1. The CIO of the Future
Here are four possible panel question areas:
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What is the CIO’s principal purpose?
o CIOs as technology generalists, focused on relationships and
communication/marketing to effect positive change without direct control.
 Some see this as something consistent in the CIO role, not as a change
 In some cases the role is to build relationships between groups to create
solutions that may not ultimately involve IT
 The CIO should facilitate collaboration within the campus and with other
institutions
 Concerns about how, without control, we can avoid chaos in the future. How
can the CIO ensure strong positive influence?
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CIO as operational efficiency driver and entrepreneur
o Funding still has to be tied to strategies with good justification – that hasn’t
changed
o Should IT not only drive efficiencies, but generate revenue?
o Should IT be writing grants? Is that competing with academics?
o CIOs should see trends early and help with enterprise agility
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CIO as service leader
o CIOs should be focused on providing or sourcing quality services
o CIO must be results oriented
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CIOs should be mission-focused
o on the use of technology to support student learning
o on research
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What skills do CIOs need?
o Politics, relationship management
o Finance, business skills
o Communications/Marketing
o Technical
o Analytical
o Team building
o self awareness
o objectivity
o fairness
o hard work, leading by example
o PhD can be helpful but not required
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How do we develop the next CIOs?
o Mentoring, connection to IT leaders within and beyond higher ed
o Build engagement with student and faculty communities
o The CIO is not that different, but the people hired will be different.
o Technical staff want to stay technical, don’t want to move into the management and
communications role of CIOs. Is this a problem? If so, how do we motivate strong
technical staff to lead?
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Some technical staff have trouble being seen by others as more than a technician,
even if they want to lead
Where do CIOs report in the org structure? Where should they report?
o If not at cabinet level, need good access to that level
What is the CIO’s principal purpose?
o CIOs as technology generalists, focused on relationships and
communication/marketing to effect positive change without direct control.
 Some see this as something consistent in the CIO role, not as a change
 In some cases the role is to build relationships between groups to create
solutions that may not ultimately involve IT
 The CIO should facilitate collaboration within the campus and with other
institutions
 Concerns about how, without control, we can avoid chaos in the future. How
can the CIO ensure strong positive influence?
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CIO as operational efficiency driver and entrepreneur
o Funding still has to be tied to strategies with good justification – that hasn’t
changed
o Should IT not only drive efficiencies, but generate revenue?
o Should IT be writing grants? Is that competing with academics?
o CIOs should see trends early and help with enterprise agility
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CIO as service leader
o CIOs should be focused on providing or sourcing quality services
o CIO must be results oriented
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CIOs should be mission-focused
o on the use of technology to support student learning
o on research
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What skills do CIOs need?
o Politics, relationship management
o Finance, business skills
o Communications/Marketing
o Technical
o Analytical
o Team building
o self awareness
o objectivity
o fairness
o hard work, leading by example
o PhD can be helpful but not required
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How do we develop the next CIOs?
o Mentoring, connection to IT leaders within and beyond higher ed
o Build engagement with student and faculty communities
o
o
o
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The CIO is not that different, but the people hired will be different.
Technical staff want to stay technical, don’t want to move into the management and
communications role of CIOs. Is this a problem? If so, how do we motivate strong
technical staff to lead?
Some technical staff have trouble being seen by others as more than a technician,
even if they want to lead
Where do CIOs report in the org structure? Where should they report?
o If not at cabinet level, need good access to that level
2. IT Governance
Four questions
 Is there a standard for governance in higher ed?
 Does IT governance have to model institutional governance?
 How does IT governance affect the model Greg Jackson portrayed?
 What is the role and strength of faculty in IT governance?
Notes
Qualities of good governance
 Strong governance – one that will make even difficult decisions
 Have to address the fear that IT governance always means change in organization towards
centralization
 Model – cost containment drives evolving to a new governance model – more centralized
 Bottom up or top down, not both
 Grassroots:
o Communication
o Ownership
o Engagement
o Collaboration
o Collegial
o Holistic
 IT governance engaging board of trustees – in a small college, works very well
IT Governance linked to institutional planning / governance capacity
 Lack of strategic planning is a problem – no common vision
 Governance created for one specific system only
 Fighting to get governance in place
 Committees in faculty senate; enterprise business partners
 No IT governance historically. President/Provost makes decision
 No campus plan, no IT strategic plan—guidance committee from school IT Director—
guiding role
 Campus and IT plans not really linked
o Admin government; academic government
o IT policy committee of IT faculty council
 Does not make difficult decisions for fear of fallout
 Lack of coordination
Evolution of governance structures
 Do you even have governance structure?
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Developed steering committees; user groups evolve into IT governance
University wide info systems group – receive and review
Major recommendations about systems
Sets priorities
Steering committees for systems
Smaller institutions easier
 Small institute = easier
 School of medicine – small institute inside large institute
 Small college works very well
 Small institutions = easier
 process feeds budget
IT governance helps promote strategic value
 IT governance – wrong words – about the mission , not IT
 About air cover, transparency,
 Being ―at the table‖ with thought leaders –it’s about influence
 CIO need touchy-feely skills
 Challenge to engage community on strategy
3. Open Source
Control/Customization
 Business applications – how to control
 Is open source controllable
 How will we manage and control (locally) the implementation, and can open source help change
campus culture?
 How will we get support for specific things we do to customize?
 Is open source supportable (risk management)
OS and Cloud
 How will open source compare to cloud sourcing
 How open do you go? Hosted? SAAS?
OS opportunities
 Opportunities for academic and learning systems
 How can open source options respond to costs of commercial ERPs, upgrades, customization
needs, staffing turnover, and skill gaps?
 When are the best open source opportunities to affect institutional culture
 Collaboration and community aspects of open source are appealing – neither of which are
associated w/commercial products
 How can community source be ―part of the answer‖ to our ERP challenges?
 Can a college use open source as a lever to ―green‖ the campus?
 Upgrades – what opportunities does open source offer?
o How to reduce the costs of upgrades
o Options for long term flexibility
OS vs. commercial
 Will open source quality be better than commercial
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How is the implementation process different from commercial OTS products?
Is governance different?
What are the decision making criteria?
What campus communications and collaborations are key?
Can open source force us from our Oracle dependency and million dollar vice grip?
Perception that open source is well suited for ―smaller‖ well-defined functionality, eg help desk,
financials. Student systems are more complex – is open source viable for this?
How does open source provide a strategy for moving off legacy systems, as well as
oracle/peoplesoft
Interesting to see commercial vendors enter this space- such as sungardHE community source
community and development model
Business Case
 How do we make the business case for open choice, how do we ―buy‖ open source (procurement)
 Open source changes the business of the university
 During these difficult economic times- what is the likelihood or priority of getting funding for
multimillion dollar implementations?
 Vendor relationsips are less strategic- no new value added functionity- revenue/profits based on
maintenance costs..higher ed has lost leverage with commercial vendors such as oracle
 How do you know if open source makes business sense for your institution?
 What are realistic implementation and support costs?
Specific questions
 Update on Kuali- is it a viable option, esp for institutions w/home grown systems?
 What is important to know about the difference between open source apps, eg apache vs.
community source applications, eg Kuali?
 Who is considering the Kuali student module?
 Several schools need an enterprise grants management solution- what is the state of the open
source offierings?
 Is open source an alternative for schools that seek to separate from state system ERPs?
 The community’s shared knowledge and experience is very valuable
 What are the open source options and issues for the academic enterprise – what is adoption rate
for LMS solutions, eg moodle, sakai
 What open source options are available or in development for library systems? Kuali OLE open
library initiative?
 Who are the major contributors and leaders for this space?
4. Portfolio & Project Management
a. Project discipline helps accountability
i. PMI helps w/ accountability at all levels in the organization and increased
visibility
ii. PMI helps us remember some aspects not always top of mind: communication
plan, risk management, etc. – even if we don’t use PMI
iii. Importance of communication and marketing
b. Ongoing tension between operational and project
i. Challenges of living in world w/ concurrent operational and project work – rarely
have 100% project resources,
ii. Success depends on dedicating resources, but hard with no depth / backup
iii. Greatest success when dedicating resources to projects – nearly impossible
iv. Consolidated task lists for staff incl both operational and project
v. Project vs ongoing always a struggle
c. PM can begin to surface other organizational issues
i. Introducing structured PM can reveal other problems – management in general,
governance, time mgmt. etc
ii. How do organizations prioritize projects?
iii. Importance of governance and portfolio management to manage requests,
prioritization, budgeting, etc.
iv. PM and PMO must be tied to IT governance
d. IT as institutional experts in Project Management
i. IT seen as experts in project management – will end up leading projects that we
should not necessarily lead because functional counterparts lack PM skill
ii. PMOs will end up doing projects for other areas
iii. IT services as model for PM in institution
e. Need flexible approaches
i. What projects rise to level of PM?
ii. Need flexible, expandable, pragmatic approaches and methodologies, not all
projects require the same degree of rigor
iii. PMI is rigorous – doesn’t fit higher ed well
iv. Projects are not just about IT
v. Not IT projects, enterprise projects
vi. Not IT projects anymore
vii. Grab bag of PM operational issues
viii. Need dedicated PM resources
ix. Dedicated necessary
x. PM tools and skills
xi. Tools used: @Task, MSProjectSEver, Team Dynamics, FootPrints, HITHub
xii. PM needs to be able to work with all kinds of people and not also be tech lead
xiii. What are the best tools of the trade?
xiv. What software tools do people use?
xv. Project easier than portfolio management
xvi. Post implementation reviews are very worthwhile
xvii. Team collaborations work best
xviii. PMOs not that common (offices)
xix. Very few orgs have PMOs
xx. Functional leads are crucial
xxi. How do you start a PMO?
Development opportunity
 Rotating staff through projects can be development opportunity]
5. Mobile App Strategy
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Educational vs Services
Vendor vs Build
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Vendor innovation or lack thereof
Vendors – too slow?
Support – which devices?
Infrastructure
Security
Chasing the students
UCLA’s html5 might be the answer
What info to push to devices
What do students need?
Apps vs moblile web
Type of school will drive the strategy
AUDIENCES
Student / alumni / prospective students
How to select applications
Bandwidth
Virtual desktop appls
Discussion Interval 1
Safety and security of applications
Students don't like interactive apps they want alerts
Not interested in middle ware because of the annual costs.
Things are moving away from the app to the web platform
Deciding what mobile framework to go with? Open source versus vendor based
How to convince management to invest in mobile platform. Possibly getting somebody from
the outside to speak.
Mobile strategy task force?
Agreements with the CS dept to build apps.
Involve students and invite them in because what they want may not be interactive in nature
for example all they care about maybe alerts bus timings emergency messages etc..
Not much has been seen in the area of using mobile devices like flickers to enhance classroom
discussions.
6. Enterprise Security and Compliance
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Mobile App security
Security in the cloud including social networking
Password policies / session logouts
Shared resource for smaller schools – (EDUCAUSE sponsored)
Training how to train on line community esp faculty
Security audits – who, how often etc.
Compliance to state, local and federal laws
7. ERP Implementations or Replacements
Integration
 It’s about integration. Tools are there now. And BI
 Best of breed vs. integrated ERP. Good middleware is key to integration
 Best of breed vs. integration
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End users
 Needs of end-users drive project (not biz units)
 Is IT the best place for resources and drivers or should resources be in other departments
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Change management/Customization
 Change management - tech and business
 Boutique culture
 Techniques for avoiding customization
 Will we lose flexibility
 What to do with processes (1000’s) that cant be accommodated
 How can you deal with los of content in a culture that judges?
 How do we manage culture change – how to bring people along
 Changing role of IT – users to be responsible
 Strategies for transitioning from mainframe and older tech
 How do you market/propose a different way of life. Change management
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Issues
 Difficult to prioritize infrastructure projects
 Governance questions for infrastructure
 Business environment
 How can schools cooperate to gain learning
 Open source seems risky
 Succession planning (esp mainframe)
 Moving mature ERP to hosted to lose data center, etc
 Senior leadership doesn’t understand dynamics of cloud cost more b/c managed service
 Tradeoff between vendors/profit and risks of going collectively
 Barrier is skill sets, financial, training issue
 How to decide RFP or open source
 How do you keep the place flying when you go from old to implementing new (issues, threats,
cost freeze)
 When vendors consolidate – dictate roadmap
 Is status quo OK? Vendors pushing 20 yr old tech vs costs
 Is conventional wisdom wrong?
Finance
 How do we finance?
 Funding challenges can drive culture change
8. Cloud
Functionality
 Can you rent applications vs. desktop virtualization
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Storage is one of the easiest cloud services, private and public
Continuum – unique will remain local
It is all about the service – and meeting requirements
Advantages/Collaboration
 Bribery – consortiums can help lower costs – what is role of CFO in incentivizing/$?
 Opportunities for delivery services for mobile congruent
 Multiple opportunities , DR, Business continuity
 Cost effective and the way for the small to deliver 24 x 7 x 365
 NSF data management policy actually encourages shared services
 A university system can be a cloud!
 NACUBO needs to be a partner in discussions – business professionals see it as ―cost.‖
Business case
 What differentiates what is private and public cloud?
 Value add.
Trust
 Key question: Where do you trust putting your data?
 Trust issues exist – central IT is often too slow to respond.
Issues
Compliance/Security
 Are there enough sources – enough critical mass for options, eg HIPAA
 Challenges: overcome security, compliance issues
 FERPA, PII, need to be considered.
 CIO’s are going to end up being lawyers.
 Does lack of controls mean changing policy?
 How can CIO deal with the larger compliance issues
 Merging faculty, staff, alumni in the cloud creates issues with record retention.
 How to address security and contracting.
Costs
 Cloud creates more reliance on central IT. Need to avoid costs
 We need to understand total costs of existing services to evaluate cloud options.
 Cloud storage is low hanging, but total costs need to be explored.
Culture/buy-in/adoption/impact
 Opt-in, incentivizing, what are support needs, lots of questions have to be answered.
 Provosts need to be engaged, but they do no want to be bothered.
 Cloud is impacting academics, eg Pearson
 Need to address cultural aspects of shared and common services
 Cloud sourcing in practice isn’t here yet. Service/vendor performance an issue
Professional Development
 How do we help our people transition?
 How do we move IT staffs from techies to cloud architects, managers
 How do we develop our IT staff to handle the change to cloud sourcing?
How to start/Best practices
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Using existing traditional examples, creating a template for requests for cloud requests
Need to inventory existing outsourced services.
Looking into general cloud providers to test the waters.
Leverage system-level cooperation.
Make sure you utilize multiple sources – multiple vendors, private and public cloud, etc.
Back out strategies are important.
Important to talk to human beings – begun dialogue
9. Data Center Strategies
Sharing space
 Consolidation and governance
 Legal issues sharing space
 Issues with sharing space b/t schools,
 What unit or department is responding for funding data center infrastructure
Growth/strategy
 Growth with storage demands
 Do we invest or outsource collocate
 Short term gains through efficiency
 Operating goals
 Should a university be in this business (data center)
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DR-BC
Staff Skills
 Staff skill sets from SLA contract admin vs OS admin
 Staff costs savings due to consolidation hard to quantify
Models/important variables
 Enterprise vs. Research space demands
 Size of institution
 Cost of power and metrics
 Looking outside is not always an option
 Geographic area a large consideration in assessing options
 Data center is actually becoming more open
 Challenges with density due to virtualization
 Physical access control evaluated and considered (virtualization, consolidation)
 DR site considered as collocation or cloud option vs building new data center
 Moving from Capex to Opex as a strategic financial decision
 Storage/network costs key consideration
 State data centers consolidating/state options not that great outsourced to another vendor
 Politics can play a key role here
 State virtualization/cloud offering (J Bottom @ Clemson)
 Sustainability an issue or driving force. What’s the role of IT here.
 Some institutions costs are double the national coverage
 Short term strategy to drive efficiencies in existing space.
 A Vendor at table stated outsourcing data centers is a booming industry
 What strategy should one utilize to move/outsource to a collocated or cloud service
10. Identity Management
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a. Selling the benefits of Identity Management – Help people understand it
Bribery
Conspiracy
Propaganda
Dealing with Vendors and the Cloud
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What are the corporate positions on IdM
How do we get vendors to support our collective message
Balance between security and control
How does it work with private vs public clouds
What are the authentication issues – audit and security for the cloud
How do we work with cloud providers
Management Issues
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Business Processes
Control of identity by functional groups and what that means
business agility Consolidation/merging of identification across multiple systems
Scaling
Business agility – leveraging
Intersection of multiple identifiers – social network gateways
Where should business roles be stored and how to streamline – data standards
How do we integrate across all different roles
Use of portal
Multiple sign-ons
Merging identities of people across system
Roles and responsibilities
Business processes
Governance questions – business roles stored and developed where --Idea – data stewards, data
custodians
Assurance
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What is assurance and how to get started
Risk mitigation
Multiple stakeholders
Identity vetting
Higher levels of assurance – flexibility
Credentials
A standard is needed like InCommon service provider
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InCommon – silver certification – a moving target
Trust relationships
Identity providers - service providers
Assurance – risk based approach
Identity proofing
Controls over credentials