Miroslav Humer:
I think people have to have the, the humility to say, okay, yeah mine can wait. Let’s do yours. I see the value in that, but also the, the confidence that they can speak up and say, okay, this is really critical for me. I really need this.
Joe Gottlieb:
That’s Miroslav Humer, Chief Information Officer at Case Western Reserve University, summarizing the two key organizational culture traits, humility and confidence that are so critical to objective prioritization. We talked about how these traits are best activated in the context of relationships, trust, and consistent process. I hope you enjoy our conversation.
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 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, welcome and thanks for joining us for another episode of TRANSFORMED. My name is Joe Gottlieb, president and CTO of Higher Digital, and today I am joined by Miro Humer, Vice President and Chief Information Officer at Case Western Reserve University. Miro, welcome to TRANSFORMED.
Miroslav Humer:
Thanks, Joe. I’m happy to be here. What would you like to talk about?
Joe Gottlieb:
Well, I’m glad you asked. I want to talk about how you are leveraging objective prioritization to serve the research agenda there at Case Western Reserve. But before we dive into that, share a little bit about your background and how you got up connected to this world of higher ed.
Miroslav Humer:
Well, it’s you know, when I first got my computer science degree, I went into a couple different industries. I started with telecommunications went from telecom into consulting. This is all within it. Very various development roles, things like that. Went into consulting, went into banking, and then on a whim I decided to interview for an higher ed position for practice. It was not, I didn’t intend to go there. I just wanted to practice my interviewing skills as I looked for other roles and I interviewed, it went well. I had the job offer. I talked to people who worked there. Everybody loved it. And I took the job and I found that working towards something besides pure profit was really rewarding. So I loved working with the students, seeing the energy that the fall semester brought. And that was 25 years ago. So this is the second higher ed institution I’m at, and I really enjoy it. I find it very rewarding.
Joe Gottlieb:
Wow. That’s a great story. I love hearing the backgrounds of my guests. So let’s, and, and, and just thinking about that, right, sort of by chance, but then immediately discovering the vibe, the, the feel, the difference of higher ed relative to other industries is an interesting pattern. And I, I, it seems to supply a lot of energy for people. So let’s dive into this topic, though, when we say leveraging objective prioritization to serve the research agenda. Let’s break that down. What are we talking about there?
Miroslav Humer:
So, that really refers to the fact that R one institutions, which we are one of those has a very formal process for prioritizing and pursuing research grants. So when a researcher’s looking at a particular grant or project they’re looking at what’s the life cycle of this? What’s the objective criteria around the value, the feasibility, the cost of doing it. And that helps, helps institutions like ours figure out which grants are gonna go after. So it’s a very structured process that they go through. And the, the proposal process, the application, the granting of it, the expenditures, the tracking of it. So we have to have an equivalent process within IT to make sure that that’s prioritized. So these grants can come in and we have to know what are they gonna be doing, you know, what are they gonna need? How do we balance the need for supporting them across all the other things we do?
Miroslav Humer:
So we, we have established a group within the IT organization that meets with the researchers. So we meet with them as early as possible in the process to determine what their IT needs are going to be. And in general, what is their area of research? So they’re looking at, at a variety of grants. So we wanna know what, what are they gonna be doing. We can get some sense of what resources they’re gonna need. So we meet with them, we determine what their needs and are going to be, how we can work that into all the other projects we’re doing. ’cause We’re also supporting the whole administration of the university. And we only have so many resources. You know, they’re not infinite. So we have to be very careful about how we spend them and how we do it to support the research initiatives.
Miroslav Humer:
A big part of that is really maintaining the relationships that, that I have across campus. So I, you know, I meet regularly with the deans from each of the eight schools that we have. We create a really good relationship. They know they can come to me with things that they know are, are coming down the pike. Sometimes these are very informal discussions like, Hey, we’re thinking about applying for this grant. It’s gonna be six months from now, but here’s what I think we’re gonna need. So we have those discussions and we, we work off of that. We, we trust each other. If they say that to me, they, they know that, okay, I’m gonna be thinking about it. I may have some questions, we may need more discussions, but it gets the conversation going. So that, I found that very, very helpful.
Miroslav Humer:
And that’s informal, but we also have a very objective process of how we prioritize these things. So we have a process. We follow a lot of the best practices with project management and prioritization. So we have that to fall back on. But the in informal relationships really help move that along and then get us into the process of talking about it, of, of the various considerations we have to have and get that as, as early as we can. But the relationship part of that I I I can say it greases the skids. Absolutely. It moves things along easier.
Joe Gottlieb:
Well, it sounds very healthy to me, and it, and in particular because it calls upon this combination of maybe art and science, if you will, right? The process specifics of project management, prioritization, requirements gathering and all that. And this, this more arty side or, or softer side of relationship and trust and, and the culture you build around that as an institution sounds very healthy. Indeed. I can only imagine it took some work to make that happen. How, how, how did this story begin? How did this, this wondrous combination of art and science in your environment get rolling?
Miroslav Humer:
Well I, I had joined Case Western Reserve University about seven and a half years ago. And the role I came into was associate vice president of client experience, a kind of a new buzzy title. And this was right after the university had centralized their IT resources. So the, each school, and we had eight of them had their own IT departments. And those departments had, were staffed to various levels. Some had CIS admins, they had DBAs, they had server admins. And, but not every school was the same. Some schools had 14 people, some schools had three. So they were all centralized now. And the reason the school did that was the board of trustees saw that that dispersed talent pool as a risk. ’cause That also meant we had dispersed data, and data was sitting on servers that were managed at various levels and not very consistent.
Miroslav Humer:
So they were all brought in. And my role was to make all that work. So there was, as you can imagine, some dissatisfaction. The schools were losing, losing a bit of autonomy over these resources. And we had to make sure that we maintain the relationships. So all those people physically stayed in the schools. We brought them all in. We had had consistent training across all of their roles and functions. And we also looked at all those servers that were out there with the data. They had identified around 600 servers that had sensitive data that were not managed very well. We eliminated those and we moved about 400 of those into our data center and put backups on ’em, power backups, had consistent staffing and centralize some of those functions. Like how do you administer a server, you know, that’s a group of server admins doing that, not people out in the field. So we, you know, brought all those people in, trained them made their compensation and roles and titles consistent across the university. So doing all that and maintaining the, the tie to the schools really helped making this work. So we moved, you know, kept the process going. That was, you know, seven and a half years ago. And two and a half years ago, I moved into this role as CIO at the university.
Miroslav Humer:
So I think I did okay.
Joe Gottlieb:
<Laugh> well, yeah. So clearly your work, so you were, you were stewarding forward as the organization was centralizing. It sounds like you were doing two things in your role as, as a VP of client experience. You were really taking a a user specific a user well, a, a a a user sensitive view on how services were operating in it. And therefore, that must have become an objective of the centralization while maintaining this, this, this sense that they, of course needed, which was, well, don’t run off and get really bureaucratic on us and, and, and make us feel like we can’t be served as you introduce these norms and standards, which are critical. And that, that must have been a fascinating journey in its own right to wind up helping the organization through that path. Any, any takeaways in terms of the, the client experience side and the serving personas and the like that you, that you encountered along the way?
Miroslav Humer:
Well, you know, we have to stress with the schools that the service level will, well, at the very least say the same, but we’re planning on improving it. So with that message repeated constantly and with results it, it made it work. So as people saw that, as they saw that we weren’t just trying to grab their budget and the resources they had that we’re looking at improving the situation it really became relatively easy. Once that message was received and and supported by results I think it moved ahead pretty, pretty quickly.
Joe Gottlieb:
Nice. Yeah. And just to dig into that a little bit were you using, were you reporting on service level through some standard metrics that allowed you to point to that evidence, or was it more anecdotal and relying upon those trusted relationships?
Miroslav Humer:
We had some evidence through our IT service management system. So our ticketing system that we reported regularly on, you know, how long tickets were a aged and what the response was, things like that. But most of the perception of how we were doing was anecdotal. Yeah. It was people saying, oh, yeah, this is working fine for me. It’s better than I expected. And the people that were most negative about it, we won them over eventually <laugh>. Right. So, but it was in makes sense. Yeah, it was, we had some regular KPIs that we presented, but the anecdotal evidence was what really mattered most to the, to the schools. They would talk to their faculty, their administrators say, how’s this working? What do you think? Yeah.
Joe Gottlieb:
So let’s, we’d love for you to share an example of how it partner with a college, maybe a particular college, to advance the research agenda within this frame that, as we’ve said, sounds like a very healthy process and combination of art and science. Let’s go through an example, if you don’t mind.
Miroslav Humer:
Sure. So sometime, this is a little bit more than 10 years ago Microsoft was introducing the HoloLens device. So this was a headset AR device that was brand new to them. And they invited some of our leadership to look at this and see, you know, is this something we’d be interested in, in doing something with? They didn’t really have any, any ideas for it. So we looked at this and immediately our leadership said, okay, we, this is going to be, this is going to be significant for our university. So we, we formed what we call the interactive commons, which was made up of medical faculty it developers and artists. And what we said is, we are going to use this device, which the can put holographic images in front of you. We’re gonna use this device to teach anatomy in our medical school. So back then, when this first came out, that was kind of a big deal to say that
Joe Gottlieb:
I’ll say <laugh>,
Miroslav Humer:
And then it was an even bigger deal to say, oh yeah, that new medical building we’re building that we’re, that’s gonna be 500,000 square feet. We’re not gonna put any wet labs in that. We are going to say that in our first two years of medical school, our students are gonna use an holographic images to learn anatomy. And that was before anything was really functioning or working. This was just big bet an early, early bet on this. So we, we had gone off and built this new medical building, no wet labs, the interactive commons continued developing the software and the imagery to make this work. So they were going along, going along, doing this. And in 2019, we went live with this. So this was like the project on campus, how is this going to work? We did a year of proof of concept, and that went well. And then in 2019, we went live with this. So if you remember 2019, that was the olden days. That was pre covid. Pre
Joe Gottlieb:
Covid the olden days, right?
Miroslav Humer:
Yeah. So we went live with this, it was working well, and then Covid hit, and the thought, the concern was how do we keep teaching students? So in many cases, you just do a zoom session, students can, can learn. But in the case of anatomy, that’s a bit more difficult. The fact that we were using what this product we called Hollow Anatomy, we shipped off these devices to our whole class of students to learn, keep learning anatomy at home with faculty teaching from their homes. And it worked beautifully awesome. All they needed was an internet connection. Bandwidth was not an issue. And they kept working, they kept learning anatomy, and it, it worked great. And we found that students learned, you know, through a published study, we learned that students were learning the topics in half the time and retaining it 44% better after eight months.
Joe Gottlieb:
Wow.
Miroslav Humer:
And, and yeah, there are a lot of reasons for that, but it, it really helped to improve the student experience on campus. So that’s one of our, our Go ahead.
Joe Gottlieb:
I’m sorry. Go ahead.
Miroslav Humer:
It’s one of our key drivers in our medical school.
Joe Gottlieb:
It has become, and it’s gone even beyond that, right? You’re, it’s being picked up in other parts of, of the, of the institution, is it not?
Miroslav Humer:
Yeah, yeah. It’s rolling out into other areas. So we’re, we’re seeing it being used in our dance program, in dance performances, which is interesting. History, his history classes are using it. Religious studies are using it. So we had one of our courses go out to Egypt and record the inside of what’s called the the red chapel, I believe. And they record it and put it into the HoloLens so students can actually walk through it and Wow. And, and experience it in, in the classroom. So yeah, it is rolling out into other programs, and right now we’re seeing it, about 15% of our students are experiencing the HoloLens device in a variety of classes.
Joe Gottlieb:
Fascinating.
Miroslav Humer:
Yeah. So, and we ended up, and we ended up actually spinning this off into a for-profit venture. So that company’s called Lencia xr, and they’re selling this now. They’re selling the Hollow Anatomy program to other schools.
Joe Gottlieb:
And what’s the relationship with Case Western Reserve in that, with, with that spin out? How does that work for you guys?
Miroslav Humer:
So we’re one of the key, you know, the primary investors in it, and we’re just, you know, we’re seeing how they sell and we’re, we have, you know, benefit from it once they keep selling it.
Joe Gottlieb:
Sure. And of course, you’re in, in as, as a re as a sustained active user of it, you’re probably influencing the direction of that technology over time based upon the uses that you’re finding inside your curricula.
Miroslav Humer:
Exactly. We are, we are, we work closely with them on, you know, support issues, evolution of the software, our medical professionals also work with them on imagery and the evolution of more things to be, you know, put into the, into the imagery.
Joe Gottlieb:
Nice. Well, that’s a great example. So let’s, let’s then shift the spotlight a little bit here. Now, back to the, what methods do you use to stay connected with your stakeholders in a way that produces that interpersonal trust we talked about? So now let’s talk about how you really accomplished that on a sustainable basis, and it so that you really can optimize how a, a shared IT organization can perform.
Miroslav Humer:
Yeah, so I, I meet with our key users, our, our deans, our administrators on a regular basis. When I first went into the CIO role, I did a listening tour. I met with everybody, said, okay, you know, what are your issues? So I’ve continued doing that. At, you know, several times a year I’ll meet with each key user and see how are things going. I also attend the faculty senate meetings to be just for awareness of what, what’s going on in the faculty world, what are their concerns, their issues. And I also want to be seen by them. I want them to know that I’m interested in what’s going on. I am a member of the president’s cabinet. So we meet regularly, and those are all the VPs across campus. And that leads to a lot of informal discussions of, of like, Hey, I’m thinking about this, or, we’re putting up a new, we’re planning a new dorm in, you know, a couple years.
Miroslav Humer:
What, what do you think we should put in there? Right now we’re in the process of putting up a research building, and that discussion came, you know, very early, Hey, we’re thinking about this. What technology should we put in there? What do we need to consider as we do research in this in this new world? So I attend, you know, the faculty senate meetings. We have an IT advisory committee that just gives us advice on, you know, things that they see happening across campus or in their own schools. So through all this, I meet with the eight different schools. We also, in addition to that, support our administrative initiatives across the university. And that can come from the president, the provost, any of the VPs, any of the various areas. So meet with all of them very regularly. And as an IT organization, I believe this is true in most schools, we have a unique perspective on the whole university.
Miroslav Humer:
Mm-Hmm. <Affirmative>. So what’s going on in school A as opposed to school C, you know, what are they doing? Are there any synergies there, are there ways that they can collaborate if they’re both looking for the same piece of software? Can we buy enterprise license as opposed to two separate licenses? When we first started doing that kind of thing, we found that we had three different Salesforce licenses across campus. That was a perfect example. Okay, let’s centralize that. It’s gonna be cheaper, and we have a common platform and we share best practices across all the users. So we always look for those opportunities. And we’ve had savings across, you know, the various software packages that we use across campus. And if there’s four different systems people are using, and we kind of agree on the core requirements and reduce that down to one. So we do a lot of those types of analysis across the schools. And it’s been working pretty well. It’s not, has not been confrontational. People agree on the on the priority of doing this, that they can save money, they can get people across the campus who can help them and who they can help. So that’s really worked out well in building those connections between the schools.
Miroslav Humer:
Our challenge is always working through the silos that we have both right, academically and administratively. This has helped to break some of that down.
Joe Gottlieb:
That makes sense. Do you, have you, is it possible that, I think a lot of schools have gone through this where they have grappled with the implications of decentralized purchasing and ultimately seen an opportunity to consolidate and save money. I’m wondering if you experienced there at case Western Reserve, this sort of phenomenon of, well, we thought we liked the idea of having our own stuff, but we’ve very quickly learned this is a business we don’t wanna be in. Like, like the care and feeding and the, and the, the, the upkeep and all that. Like, it’s, well, okay, wow, we, we love this. There was maybe this romantic notion of having a lot of control and, and, and, and a lot of really attitude to do exactly what we needed to do and, and when we wanted to do it. But there’s a bit of a hangover that occurs and you, you, you know, you start to start to balance this, well, you know what, maybe if we get good enough support from a, a shared body, that might be a better way to go. Did you feel some of that? Did that help the organization evolve? Yeah,
Miroslav Humer:
Absolutely. We did. We saw quite a bit of that when it came to things like servers. Any, any devices that needed, excuse me, regular upkeep and regular care and feeding. Once we put them into our data center and had them managed centrally, they didn’t have to worry about it. They didn’t have to worry about power, about upgrades, about backups, about security. So it, there was a realization, Hey, they weren’t lying. <Laugh>, there’s actually a benefit to us. We just don’t have to worry about these things anymore.
Joe Gottlieb:
It’s always handy when those kinds of conclusions are reached <laugh>, they’re not lying Yeah. About this.
Miroslav Humer:
Yeah. Yeah. <Laugh>. So it is fun. It is fun to see that.
Joe Gottlieb:
Well, another, so here’s another question we didn’t necessarily plan for, but I think it’s a natural offshoot of what we’ve talked about, and that is, you mentioned an IT advisory committee, and of course you also mentioned that you’re a member of the president’s cabinet, and I’m, and you’ve mentioned that informal dialogues for sure occur there about things that are coming down the pike and, and like that and and such. But I’m wondering where if ev anywhere the real discussions and decisions about prioritization, when things get hard, where do those occur? And, and it might be that, for example, there’s two different forms of those, and one, one kind of profile of, of discussion and decision occurs at the IT advisory committee and a very different one happens at the cabinet. But I could, I totally agree with you, that it is, has a tremendous vantage point on the confluence of things the institution is trying to accomplish, and therefore it can provide a visibility, but then b, potentially facilitate alignment and convergence on that. What should happen when you really consider priorities and finite resources?
Miroslav Humer:
Yeah, we, one of the first things we look at when we have a prioritization issue is resources. So what resources do we have? Can we combine resources? If there’s some, if there are two things that have to be done at the same time, do we have the resources to do it? Can we can, is there some way we can coordinate that to achieve both without burning everybody out? If we can’t do that, if, if there’s no way of, of collaborating on that, we bring the parties together and we figure out, okay, what is the hard deadline on each of these? Is there a hard deadline or is it just a preference?
Joe Gottlieb:
Right?
Miroslav Humer:
So we, we have that discussion. We have bring the parties together. So far, those discussions have not been confrontational. They, they’ve been collaborative pe people, you know, are willing to work together when, when given all the information.
Joe Gottlieb:
So in that case, if I understand it correctly, when you’ve got a challenge that your natural effort to optimize your use of, of resources doesn’t satisfy, and now you’ve got a challenge, it really becomes a little bit of an exercise of bringing the parties together that are impacted by that challenge versus making sure it’s raised at a recurring forum that is, tends to be looking at those things in, in, in, in aggregate depending upon their incidents. I, I imagine if it’s not happening very often, you wouldn’t, you wouldn’t create a forum for, for just that. But if there are fora to leverage and you had enough flow, it might be a standing agenda item. I’m just very curious to see, you know, for your organization, how that works.
Miroslav Humer:
You know, if, if we can’t resolve it at this level with bringing the parties together, then we do escalate it and got it, and bring more people into the discussion and more of the regular meetings that we have and bring it up there. And we as it, i, we, we don’t want to make some of those decisions at the high level where it’s somebody else’s initiative. Say the president says, okay, I I need this.
Joe Gottlieb:
Yeah.
Miroslav Humer:
And somebody else, and say a dean is saying, well, I need this other thing. We want the decision to be made between them or at the presidential level, at the provost level. Sure. we don’t, we don’t want to be the ones, oh yeah, that’s not as important. The president’s not as important. We want to bring them in into this discussion and have, have them participate in this setting the priority of that.
Joe Gottlieb:
Well, it sounds very sensible. And I also think what it reinforces is that bringing the parties together for an ad hoc discussion around, okay, hard versus soft deadlines. Let’s, let’s put this stuff on the table. Let’s sort through this together because we’ve got two objectives that are having some colliding circumstances. And it really does reinforce that trust and relationship based muscle i i in the organization, right? So rather than quote, putting it to a vote, which feels more contentious, less personal, less, you know, maybe even contextual sometimes.
Miroslav Humer:
Yeah.
Joe Gottlieb:
It’s an interesting combination of things, right? And in a healthy organization, the quote, escalation shouldn’t be contentious. It should actually be a, just a normal course of more of this objective process, but a necessary opportunity to get everyone’s point of view aligned. Does that make sense?
Miroslav Humer:
It does. Absolutely. And we, we don’t want these, these discussions to be emotional. We want them to be based on, on facts and, and resources we have and timing, things like that. I’ve been at other, another university that actually had the vote that had a committee that voted, and the problem was they didn’t have any skin in the game. So you get a, a writeup of why of these 10 projects that are going on and the prioritization and people were prioritizing things and didn’t have a full understanding or any skin in the game of, of doing this. So it didn’t really lead to any, it didn’t lead to any benefit. It was everything was approved, everything was pushed through priorities were seemed like they were all equal.
Joe Gottlieb:
Yeah. Well,
Miroslav Humer:
So it was a bureaucratic process.
Joe Gottlieb:
Right. I, I think the key for some, a mechanism like that to work, this is an area we spend a lot of time, and so I’m always pressure testing our, our hypotheses and pr best practices that I see, but you really have to assemble parties that can see the bigger picture Mm-Hmm. And can value the holistic progress of the institution, and therefore sometimes put their personal need or their organizational need or their departmental need below the holistic path, right? The, the, the, the need of the institution. Mm-Hmm. <Affirmative>, sometimes they have to argue the importance of their need, and that’s what their, their specialized backgrounds and their role in the institution to help it perform, require them to advance an agenda sometimes. Right? And so exactly that, that interplay is I think, a beautiful dance in organizational culture, right? That mm-hmm. That to do this well, you have to balance your ability to discern based upon your specialization, your responsibility, but also your ability to see the big picture and to work together to make those compromises,
Miroslav Humer:
Right? Yeah. And, and what that’s exactly a great point. I I think people have to have the I can put the humility to say, okay, yeah mine can wait, let’s do yours. I see the value in that, but also the, the confidence that they can speak up and say, okay, this is really critical for me. I really need this.
Joe Gottlieb:
Right. So true. And it’s a neat balance. And, and the art and the science becomes how do you put people in positions to accomplish that and even get better at that if it’s not their strongest suit, because people get into positions and they’re not always built for all the things that go with those positions. Anyway, that could be a whole nother podcast, but, but let’s instead go to one more question, and I’d love to have you comment on how you are enabling case Western Reserve to harness ai. We can’t finish a podcast these days without talking about AI generally. And, and how do you see AI improving even the, the holo anatomy system that we discussed earlier? Sure.
Miroslav Humer:
So we have multiple different stakeholders or groups within the university. I break them down by academic, which is really what’s going on in the classroom between the student and the faculty and the professor. How are they using it? How are they teaching with it? How are are they using it to manage the class? Things like that. We have research AI’s been in re in the research world for a long time. It’s just accelerating now. So what resources are they going to need? And also administrative users. So that’s really more along the lines of efficiencies. How, how does AI play into the efficiency of, of running the university? So bot those, those three groups were, were trying to understand what their requirements are and, and what’s going to help them, what’s gonna have some kind of value. So we have an AI task force across campus is made up of of various members from different areas, academic research, administrative, and we also are forming, we’re currently forming a governance committee that’s gonna look at governing the tools that we have, how we use it, how we share it across the, the campus.
Miroslav Humer:
We have lots of use cases right now. We’ve done quite a few proof of concept over the past year ever since generative AI kind of came out and everybody wants it. And the, it was a consumer type of a product, right? It came out and everybody saw the value of it, which isn’t always the case in it, right? But usually it, it’s, you know, servers and software and big systems. But this made sense to everybody right off the bat. So, and we had various responses to that when it first came out. I had faculty calling me and saying, Hey, block this. There’s no way we can allow this. Everybody’s gonna cheat. Those same faculty members are now calling me and saying, I want all the ai, I want all of it <laugh>. Yeah. And, and they’re using it and they see the value of it.
Miroslav Humer:
So one of our key concerns with AI is keeping our data safe. So we don’t want any privilege information being shared with a public AI model where it’s gonna be used to train the LLM. So, and to give some, give people a place to, to use it. We had built what’s effectively an AI portal. It’s through our work with Microsoft is built on the Azure environment, and it’s Microsoft copilot studio, and it’s charged by token use. So it’s, it’s a difference from buying a license to copilot for August 365. It’s really just the platform. You can go out and use large data sets and, you know, act on it. So we’re, we’ve set this up, it’s open to faculty, staff, and students, and we we’re anticipating this being the platform to be used across all those different groups that we have on campus.
Miroslav Humer:
So that’s good. You know, everybody wants to have access to it. What we’re also seeing is because of the ability it has to create imagery and, you know, in addition to text, video, audio, all sorts of things, we’ve seen that it has a use in creating imagery for our HoloLens. Hmm. So where before we had, you know, medical person, you know, faculty, medical faculty from the university, we had artists, we had developers to come up with the imagery. We can use AI to speed up that process. So we’re seeing that in, in how we can develop new imagery for it, both in the medical area and in the other areas we’re using it. So that’s been, that’s been kind of a, a fun fun, what’s the word I’m looking for?
Joe Gottlieb:
You’ve been on a journey with ai.
Miroslav Humer:
We’ve been on a journey. Yes. And you know, the past year has really been the party tricks of ai. Yeah. And look, it can write a haiku, let’s use it to write haikus. That’s fun. <Laugh>. But that, that isn’t like an ROI, right? So right now we’re at the point where we need to see ROI and where something is improved. What’s the value in doing this?
Joe Gottlieb:
Well, since you mentioned ROI, I can’t help myself, but any, any insight into the cost profile of that token consumption and whether you’re concerned about its sustainability or, or perhaps the need to, you know, not let it be this free thing that everyone uses for all their consumer questions that just at a convenience, they use the, the school’s version, but in fact is being directed towards things that are gonna be useful for at least scholarship, if not hard ROI for the institution. You know, any insight into that?
Miroslav Humer:
Well, partly it’s become a requirement. So we have to have some level of AI tool set available to the university. The cost is a, is a concern. Hmm. We are, we’re going relatively slowly into this token usage. We wanna see what, what’s the usage going to be, what’s it going to cost as we turn down this platform. So we’re going slowly, we don’t wanna be surprised with a hundred thousand dollars a month bill for, for AI usage. So we’re going slowly, we’ve put quotas on it, okay. And we wanna move forward. I’m gonna put it very sensibly in how we use this. Now, there’s gonna be times when research needs to do heavy duty AI on a large data set, and for that, that’s gonna have to be part of the grant. So we have to get some sense upfront of what’s typical usage gonna be for something like that. And, and give that at the time of writing the proposal that include to include that cost in the, in the grant proposal. But I, I’ve talked to other universities we’re looking at, we’re asking them, what are you spending? Right? It’s all over the board.
Joe Gottlieb:
A fascinating new frontier into IT services, you know, value and cost. It’ll be interesting to see how that plays out. Alright. Let’s bring this to a close. What three takeaways would you give our listener on this topic of leveraging objective prioritization to serve the research agenda?
Miroslav Humer:
So, a couple thoughts. From my experience, I would say relationships are key. They really lead to trust. Trust leads to collaboration, and collaboration leads to success. So wrapping that up, I would say using the objective prioritization has helped us to accelerate the relationships, the collaborations, and getting to successful conclusion. So I, I think it’s, it’s really, those are my thoughts. I, I think it’s really helped us move forward quicker than we normally would.
Joe Gottlieb:
Great summary. Miro, thank you so much for joining me today,
Miroslav Humer:
Joe, thank you. It’s been a pleasure.
Joe Gottlieb:
And thanks to our guests for joining us as well. Hope you have a great day and we look forward to hosting you again on the next episode of TRANSFORMED. Yo, stop the music. Hey, listeners, have transformed. I hope you enjoyed that episode and whether you did or not, hope that it made you stop and think about the role that you are playing in your organization’s ability to change in the digital era. And if it made you stop and think, perhaps you would be willing to share your thoughts, suggestions, alternative perspectives, or even criticisms related to this or any other episode, I would love to hear from you. So send me an email at info@Higher.Digital or Joe@Higher.Digital. And if you have friends or colleagues that you think might enjoy it, please share our podcast with them as you, and they can easily find.
