Matthew Gunkel
One of the challenges that we saw in needing to make some of these critical changes were that there were key business processes that finance was looking for, things that we needed to execute, and helping the CFO understand how we were putting together a long-term strategy, but also how the new platforms were going to ultimately accelerate efforts that they were requesting, either from the data delivery side all the way out to the end user or in our ability to lean into more standardized business process. You know, where we were working to align to compliance, we were looking to minimize the overall risk and, you know, moving away from, you know, some of our legacy tools ultimately showcased and highlighted that we could do that. And when we first started this, we offered an initial win. We said, look, give us one app. And it was one of the simpler apps. And we said, look, we’ll rebuild this and we’ll rebuild it pretty fast. And, you know, and then we’ll, and then we’ll ultimately show you how we can rebuild, you know, the rest. And highlighting sort of that first win in building out this proof of concept went really well in the sense that he was able to see like, oh, okay, this is what they’re talking about. This is how they’re saying they’re going to now apply the technology into the space and really, really help drive support.
Joe Gottlieb
That’s Matthew Gunkel. Chief Information Officer at the University of California, Riverside, describing the breakthrough he and his team made with the CFO in their effort to unwind technical debt that had accumulated during a period of prolonged interim leadership. We talked about how UC Riverside secured support from the finance department to modernize and consolidate all of their applications, partnered with Google Cloud to unlock innovation without traditional infrastructure capacity constraints, and adopted the error budget model to take new risks while maintaining service levels. I hope you enjoy our conversation.
Welcome to TRANSFORMED, a Higher Digital podcast focused on the new whys, the new whats, and the new hows in higher ed. In each episode, you will experience hosts and guests pulling for the resurgence of higher ed while identifying and discussing the best practices needed to accomplish that resurgence. Culture, strategy, and tactics, planning and execution, people, process, and technology. It’s all on the menu because that’s what’s required to truly transform.
Hello, 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 Matthew Gunkel, Chief Information Officer at the University of California, Riverside. Matt, welcome to TRANSFORMED.
Matthew Gunkel
Thanks, Joe. Happy to be here. What do you want to talk about?
Joe Gottlieb
Well, I’m glad you asked, Matt. I want to get your thoughts on partnering with finance to recover from tech debt. But first, I’d love to hear a little bit about your personal background and how you got connected to the work that you do in higher ed.
Matthew Gunkel
Yeah, happy to share. So I’ve been in higher education about 20 years, Joe. I originally started at the Kelley School of Business as a help desk technician. So I came in early on and really was just all about customer support and helping people find their path in IT. I was at the Kelley School for a number of years before moving into director of teaching and learning technologies at Indiana University that oversaw a large deployment across the university of their technical infrastructure on the teaching and learning side. Really helped me understand scale and how really to approach and think about customer success and added customer importance. And really from a faculty perspective. So we built a lot of new programs. We thought about how to leverage and implement technology in new and innovative ways. Probably some of the most fun I’ve had in technology for a very long time.
After that, I moved on to the University of Missouri System. where I got started really just as a, you know, come and build this. So Missouri Online was a venture that the president and the University of Missouri Regents wanted to build out and develop. And so I got brought on as a hire one to come in and like take that on and put that together at some increasing scale. And so we brought together about 120 people, helped to grow their enrollments over the three years that I was in that role, but also help to build out their technical stack, look at their data, look at how they could be aligned across the university system. And so really, really interesting opportunity. Really appreciated my time at the University of Missouri System.
And then most recently here at UCR. So I’ve been at UC Riverside now for three years in March, actually. So I’m like right at that three-year mark. It was just like a couple weeks ago. And so, you know, really, really excited to be here and sort of look at, you know, kind of how and where UC Riverside needed to grow and change They’ve got a lot of opportunities in undergraduate and graduate education, but also just sort of in their overall technology stack. So they’ve had a number of years of just some instability, had some interim CIOs, and to able to come in and help them transform around technology. And so that’s been very, very exciting to do here.
Joe Gottlieb
Well, it’s good to have you on, and I’m sure we’ll get into some of the details there, particularly what you’re doing at UCR. And it’s nice to see how you’ve touched some very, very big schools, but also got the system view, which I know is really important. So to set the stage, let’s focus in on, you’ve had these prior roles, and those roles have allowed you to focus on very, very large, but pretty specific problems to solve and you developed an approach that served you well in those roles. How did your arrival at UC Riverside warrant a new approach and how did you adapt? How did you adjust?
Matthew Gunkel
Yeah, that’s a great question. So, you know, I’ve been coming in, I’ve been doing a lot of entrepreneurship or building or scaling and, you know, UCR really required, you know, sort of instability that they were facing. We were kind of looking at the interim CIOs that they’d had for a number of time. They were sitting on a lot of long-term technical debt. There’s a lot of sort of existing infrastructure that hadn’t been touched in a number of years. Some of their design paradigms were antiquated at best. And so we really tried to come in and I tried to think about like, how can we build a new strategic approach and where did we need to go, you know, partner, become more collaborative, really think through how to help transform the way in which they were approaching and doing work and how they were ultimately engaging with the university in their partnerships. I found that a significant number of our engagement was order-taking. You know, we were just, you know, this is, you know, can tech build this? You know, can tech paint the walls purple? And, you know, and so we were just kind of like, okay, but should the walls be purple? Maybe that’s not a very good color. And how should we actually help people begin to strategically think about IT and then work with us more collaboratively in trying to actually drive the goals of the business?
Joe Gottlieb
Yeah, I like that. Regardless of what the context is, what you saw was this pattern, this pattern of reaction, really reactionary services orientation. I see this pattern actually a lot. In some cases, it is something organizations even seek. They seek to become more reliable in responding to things. And before you know it, they’re very reactive organizations. So on the one hand, what felt like progress is actually setting them backwards in terms of the strategic conversation and their ability to participate in that. So building on that, then, you mentioned the tech debt. So let’s dive into that. When you arrive at UC Riverside, not only do you see this pattern of reactive service orientation, you saw this accumulation of tech debt that had come from the years of some short-sighted strategy and operations, kind of exacerbated by this interim CIO situation that preceded your arrival. How did you go about unwinding the tech debt? What was involved with that? And what did you learn in the process?
Matthew Gunkel
Yeah. So, you know, I mean, it’s really interesting, right? Because when you kind of start to dig in on like, okay, what, what does technical debt look like and what does it mean? And it can be, you know, any number of things, you know, from our antiquated phone system, you know, we have this old PBX unit from the 1980s. It’s early, you know, it’s super early. They’ve actually bought replacement parts from NASA, you know, all the way to, you know, why did they choose programming languages that they chose? And, you know, did they pick obscure design patterns that were, you know, at the time they were emerging, right? So they were new, they were innovative. People were like, ah, you should write code this way. But then that fork fell off, right? So like whatever it was, like it just kind of like It wasn’t the main trunk that continued on. And so when you kind of look at the historic timeline of programming languages, that thing that you’re now sitting on, people aren’t learning anymore, right? You’re now having to upskill and train people because you made an obscure choice years ago. And the overhead, the weight, the burden are now significant. And so when I came on board, I really tried to sort of look at like, okay, what are the one, the modern stacks, right? So like when you kind of back up and you go like, okay, like if we’d gone a different direction, where should we maybe be now? Or you leapfrog and you just kind of go, okay, so fine, we are where we are. What do I just need to put down and start doing a new, right? And what does that look like? But in order to do that, you then have to look at the, the skills required and really understand sort of what the organization is capable of. And so, you know, that was sort of the first approach that we took was how do you begin to, you know, fundamentally augment the people, their existing skill sets? How do you do that, some of that through, you know, retraining? How do you do some of that through staff augmentation? How do you begin to bring on, you know, the right sort of pieces and knowledge in your leaders who then can go, I know how to deliver this. I know how to sort of make changes fundamentally. in what we’re doing. The other one was really looking at our infrastructure. So kind of back to that PBX statement where we had a lot of old antiquated infrastructure. One of the things that I see is that frequently in large technical organizations, you end up with legacy hardware or decisions around hardware that then create a lot of dependencies. And so leaning into abstraction through the cloud can really be critical. And so we took an opportunity to look at how we were delivering infrastructure and to look at ways to lean into technologies that are on the cloud that allowed us to move past some of those historical dependencies that are existing technical implementations had in place. And that’s fundamental in allowing you to then move faster, but also focusing and prioritizing resources on the right work in order to be able to move away from those historical decisions and historical technical implementations.
Joe Gottlieb
Yeah, I think those are some great patterns in terms of infrastructure and tech stack. I love the references to the older languages that seemed useful at the time, maybe even really innovative, but had fallen out of favor. But you were left with the pattern. Once you got into that pattern, it was hard to get off of. And before you know it, there’s a whole bunch of legacy there sitting behind it. If you don’t mind, I would love to double click a little bit on a couple of areas that I know we talk a lot about. One of them is ERP. Just ERP is such a a critical core system. And I know you’ve got some personal experiences with that in this context. And then helping to maybe demystify how you’ve approached cloud, right? There’s a sort of a cloud agnostic approach. So if you don’t mind hitting both of those, that would be great. Yeah.
Matt Gunkel
So, you know, Joe’s… UC Riverside’s in the middle of a, or we finished now at this point, an ERP implementation. I would say we’re on the long tail, right? We’re continuing to clean it and polish it and make it all the things that it needs to be. But that presented a really interesting opportunity when we were going through that process. So when I came on board, I would say they were, through the planning, they were beginning to do some of the core work for the deployment of the ERP. And we had a large number of systems that were sort of sitting in the periphery of financial management. And when we were looking at those, a large portion of those actually were a large portion of our technical debt. They were built on an old PeopleSoft system, I think, 97. I think we were still running PeopleSoft from 1997. And so we saw this opportunity to rebuild those applications and or rethink those applications in the cloud. And so this is now where we were looking at sort of the balance between, you know, what do we move from a CapEx expenditure? How do we think about an OpEx expenditure? What does that begin to look like? But then how do we build an empowering environment for the recreation of those applications? So back to an earlier point I made where you sort of said, well, okay, first we, We say, well, like what’s the right technical stack to build them on, right? What are the right coding languages? What are the right platforms? What does that begin to look like? Then you start to say, okay, how can we now take an infrastructure approach that really facilitates DevOps and allows us to move past some of those historical design paradigms? And this is where we went out and, you know, partnered very closely with Google. So I had to go work with my CFO and, you know, we had to sort of think about, you know, what did this look like? Historically, we’d been, you know, sort of holding money and working for the next capital expenditure because, you know, balancing it with OPEX can be tricky. The cloud has… You know, it’s based on usage and, you know, there’s a lot of sort of unknowns and the cost rates and you’ve got to do all these calculations. And so you find all these people who are like getting ready to get ready to like use cloud or they’ve like dip their toe in and then they’re like, well, that was expensive because lift and shift is expensive. That’s what you do. You don’t like rethink how you’re going to apply into the cloud. Doesn’t work. You can’t just do what you’re doing today and then assume you’re going to do it that way exactly in the cloud. And so we went out and looked for, one, how can we put together a strategy on cloud agnostic? And so for us, that really meant leaning into existing services, existing technologies that really do operate on any cloud infrastructure. And we wanted this ability to move our compute and storage workloads seamlessly across the cloud. And so that was sort of like a core tenet, right? So anywhere we were trying to make a technical decision, we needed it to be able to be applicable and not negligible. nuanced, and specific. The second thing we did is back to that training piece. We said, hey, where can we lean in with a partner and where can we actually have that partnership that will allow us to empower our users in a way that they can now use the cloud with minimal risk? And so we started working very closely with Google and we developed a fixed cost model for cloud. And what that really means, a number of people will hear me say, oh, it’s unlimited. It’s not unlimited, but it is a model that’s very similar to a phone bill where AT&T and Verizon And they say like, look, use our service. You pay for a month. We don’t really cap you. We don’t really do anything. You just get to consume and you get to use it. And what that means in the cloud is that my team can now go in and actively just turn services on, right? They could just click the button. And even if it said that’s going to cost you 10 cents and they’re like, well, I need to click it 10,000 times. Okay. They could turn it on. They can do that work. And they could then understand how does this work compared to what I was doing before? And how do I transform to this new model? And what does that begin to look like? And so that’s why we decided we needed to start with one partner. So that way we could also lean into that technical stack, approach it from an agnostic perspective, and then apply our technology in on top. And that’s what we’ve been doing for really two years while we’ve been working very closely to, you know, redeploy a lot of those financial systems. And when we first approached my CFO with this, you know, he was hesitant, right? Because he really needed to understand how was this going to play out for, you know, three, six, you know, nine years? Because, you know, ERP deployments aren’t cheap and you don’t redo them frequently. I mean, come on, we were coming from nine So, I mean, we’ve made it almost 30 years. And so, you know, in that regard, you know, we really had to bring him a plan where he could see how this was going to over the long term. And, you know, long term is relative here because there’s a lot of change in technology, a lot of disruption. But realistically, you know, get to that five year plus mark and understand how this was going to work and how this was going to ultimately support being able to do more and improve the end user experience for UC Riverside. Well, I love the reference to how the open-ended nature of that relationship with Google in particular enabled people. Sounds like more experimentation. It enabled people to go ahead and turn things on without the fear that it was going to hit a specific limit and produce a lot of net new charges. Now, obviously, over the long haul, there’ll be some attention paid to overall consumption, I imagine. But that by releasing the… It being a constraint-based environment, you’re able to really, really now… You’re actually incenting people to… to learn about how it actually works and perhaps in the objective of making it more efficient.
Matthew Gunkel
And that’s exactly right, in the direction of efficiency. And it’s interesting because in this model, efficiency is now driven by both sides, right? We want to be efficient, right? But we also know that now our partner wants us to be efficient and they are equally helping us engineer efficiency effectively. into this agnostic approach into the cloud. And you’re right in that, you know, we have to hit certain targets, you know, averages, and then we can only be, you know, we can only consume so much and there’s, you know, there’s some checks and balances there. But ultimately it just facilitated a much more empowering environment to help facilitate this change. And, you know, and ultimately, you know, our CFO has seen a lot of new systems get deployed where we’ve been able to move much faster at relatively lower cost because the labor from getting out from under some of this technical debt, it became simpler. The planning phase became simpler.
Joe Gottlieb
Well, and I love that you called that out because that’s one of the key benefits of unwinding tech debt, you actually can get back to pace. You can actually get to a more definitive path forward for certain solutions because you’re not held back by the either fossilized brittleness of certain stacks that could hold you back or just the lack of a pathway forward, right? So you’ve seen that pace pick up, I imagine.
Matthew Gunkel
We have, yeah. And actually, so site reliability engineering is a concept that we’re leaning more into, which is this idea that basically it’s a measure of how much error are you introducing into your change? And if you aren’t introducing enough error, then you aren’t changing fast enough. But previously we were just so consumed and just trying to even understand the legacy stack because people had turned over, some people knew it, some people didn’t. And so So at this point, we’re now able to look at how do we actually accelerate into change versus just sort of sitting in a stationary position, unable to move.
Joe Gottlieb
It seems like a great mindset to have at your disposal. We’ll be right back.
Emily Rudin
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Joe Gottlieb
And now, back to our program.
All right, I want to shift gears. So… How has your partnership with finance in general and your relationship with the CFO in particular led to novel solutions that overcome the challenges of being a relatively small UC?
Matthew Gunkel
Yeah, so, you know, I think this is where because we have small teams, we have fairly limited resources. And so when you look at UCR’s IT organizations sort of compared to the other UCs, we’re just smaller in general. And one of the challenges that we saw in needing to make some of these critical changes were that there were key business processes that finance was looking for, things that we needed to execute. And helping the CFO understand how we were putting together a law long-term strategy, but also how the new platforms were going to ultimately accelerate efforts that they were requesting, either from the data delivery side, all the way out to the end user, or in our ability to lean into more standardized business process. You know, where we were working to align to compliance, we were looking to minimize the overall risk and, you know, moving away from, you know, some of our legacy tools ultimately showcased and highlighted that we could do that. And when we first started this, we offered an initial win. We said, look, give us one app. And it was one of the simpler apps. And we said, look, we’ll rebuild this and we’ll rebuild it pretty fast. And then we’ll ultimately show you how we can rebuild the rest. And highlighting sort of that first win in building out this proof of concept went really well in the sense that he was able to see like, oh, okay, this is what they’re talking about. This is how they’re saying they’re going to now apply the technology into the space and really, really help drive support. I do laugh. There was one piece that he still to this day doesn’t like. We introduced the concept of a minimum viable product. And to this day, he still wants a fully viable product, not a minimally viable product. And so every time we try to tell him it’s going to be an MVP, he’s like, I want more features. But But otherwise, the relationship is now going quite well in the sense that we’ve reworked. We’ve either ended, right? So we’ve stopped doing a large number of apps. They’ve gotten rebuilt, retooled, re-architected. And we’ve moved from about 100 applications. We’re now down to 20. And we’re in the process of consolidating probably the last 20 down to about 10. And so, yeah, so it’s been a big transformation.
Joe Gottlieb
That’s ultimately a tenfold decrease in app count, which I know helps tame some of the complexity that the much larger portfolios can produce. I want to come back to that example. So maybe a little bit more on that. If I heard you correctly, you took a relatively simple app. as a good experiment that you knew you could pretty quickly get through. And if I’m hearing you correctly, I just want to make sure this is right. You showed not only the current drag it had in the ways that you would represent tech debt, and maybe that was ongoing maintenance cost and or issues with being able to add capabilities to it, but I’ll let you respond. And then you identified the cost of literally that was applicable to that particular app, you had options for how to replace it. You probably considered some options, but then recommended one. Is that the way you went about that? And maybe you can give a little more color.
Matthew Gunkel
Yeah, no, that’s exactly right. In that we, you know, first we looked at, well, what was our capacity to add features, right? So, you know, when we were looking at like, how would you, you know, rework this to now apply to the new ERP? Yeah, so we, you know, you know, we did some initial planning, looked at some backlog requests, you know, some of the features and functions and then went like, okay, well, like how much time, right? Or how many developers are you now going to have to put on doing that work? You know, we also looked a lot at, you know, how quickly we were actually able to write code. And I, and I truly mean like the amount of lines that like somebody could write in that environment. And so when you look at lower level languages, there are more lines, they just, you know, because they’re not as abstracted, they just, They require more work. Now there are industries where you need that, right? I mean, COBOL developers are still excessively high paid and they’re in demand, right? But when you look at a lot of the applications that we run, that’s not what we needed. And so we had an opportunity to lean into Let’s go simpler. Let’s lean on libraries that exist. Let’s not rewrite search engines and different things. Or these were functions and libraries that we pulled in so long ago. that they’ve just been literally engineered completely different. And so we shared those costs to sort of walk through what does it take if you stay on this app? What would it mean? How would we use it, et cetera? And what would that cost be? And those costs were high relative to literally just throwing it in the trash can and starting over. But of course, everybody was very nervous. So we also tried to look at, well, what features and functions? Because in a lot of cases, we did just end up mirroring features. We didn’t try to also enhance. And I really want to emphasize that point because you’ll get people that are like, well, you’re rewriting it. So we should then fix these 10 things. We will, but not when we rewrite it. We’ll take those in and then we will make those enhancements. Now, that’s not to say we didn’t do any enhancements. We did. I mean, there were some things that just got brought through that just got enhanced naturally. But don’t bite off more than you can chew. You really want to take on sort of that initial set of features and functions that are critical. Back to my MVP comment. Right. And get those out the door.
Joe Gottlieb
Well, I was going to make that connection, right? It sounds like that’s still an ongoing frontier whereby you can help the organization appreciate the discipline of what an MVP represents, which is get the minimum fundamental necessity out the door and don’t let your interest in a lot of enhancements make, slow it down, right? At the end of the day, right? And these are agile concepts that not everyone needs to comprehend agile, but they really apply to the agile enterprise. Wouldn’t you agree? I mean, this is a, even if you’re just thinking about how a business process evolves, you can break it down using the same approaches, right?
Matthew Gunkel
And you want to, right? And, you know, and I think you know, oftentimes, uh, you know, we don’t take enough time sometimes when working with the business to sort of rethink, how do we also rework the business rules? But you, you do to that point, right? You want to break it down into small bites. Um, you know, it’s the, what the, the adage, how do you eat an elephant, right? You know, one bite, I actually don’t like it. I don’t want to eat an elephant, but, uh, but you know, it, but it applies. Right. And so I think thinking, thinking and using those principles to help solve these larger problems and how do you facilitate transformation is important, you know, versus trying to just start with, okay, like, let’s just get to agile.
Joe Gottlieb
Right. Great stuff. All right. Now I want to talk about AI. I can’t do a podcast episode these days without touching on AI. And I saw on your LinkedIn profile, your background image actually features this lovely workshopping poster proclaiming that analytics and machine learning will transform education. I’m going to give you a chance to elaborate on that because that must have been a fun event. It’s an opportunity to talk about what you guys are doing with AI.
Matthew Gunkel
It was, yeah. It was a great event. This is where I think as we look at the AI space, we look at what’s coming and we look at the ability for AI to create new content. We have a a huge influx and shift that I think is gonna occur in the higher education space in particular, and really even sort of the training space at large, because AI can now build out so much of this appropriately aligned material and content, which is really a big deal because we have so many faculty for years who were supported literally by teams of people to build content. And overnight, that’s just kind of like, it’s not gone away, but it has transformed. And we do now have this need to think about where and how can we embrace what we’re seeing in AI in order to think about how we can now build the institution or the educational framework of the future. And for me, and I want to be really clear here, because some people are like, I don’t need a faculty member. I don’t need teachers anymore. I have the completely opposite opinion. You need them more. And the content is critical. Students need to work through it. They need to do those things. But we now need those people who are deep in very particular topics, who are now at the center leading that conversation. And 100 years ago, people used to come to universities because of individuals, right? So it wasn’t, I want to go to this institution or that institution. It was, I want to go learn from that person. And I think we’re going to see that occur again more frequently where people are choosing and selecting the people that are at the center that are helping to lead and guide the narrative. You’re going to use the tools, right? You’re going to use AI on the periphery. It’s going to work around it. You’re going to use it to inform your thinking, to move you faster. And, you know, I think for me, you know, another exercise that I like is sort of looking at what kind of, you know, movie scenario would I want to live in, right? So like when I look at TV shows and you look at like different tech opportunities and you go, well, like, do I want the Terminator? I mean, that sounds terrible. But, you know, for me, it’s Star Trek, right? So no one in Star Trek, right, looks at the computer and says, you know, do everything for me. but they do use it to augment their knowledge, right? To enhance their speed, their capacity, their ability to do the work that they’re doing, but also to further advance their own knowledge at a much deeper level. And for me, that’s where AI gets really exciting. For UCR, we’ve been really working to deploy So we mentioned Google earlier, right? So we’ve really been leaning in on the Gemini tool stack. Model Garden has over 100 models that are available to us. We’re in the process of building custom tools. We have a couple of custom tools that we built, one in particular to help support the UC student application. So all UCs use one application for the entire UC. If we need more information from you, we send you what they call a long form application. And we built AI into that to actually help gather information from people rather than having potential students hand enter it. As you can imagine, hand data entry is often not accurate. And so instead we just ask them to take pictures of things that we’re then able to transfer to the application seamlessly. And so it’s been going really well. And so we’ve had a lot of opportunities to sort of look at where can we enhance it. You come all the way back to our other topic, right? We’ve been building it into these new financial apps, right? So we’ve been looking at where can you use an AI-first approach to do heavy lifting within those applications, but also where can you use it to enhance the coders even further as we’ve been kind of leaning into the elimination of that technical debt.
Joe Gottlieb
So one of the things that strikes me is, I love the way you characterize, particularly for faculty, the way AI is makes their roles that much more important again. I think that would, and the way you talked about it was because they should be leading research and these conversations about these topics. I would liken it to a very, very well documented shift from from sage on the stage to guide on the side, right? So sage on the stage was all about dispensing knowledge. That knowledge is now nearly ubiquitous, and it’s about the guide on the side that can help a student apply it, can help them think critically about it, can even help them use AI to exercise it into forms that they might find useful or beneficial to whatever they’re working on. And so to that end, it sounds like you think similarly, and I’ll give you a chance to redirect if you like, but… But if that’s true, then I would imagine one of the key jobs at hand for you is to just help overall facility with AI, help train the use of these tools so that people can start to discover and share and rise to that challenge and that occasion. Is that what’s going on?
Matthew Gunkel
Yeah, you know, Joe, so that’s where, you know, we’ve really got to drive, you know, just broad adoption and awareness, right? So we have so many people who are just You know, they’re nervous about the tool, either from a security perspective or they don’t understand it or they’re afraid it’s going to replace them. Right. And I don’t know that. I mean, don’t get me wrong. We’ll see a shift in how jobs are leveraging this tool. But, you know, I don’t know that we’re going to see a lot of jobs necessarily go away completely. You’re just going to see them more if you’re going to see them change around the people that are adopting. And this is where, you know, really getting more of those faculty, more of the university staff, just using the tool or thinking about trying it in everyday tasks is imperative. It’s not that we want to miss AI or not or make a decision. It’s more just like it’s here. It’s not going anywhere. I mean, that’s clear. And How do we now just get more people going? Well, that’s interesting. This helped me with this small thing. I tried it here and it worked, or I tried it here and it didn’t work, or we’re now using it in this class exercise. And, you know, and so providing access and availability is one of the things that we’re really leaning into, you know, at UCR. And we’ve had A number of tools turned on. We were an early adopter of Notebook LM. Notebook is now, I would say, one of Google’s leading tools that they’re putting out. But also trying to make sure that it’s an accessible tool, that students have it in a way that is also not creating additional divides from a technical perspective. And so, yes, right, I think is the answer to your question.
Joe Gottlieb
Good, good. I like yes. And in fact, I like your strategic plan. I know that sounds kind of nerdy, but I was recently reading through UC Riverside’s 2030 strategic plan. And since I read a lot of these, I was struck by the fact that your plan makes Almost no mention of technology. And in fact, in my opinion, this is the ideal form for a strategic plan, because a strategic plan should be about what strategic objectives are we pursuing as an institution. And technology will be part of all those as an enabler, but it need not be hopefully called out separately, because that means that we have it working as an enabler. And so just curious, am I misinterpreting this in the case of UCR? And if I have this right, is this one of the reasons that it’s been a little easier to unwind tech data? Are these things related? Is this a level of strategic thinking that’s going on?
Matthew Gunkel
It definitely is. And it’s one of the things that we have to remind ourselves of frequently, which is that a university is not a technology organization. You know, we’re here to support that, you know, the university mission. We’re here to support research. We’re here to support that teaching and learning. You know, we’re here to help students find success in the job market. We’re here to make, you know, onboarding and admissions easier for people. And, you know, and hopefully overall, you know, lower that cost burden to our students. And, you know, and when you think about that and you sort of think about some of the underlying tenets for, you know, the students you know, that strategic plan and some of the IT things. I mean, you know, we do lean in at UCR to, you know, some themes that are critical to the tech, but they’re underpinned by that larger plan. And we don’t want to lose sight of what our larger goals are. And so, you know, some of the examples that I have, you know, so one theme that’s specific to my strategic plan is enhanced user experiences. Again, nothing to do with technology, right? Now, maybe everything to do with technology because that’s how we do work. But we really want to look at how we’re improving those experiences for staff, faculty, and students in our systems that are then empowering and enhancing that 2030 strategic plan that’s out for UCR.
Joe Gottlieb
Makes a lot of sense. And I don’t mean to suggest that there won’t be IT plans, perhaps even including a digital strategy or an IT strategic plan, as is often the case, that helps IT think about all the ways it’s serving both in the collaboration, i.e. in the stack of all the institutional things that are going on, like user experience, but then also Things like unwinding tech debt or lower level things that you’re just doing to make sure the engine is working properly to play that effective role. But not seeing it in the main strategic plan, to me, is just a good representation of the fact that you are thinking student first. You are thinking teaching and learning and administration necessary to make that happen. Good stuff. All right, let’s bring this to a close. What are three takeaways we can offer our listeners on this fun topic of partnering with finance to recover from tech debt?
Matthew Gunkel
Yeah, it’s a great question, Joe. Everyone tries to calculate risk, but most strategic change requires embracing uncertainty. AI adoption will happen with less tech debt if we educate and train users effectively. And last, good finance people aren’t just tactical accountants. They’re also strategic long-term planners. This is an opportunity for IT due to a shared responsibility for those tactics and strategy. So how do we lean in and partner?
Joe Gottlieb
Love it. Matt, thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you, Joe. And thanks to our guests for joining us as well. Hope you have a great day and we’ll look forward to hosting you again on the next episode of TRANSFORMED.
Hey, listeners of 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 were 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, TRANSFORMED is available wherever you get your podcasts.