having a strategic plan. I always talk in terms of let’s make sure the things we’re working on where our resource allocations are going. They align to the strategic priorities of the organization that we’re a part of. I, I don’t like this concept of we have to align it to the business. We shouldn’t have to talk about that. We are the business. Mm-Hmm. We’re touching, we’re not doing things on paper.

Tom Andriola:

We’ve deployed some type of application, some type of analytics for everything the organization is doing. Today’s chief Information Officer, in my role, I can see I have a Vander portion. I can see across everything that’s going on from what the police department is doing to how a patient’s being served in the er. Right? Why? Because technology is deployed, data’s being generated, and we’re able to think about what are the analytics that would support decision making. So I have this unique ability to sit with our leadership and say, I can see some opportunities that we might be missing, or I can see some, I can see some synergies across different parts of our organization that if we work together, one plus one equal, equal four for us.

Joe Gottlieb:

Hmm. Excellent. Well, let’s bring this to a close, uh, in summary, what, what sort of three takeaways would you give to our listeners on this topic of driving alignment as a catalyst for positive change?

Tom Andriola:

Yeah, so I, I think I’m gonna, I’m gonna frame this in, um, you know, some of the things I just shared with, uh, a workshop that I ran here at EDUCAUSE., So every year I run a workshop and it’s, the name of the workshop is positioning IT for Strategic Change. And it’s really about how as an IT leader, and I don’t just mean the Chief Information Officer, but how, as a person who can influence the organization in a positive way, how do you think about going about and making those changes happening? And so we actually talk about four key competencies that you need to be really good at regardless of, you know, what kind of role you have and what function it sits in. It’s, we talk about being an effective leader driving collaboration, which means how do you work across the silos of any organization?

Tom Andriola:

Um, what does innovation mean and how do we make it happen? It’s the most overused word in business, but there is a real process around innovation and understanding how to contextualize it, frame it, and drive conversations around it. Uh, and, and then the last is, what does it mean in your role to be relevant? And, and it’s kind of a, it’s a longer conversation about what we mean by relevant, but understanding how to position your role and your team to be relevant in the organization’s strategic plan is a thoughtful conversation and a set of tools that we’ve learned how to, uh, how to teach people how to do.

Joe Gottlieb:

Wow. I love those four things to think about and it’s a great point to end on. Tom, thank you for joining me today,

Tom Andriola:

Joe, thanks for the opportunity to be on the podcast.

Joe Gottlieb:

And thanks to our guests for joining us as well live here in Chicago at EDUCAUSE 23. Have a great day and we’ll look forward to hosting you again in the next episode of TRANSFORMED.