Steve Munson:
We are known as a community of change makers. And if you think about that more from a student standpoint, it’s more of our ethos or culture is really to educate and give students an opportunity to go out and make a real impact on the world. And so that permeates down into the staff too, kind of the, the can-do attitude, the, the dedication to our mission. And then as a result, our our marketing and our brand is a phrase challenge accepted. And so that’s a big part of of how we operate as well. And it’s that kind of can-do spirit and kind of dedication and definitely when you’re doing an ERP and A CRM and then all that other major infrastructure change that I mentioned that challenge accepted kind of becomes battle tested. And you, you see that it really, it’s the real deal
Joe Gottlieb:
That’s Steve Munson, Chief Information Officer at American University, talking about how his institution’s can-do spirit, has proven to be central to their success, tackling multiple major system transformations. At the same time, we talked about how they combined this cultural strength with clear priorities, supplemental staffing, leadership alignment, and the flexibility to adjust the plan so that AU could maximize its organizational capacity for change and accomplish extremely ambitious goals. 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’m joined by Steve Munson, Chief Information Officer at American University. Steve, welcome to TRANSFORMED.
Steve Munson:
Thanks, Joe. Thrilled to be here. What do you wanna talk about?
Joe Gottlieb:
Well, I’m glad you asked, Steve. I wanna talk about your thoughts on maximizing an institution’s capacity for change, but first I’d like you to share a bit of your background on how you got connected into the world of higher ed.
Steve Munson:
Sure, happy to. So I started my career in traditional IT consulting. I was with Accenture and the North Highland Company for about 16 17 years or so. And I worked in a variety of industries, and I was lucky enough to have some consulting engagements in higher ed. And as I got to know higher ed and higher ed IT in particular, I was really fascinated by the diversity of technology that an institution supports and a diversity of technology that a CIO needs to be involved in higher ed. And I’m the kind of person that I like to know a little bit about a lot of things. And that diversity within higher ed really kind of appealed to me because I could really span across a lot of different challenges, technologies, platforms types of operations within the institution. So it, it was just a great fit for me.
Joe Gottlieb:
Well, it does sound like a great fit to me, given that you tackled what you’ve been tackling over there at American U. So let’s set the stage for this conversation. You’re going after two transformations at once, and so we’d love for you to describe those in terms of scope and the departments they serve.
Steve Munson:
Sure. We have some really ambitious plans here at American University, and I’m really pleased to tell you that we’ve, we’ve had some great accomplishments executing on this ambitious plan. And so in terms of the, the scale of transformation that, that we’re tackling we, earlier this year completed our first phase of ERP replacement. We went live in January with Workday for HR, finance, payroll, and budget. And then we’re also doing a multi-year implementation of admissions CRM with Salesforce Education Cloud. And we’re also doing Salesforce Education Cloud on both undergraduate and graduate admissions which is, is very unique for an institution to be doing the full scale of admissions.
Joe Gottlieb:
That sounds super unique, right? Going after not only the dimension and depth of, of of admissions across, across the institution, but then also doing ERP at the same time. Wow. That is very ambitious. And and so given, you know, given that I, I’m just very anxious to understand what factors drove you to tackle those two together, you know, something that mere mortal institutions would tend to avoid mm-hmm. <Laugh>, help me do that.
Steve Munson:
Sure. and I did though wanna mention that not only are we having these major projects with ERP and CRM, but we’re real gluttons for punishment. Over the last couple years, we’ve also done a complete overhaul and upgrade of our campus wireless network. We’ve replaced our 30-year-old phone system going to voice over IP, and we’ve also moved over 300 terabytes of data to a new state-of-the-art storage area network. So we’ve had some major infrastructure changes under the hood as we’re also doing these major strategic customer-facing changes. So we’ve, we’ve really we’ve really aimed high. So in terms of the, oh, sorry.
Joe Gottlieb:
Yeah, it sounds like it. So yeah, go ahead. What drove you to this though?
Steve Munson:
Sure. So you know, first it’s really the amount of change in higher ed. And I think, you know, for any of your listeners, I don’t have to explain, you know, what everybody’s going through. But just such incredible change right now. And with that, from a technology standpoint, we have just such a, a thirst and a need for flexible systems that are capable of adapting and supporting all of the change that we’re all facing. I’d say the other big piece for all of our systems has been the real access to data that’s needed for the institution and for a lot of these systems that were, were older or been, you know, in place for a couple decades those systems just weren’t designed with the same access to data and analytics that people need today. And it’s just a, it is just a different time.
Steve Munson:
And people really have just such a thirst for, for information to make data informed decisions that we really need to make sure that we’re providing the technical capabilities that can support that. And the one other thing I would mention on the admission side is also the need for real improvements in communication engagement and marketing capabilities. I think the landscape for CRM on the admission side really started focusing on the application process and kind of the application ad manage management pieces. And then when platforms like Salesforce came along that really had these world class marketing and communication capabilities, we started to see those types of, of things married up with the application piece to give you that true end-to-end capability to support admissions.
Joe Gottlieb:
Wow, that’s a lot. I mean, that’s great recognition of all the usual stuff that higher ed’s wrestling with, but also a, a point of emphasis on just the need for enhanced marketing communications capabilities, enhanced data access. I imagine there was some customization that had accumulated in some of those older systems, which was also maybe obstructing your way forward. Is that a reasonable assumption? Mm-Hmm <affirmative>.
Steve Munson:
Absolutely. we are a heavily customized ERP we currently use Colleague by Ellucian. We have a pretty sizable staff that’s supporting our custom code. And we also have been thinking for some time about how we can get to the cloud and we have a broader cloud migration strategy in terms of moving off of, on-premise and, and reducing the footprint of our, our data center. On the admission side we are also on premise for undergraduate. We also, we do use the CRM Recruit by Ellucian for both undergraduate and graduate. But we have an architecture where we were an early adopter for undergraduates, so that’s on premise. And then later on we adopted the graduate side, which is in the cloud. So we have two different architectures there. And so as part of our cloud strategy, starting with undergraduate admissions, moving, moving to the cloud helps there.
Joe Gottlieb:
Got it. So fair amount of definitely mixed mode, part of the heterogeneity of your architecture, and that’s part of what you probably we were tackling as as part of these efforts. Okay. So you had these drivers to get you rolling. You, you, you, you really were kind of thrust into a situation where you were anxious to make progress on at least a couple fronts. And it sounds like even more than that. So knowing that would be an extremely challenging endeavor, what would you say was the single most important critical success factor that you identified from the onset and how’d you go about managing it?
Steve Munson:
Great question. So, the one thing that I knew going into all of this technology change was that we have amazing people at American University. We have incredibly talented and dedicated staff, and that’s both IT and outside of IT. And with, with that core of people, I knew that we were positioned for success on those projects. Our, our people. You know, failure is not an option for, for us at AU it’s really part of our, our culture. And we also made a significant investment in our people to support our people through these implementations with what we call supplemental staffing. And so we added backfill resources to help the day-to-day as our critical subject matter experts were working on the projects. But then we also brought in people, especially for our Workday project team, who had prior experience with Workday to basically be a bridge between our staff who had their deep subject matter expertise in either payroll or HR or finance or budget.
Steve Munson:
And then married those folks up with our consulting partner experts who had that deep expertise with how Workday would be configured. And so these bridge resources also helped to support our people and brought an an extra level of, of expertise. The other part about our people that I would mention is that we have fantastic leaders throughout the university, again, both within IT and with the non-IT members of our project team and leadership from across the university. And I can’t say enough good things about how our leadership came together to really work as a team. And they also had a great mindset to not lift and shift our, our current processes that were based on these older architectures of systems, but to really focus on how to embrace best practices in these, these new platforms. So it all starts with the, the people. And I kind of was quietly confident going into this transformation knowing that, that we had this secret weapon, which was the, the people of American University.
Joe Gottlieb:
Wow. Okay. So now I’m starting to get a little less surprised as to how you pulled this off and are pulling this off. ’cause You’ve just named like, for sure the, the single most important factor, which is indeed people. But on top of that, being very honest about your current capacity, right? And we, we, we’ve started with, you know, we, we, we, we put into the title
Steve Munson:
Absolutely
Joe Gottlieb:
Maximizing the Capacity for Change. Part of how you did that, it sounds like is supplementing the staff with partners in places where you knew you were gonna need, need that to be able to let the current team focus on some of these big, big efforts, right. That were net new. That sounds really, important.
Steve Munson:
Absolutely.
Joe Gottlieb:
I’m curious about the culture. So if, if, if people are the single most important part, right, culture becomes the best way you would describe what kind of binds them together and what that ethos and what that sort of mindset is like at an organization. And so how did you know, maybe, maybe you can share a little bit of a, of a, of a, you know, a little bit of a story about when you first started to recognize that about the AU culture, which then gave you that quiet confidence that you, you just described. Is there a, a little story you can share there?
Steve Munson:
I’ll have to think of a story. I don’t know that I can think of a specific one, but one of the things that, that I’m grateful for and and lucky to have done was I worked here at American University several years ago at a director level. And so I was, you know, right in the trenches, arm in arm with about half of the IT staff that’s still here today. And so I knew, you know, kind of the, the passion and dedication, just working, you know, day in, day out with the members of the IT staff in particular, and and you know, these, these people can do anything that they set their minds to, was kind of my my takeaway you know, back when, when I was more of a, a peer and a, and a colleague.
Steve Munson:
And so I can’t think of something one, one thing specific, but just, you know, working with this group for three years you know, I mean, they, they just have the heart of a lion is, is what, is what I would say. Yeah. You just, you just see the, the dedication and, and the passion. The other thing that I would say is more broadly within AU we are known as a community of change makers. And if you think about that more from a student standpoint, it’s more of our ethos or culture is really to educate and give students an opportunity to go out and make a real impact on the world. And so that permeates down into the staff too, kind of the, the can-do attitude, the, the dedication to our mission. And then as a result, our our marketing and our brand is a phrase “challenge accepted.” And so that’s a big part of of how we operate as well. And it’s that kind of can-do spirit and kind of dedication and definitely when you’re doing an ERP and a CRM and then all that other major infrastructure change that I mentioned that “challenge accepted kind of becomes battle tested. And you, you see that it really, it’s the real deal.
Joe Gottlieb:
Yeah. Makes a lot of sense. And I love seeing the parallelism between how institutions, this whole focus on the student experience and student outcomes and student success, and helping students to become more capable participants in society. There’s just, that’s always been true about what the mission of an institution is all about, but I think it’s become more a point of emphasis. And just to hear you describe the alignment between the way you talk about even marketing to prospective students fitting well with the internal culture that the organizational has that has, that’s just a really interesting synergy to observe. And you’re right, you can feel it when you’re we’re in, you’re in it, you can feel it, and it does give you that sense of confidence that you might not have if instead you were observing more of what is quite often in all organizations, not, not even just higher ed, but, you know, change is hard and and there’s a lot of talk about how hard change is, right. And if, when that’s the point of emphasis, it, it can sometimes be a bit of a drag.
Steve Munson:
Well, you’re, you’re absolutely, you’re absolutely right. And I and I think that, like I mentioned earlier, I had some kind of a quiet confidence going into this. And, you know, if I didn’t see the culture and the dedication and the I, I would not have had that same confidence to say, Hey, let’s take all this on at at once. Let’s maximize this capacity. ’cause I, you know, I knew that, that we had the people that could do it, and I’m, I’m incredibly proud of all of the, the team members at American University that have, that have helped to, to, to achieve this success that we’ve had.
Joe Gottlieb:
Fantastic. So, beyond your people-first approach and that confidence that was really propelling you along, what other methods or points of emphasis or circumstances did you employ to minimize risk? There’s gotta be a lot of risk in this mm-hmm <affirmative>. Basket of things that you, that you tackled and continue to tackle. So how are you managing risk?
Steve Munson:
Sure. I did wanna mention before I get into the, the managing of the, the risk. There’s, well, and I, and I think this is part of the risk mitigation strategy, is that there was another critical part of, of how we designed kind of the blueprint for these implementations, which is who are we partnering with to, to, to do these implementations? And, and that’s both from a software standpoint and from a consulting standpoint. And from a software standpoint, as you can see, we have partnered with two world-class organizations Workday and Salesforce with superior quality products. So that was kind of the first decision. And we did very extensive market analysis and reviews of proposals and really deep dives into the ERP and CRM landscape to, to land at, at Workday and, and Salesforce. So that was step one.
Steve Munson:
The second part, and, and probably for the implementation itself who your consulting partner is, is, is probably the most important decision that you make on these implementations. Even more important than the software product that’s for the implementation itself, the, the decision on software product is kind of your lifelong decision. But to get to live the, the consulting partner is the most important. And so we selected Deloitte to partner with us for Workday and Huron for our Salesforce implementation. Both of those organizations are incredibly well respected, very mature in, in the Workday and the Salesforce ecosystem, and bring a tremendous amount of talent a very robust methodology on both sides. And I’d say that you know, Deloitte and, and Salesforce are not necessarily the lowest, oh, sorry, Deloitte and Huron were not necessarily the lowest cost option, but we could see that the quality of service that, that they would bring in making that investment in their quality of service was gonna be a huge mitigation of risk for us. And so really kind of taking that total cost of ownership view I think has really been critical for the success of our implementations.
Joe Gottlieb:
So another part of that I think is, is how you thought about what parts of the organization we’re gonna be active at different times, right? So mm-hmm <affirmative>. So talk about about how you thought through minimizing the footprint of the change by balancing it across about different parts of the organization at different times.
Steve Munson:
Absolutely. Great question. And, and that’s another thing that I think that I think that I saw that maybe others didn’t, because I think some other CIOs might hear ERP implementation and just think that’s just gonna wipe out the entire organization. Everything else is crowded out. And, and I looked at it critically and came to the conclusion that it really was different groups of customers that were supporting the ERP and the CRM in particular. ’cause We were focused exclusively on admissions. And which is a, a, you know, a specific segment. So basically with the ERP, we’re really focused on that HR, finance, payroll budget, and for CRM for recruiting and admissions. And that just happened to also be how we organize here within it we have, obviously, we have our infrastructure and platform and, and network teams. But then we also align by customer.
Steve Munson:
And so we basically having our HR, our finance, our payroll budget alignment, and then having a whole separate team that aligns on kind of all things CRM basically the teams and the, the real technical talent was for the most part gonna be different. So from a capacity standpoint, I could see that we could, that we could sustain two projects. The pinch point though, becomes leadership. And so, because everything you think like a pyramid you know, you have your technical talents are the base of the pyramid. And then your leadership in terms of my level or the, the PMO level is, is gonna really be the, the group that’s spanning across. And I’d, I’d love to give a special shout out to Tracy Henneman, who is our a VP of Application and Data Services. And Tracy is the true lead executive over both our Workday and Salesforce implementations. And that was another piece I talked about, quiet confidence is I knew that Tracy was the kind of leader who could manage that pinch point and kind of, you know, be at that, that crux of those two projects and be able to kind of lead both. So that’s another ingredient or another person in our period, in our pyramid that I saw that was a critical piece that I, I knew that we had to be successful.
Joe Gottlieb:
Once again, it comes back to people, right? So that
Steve Munson:
Absolutely, part
Joe Gottlieb:
Of the, the, the, the team you were fielding was giving you that confidence. And and it, I love the word pinch point ’cause it helps really isolate what you knew was gonna be, even though you’d balanced along the different functions and with your business partner organization structure and it capacity you had the pinch points that you needed to address. And it sounds like Tracy was, was key for that. You know, did you, I imagine you also tucked several necessities in along the way as well, right? So even with these two massive projects, you can’t stop doing everything else, right? And so I imagine that you, you know, just curious to learn a little bit about, even with these two heavy, heavy, heavy projects that you’d worked hard to balance and minimize the impact on the organization to then maximize your ability to get through ’em both at the same time. How did you make room for little things? How, what did that feel like?
Steve Munson:
Well, I would say we, we made room for, for more than little things. Because of that, that pace of change that I was mentioning in, in higher ed you know, the, the u the rest of the university and the pressures of the university doesn’t stop and say, oh, you’re implementing Workday. We’ll, we’ll leave you alone here for a little bit. Or You’re implementing Salesforce, we’ll, we’ll leave you alone and just let you be. So we had all the challenges that, that everyone else has in higher ed that we were, were wrestling. And I would, I would even say you know, we also had some additional or kind of unique challenges kind of specific within, within AU or specific within DC. But the piece there that was really helpful was that our top leadership here at the university and our board of trustees were laser focused on these priorities and recognized the financial risks associated with any quality issues or with any timeline issues.
Steve Munson:
I mean, these, these projects get a pretty stout run rate when you’re in this implementation. So there’s a real incentive for university leadership in the board to make sure that these things finish on time from a, a pure cost standpoint. And then on the quality side, you see the quality issues after go live. It might, and it may not be month one or month two, but you’ll, you’ll see ’em for sure over time. And so we had great support from leadership and the, the board and everyone was, was really focused on it. We got the time and attention, but at the same time, we did have a lot of you know, it was a lot of work and tough conversations about how do we balance the different challenges that we, that we have and and how do we balance that and keep this all going? And and we, we did have great support there. And then coming back to that, that dedicated team that we have, you know, people worked extremely hard to balance getting through those challenges and, and getting through these major implementations. And I would say that’s just another piece. No matter how you slice that on these implementations, you’re gonna have a pretty sizable core group of people that, that are just gonna really work incredibly hard to, to get there.
Joe Gottlieb:
Yeah. Well, you mentioned challenges. Maybe share a couple of examples of challenges that you encountered and how you navigated them.
Steve Munson:
Sure. A couple challenges we had one was that when you do a project like a Workday, you have the core platform, but then you have your constellation of systems around it, and you’re, you’re feeding data back and forth to those systems, you know, called an integration or a system to system integration. And I actually, this was the second time that I’ve led a Workday implementation. The first time was at Marymount University in Arlington, Virginia. And when I was at Marymount I, I had an estimated number of system to system integrations. And and it turned out that, that it was double, what we actually had to do was, was double what I had estimated. So when I went into the planning, creating our blueprint here at American University, we did all this planning and we identified this constellation of systems, and then I doubled that estimate.
Steve Munson:
And so I felt really good going into the project that we were gonna, you know, had a lot of good headroom to be able to, to handle the amount of integrations we had. And then it turned out that the actual amount we had here at American was double, double that. So basically it was basically four times what we had originally going into the project thought that we were gonna need. That, that just blew me away. ’cause I really thought I had that one licked from my prior experience. So what we ended up doing was we did have both the Deloitte team was doing a, a big set of integrations. We did increase the amount of integrations that we, we asked the Deloitte team to do, but then we also had my IT ERP team took on a, a really big chunk of, of doing those system integrations, doing the development work.
Steve Munson:
But then even with, with all of that stretching, we still got to a point where not all of our integrations were ready for go live. And we had to have manual processes and workarounds while in parallel we were, were finished. And that a lot of that really affected our non OIT members of the team, because that meant more manual work for them to maybe be uploading data manually or pulling data out manually, maybe doing some, some keying in as well. And so I really am so grateful for that leadership on our project team that they really understood the importance of accepting that trade off of that short term effort in order to get the major platform up and running. That was really critical. And you know, if we didn’t have that leadership to basically work through those challenges, then that would’ve been a real, a real challenge. And I, I’m a, a self-admitted star Trek fan. And so the thing I like to think about with that decision making is that our leadership much as Spock said in Star Trek, two ref of Khan our leadership said that the needs of the many outweighed the needs of the few. And and they basically accepted all that work while we, while we got live.
Joe Gottlieb:
Nice. Nice.
Steve Munson:
<Laugh>.
Joe Gottlieb:
Well, that’s
Steve Munson:
Another Sure. Go. And then one other one that’s on the Workday side, if you’ll, if you’re okay with me sharing another major challenge that we had. So on the Salesforce side originally with our approach we were gonna, for graduate admissions, we were gonna go live end to end with two of our schools. So we have a number of schools and colleges. And so we were originally gonna go end to end from marketing all the way through application, application management and, and decision for two schools. And then the following year we’re gonna add on our rem our remaining schools. And so as we started along on our process, we started getting the enrollment pressure that everyone else has. And in particular, our enrollment pressure started on the grad side. And then this last year we really started seeing it on the undergrad side.
Steve Munson:
And so, you know, what do you do or what do you need when you have enrollment pressure? You need robust marketing capabilities. Mm-Hmm <affirmative>. So we did a shift in our approach where on the grad side, we shifted so that all of our schools would, would be live on Salesforce Marketing Cloud to start doing their marketing and recruiting. And, and that is started for the next year’s recruiting. So basically the fall 2025 recruiting. And then for the fall 2026 recruiting, we’re gonna add the application piece on. So basically we, we brought forward the full marketing capability, and then behind the scenes we’re gonna continue on our legacy system for the application management processing and decisioning, and then bring on that later. Whereas before, we were doing kind of half and half end to end. So we would’ve had two schools on, on the marketing and on Salesforce Education Cloud for the application management, processing a decision. And the other schools would’ve completely remained on the legacy platform. So this was a, a piece where, you know, in, in collaboration with our, our leadership, really listening, hearing their urgency on the enrollment pressures hearing their needs for the enhanced marketing capabilities, and then really kind of pivoting our whole approach to better align. So I’m really pleased that the end result is that the recruiting that we’re doing right now for graduate admissions for fall 2025 is fully supported by the power of Salesforce Marketing Cloud.
Joe Gottlieb:
That’s one of the better examples I’ve heard. ’cause You don’t often have a lot of options for changing the plan. ’cause These systems are not always that modular, right? In terms of how you can sequence what you adopt. And so that’s one of the best stories I’ve heard of how you, you did hear the need in the context of the pressure and you found a path to pivot to, which did leverage what was available to you in terms of potential sequencing. That’s a great, great story. And I, I I think our listeners will benefit from that because it’s so easy to stick to the plan once you have it, and not, and not, yes. Listen to your instincts firing, particularly when they span a lot of different parts of the organization. And there’s, you know, stresses up, there’s anxiety over, over delivery and performance and all that. So great example of how how the group was able to, to realign around a bit of a pivot there. Love that. So as we bring this to a close, what are some of the most important outcomes that you’ve achieved in this effort? And, and what’s your outlook going forward?
Steve Munson:
Sure. In terms of our out outcomes and benefits. So we are in month 11 in our, our Workday journey. And I, I get positive feedback from our community all the time about you know, how pleased everybody is with Workday and how they’re seeing the, the value in the efficiency of Workday the seamless user experience. And what I think is kind of the, the baseline big benefit is the move to the mobile device. Actually was just on a call earlier where somebody was talking about how they hired somebody and they were waiting, you know, for a final approval before they could start the onboarding for that person. And I thought, oh, I think I saw that in my Workday inbox this morning. And so while we were on the call, I just whipped out my iPhone and approved that.
Steve Munson:
And then I said, Hey I just approved this, and you now have all the onboarding business process steps in your inbox to move forward. So that’s just an example. And when I was at Marymount, I used to have time sheets to approve, and I always used to tell people how I could approve time sheets, literally just walking across campus or sitting in traffic or you know, whichever. So it’s amazing the power that Workday puts in your hands on the, the mobile device. The other piece with Workday that’s really critical for our community is that we were really doing a lot of operations outside the system. And what I mean by that is a lot of spreadsheets being emailed back and forth, and, and we had a lot of work that was going on as, and that was kind of our, our modus operandi.
Steve Munson:
And then, but with Workday, we’ve really changed our focus and our culture to be working within the system. And that’s a big shift. And, and when you do that, you get the access to the data that I mentioned. You get insight into where things are in the business process within, within the workflow and then you just get that overall efficiency of, of operating. So that’s been a real game changer for us now. And, and honestly, I think we’re only scratching the surface of the benefit that we’re gonna get with Workday because we are really just at the beginning of our, of our journey. With Salesforce, as I mentioned, you know, we are continuing as with everyone else to get increasing pressure on enrollment. And one of the things we’ve been able to do with Salesforce Education Cloud is we were very quickly able to activate the early action option.
Steve Munson:
We historically did not offer early action as part of our admissions process. And if you think about it, it’s just an incredible benefit to the students to get that decision early in the process so that they can really understand what their options are as they’re trying to navigate their, their college decision experience. So we have really high hopes for early action this year. We think it’s gonna be incredibly beneficial for us. That was not part of the scope of our project. That’s a change that came in. And so we were pretty far along with our undergraduate admissions implementation when when we made the decision to go for early action here for this fall 2025 season. And we were able to do that really quickly. And and I know our team right now is as we speak, is reviewing our early action applications, and we’re getting ready for end of January decisions for, for early action. So that’s, that’s been an incredible ben benefit for us on the Salesforce side.
Joe Gottlieb:
Well, I gotta say, congrats, that sounds like some really great sort of high impact value impact results you’ve been able to drive even after tackling such a huge amount of scope all at once. So let’s bring this to a close, Steve. What are three takeaways we can offer our listeners on this topic of maximizing an institution’s capacity for change?
Steve Munson:
Yep. So three takeaways. So the first one, don’t just assume that a major transformation is just gonna suck all the air out of the room for the entire university. Take that critical look at the different technology skill sets that are needed, how your organization is organized, and, and also looking at your customers and looking again at what’s the alignment, what are the segments of how these customers operate. And it, it doesn’t really have to be a tidal wave that just kind of knocks out the whole, the whole university. So really look at that, at that critically. The other piece, as I mentioned is to, to have the success that we have. You, you’ve gotta have excellent leadership, and I’m not talking about CIO leadership and I’m, I’m not necessarily talking about the, the president or the cabinet or the board leadership.
Steve Munson:
It’s really that next level down that that’s the critical area. If you’ve got that next level down, kind of the direct reports to the, the president’s cabinet as excellent leadership, that’s, that’s a absolutely critical success factor. The other piece, I know it sounds simple, but pick the right technology, pick the right consulting partners and you know, look at total cost of, of ownership you know, for, for that. The other piece that we didn’t get to, to touch on yet is that, as you know, as I mentioned, this is my second go around and, you know, obviously, you know, throughout your whole career you hear that the secret to success with these large technology projects is the people. I, I kind of feel like that’s an easy thing to say, and I hope we’ve crystallized in this conversation what that really means.
Steve Munson:
‘Cause You kind of have to go another under the surface to, to really, you know, okay, it’s easy to say it’s the people, but why is the people? And so talking about our culture and our dedication and the pinch point of leadership and, and those different factors, I hope that we illuminate that a little bit too. But the other real key secret to success, and it took me this second go around to figure it out, is that you have to have an absolutely tireless and unwavering focus on how you get to success. And you have to make sure that you don’t operate with a mode of how to avoid failure. You’ve gotta be focused on how to get to success. And that mindset, I think, was really critical because it’s so easy to get bogged into if this happens, and if this happens, everything’s gonna go wrong.
Steve Munson:
And if this happens and this happens, then we’re gonna have this major catastrophic failure. And instead it’s kind of the, it’s kind of the, the IT major or the digital transformation version of power positive thinking. But you’ve gotta be continuously focusing on what does success look like? How do we get there? We must on a daily basis talk about that with our, our leadership of, of all these projects and, and focus on answering that question and then following the path that, that illuminates. And that also is an absolutely critical part of what we’ve been able to accomplish here at American University. And I do have a question for you, Joe. It’s the first time on TRANSFORMED that you’ve had a a Star Trek quote.
Joe Gottlieb:
You did catch me a little bit off guard there, <laugh>. I don’t, I don’t, I’m thinking back. It’s possible. It’s the first actual quote someone articulated, so there you go. I tip my hat. All right.
Steve Munson:
Okay.
Joe Gottlieb:
So wonderful having you here, Steve. Thanks so much for joining me today.
Steve Munson:
All right, my pleasure. I guess the, it would be apropos if I if I ended by saying live long and prosper.
Joe Gottlieb:
Let’s all live long and prosper. And thanks to our guest joining us as well. I hope you have a great day and we’ll 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, I hope that it made you stop and think about the role that you, 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.
