Customer-focused Coach as Technology Leadership Model

In this episode, Joe Gottlieb speaks with Sean Moriarty, Chief Technology Officer at State University of New York, Oswego, about how a coach-style leadership model grounded in trust, consistency, and human connection has shaped his approach to technology in higher ed. Sean shares how his dual reporting relationship to both the Provost and CFO enables broad, strategic alignment across campus priorities, and how his team’s investment in management training and innovation grants continues to pay dividends—especially through the pandemic and into the AI era.

Listeners will gain insight into the power of building a “coalition of the willing,” fostering early adopters, and grounding digital strategy in user-centric design. Sean’s story illustrates how personal leadership philosophies, institutional mission, and regional transformation can converge to create resilient and adaptive digital ecosystems.

Our host, Joe Gottlieb, President and CTO of Higher Digital, brings decades of experience in higher ed technology leadership to each episode.

References: 

Sean Moriarty

State University of New York, Oswego

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Transcript

Sean Moriarty: 0:00

Now, I happen to sit both on provost council and on business council because I report, my direct report is the provost, but I also have a dotted line to the chief financial officer and I meet with them both every other week. But sitting on provost council and sitting on business council are just two different conversations that we're having that support one another, but are just totally different sides of the university. But both are integral in terms of what we're working on. So having good trusting relationships with those people is critical. And I just find for me, having those regular meetings with the provost and with our chief financial officer, really around the academics and what we're trying to accomplish, but also like where the budget is and how we're gonna go and implement and what the priorities from the financial side are, that we're going to go and need to navigate are really great opportunities.

Joe Gottlieb: 1:02

That's Sean Moriarty, Chief Technology Officer for State University of New York, Oswego, articulating the benefits of having a dual reporting relationship with the provost and CFO. We talked about how this structure helps IT partner with different groups of leaders focused on the specifics of their departments. and how Sean's customer-focused coach style of leadership has helped him maintain an agile IT ecosystem through the pandemic and now into the age of AI. 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, 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 Sean Moriarty, Chief Technology Officer at State University of New York, Oswego. Sean, welcome to

Sean Moriarty: 2:31

Thanks, Joe. I'm happy to be here. What do you want to talk about today?

Joe Gottlieb: 2:33

Well, I'm glad you asked, Sean. I want to talk about your thoughts on customer-focused coach as technology leadership model. But first, I'd like you to share a bit of your background and your personal journey and how it led you to your work in higher ed.

Sean Moriarty: 2:53

Thanks, Joe. I was born into an academic family. My father taught sports administration, and he also happened to be athletic director at the university for 30 years. So the academic setting was always part of my life. Back in the 60s, when I was just a kid, we had some great basketball teams winning five Canadian national championships over seven years. And really, at that time, I thought I would grow up to be a math teacher and a basketball coach. But in time, I went on, I was a college athlete, a nationally ranked fencer, and my coach made a big impact on me. And not only was he a great coach, but he was also an excellent teacher. And then during my fencing career, I was lucky enough to coach with him. And I was the assistant coach at Windsor for six years. And during that period of time, I also started working at the University of Windsor in IT services and rose through the ranks along the way I got my MBA. And really, over that time, it helped me develop the philosophy I had when I became a manager eventually, and really kind of setting myself in my view of my job as a coach. So I arrived at Oswego in spring 2013, and I was lucky enough when I started here at this new institution, we already had a strong team, and I was able to focus less on making them a great team, I think, and started really the practice of sending managers to management training.

Joe Gottlieb: 4:30

Wow, it's a great background. Just the fact that you were on a campus because of your dad, and your dad was athletic director during a time when you had some great success with the basketball team at that school, just being immersed in that combination of of setting. And then you wind up earlier in your career at Windsor getting another mixture of those things going. And so just the fact that those influences were your life, I can feel it. And then you get your MBA, right? So you embraced the real importance of some business management fundamentals that informed your career. So I know we're going to have a lot of fun with this. So let's dive in. I want to start this conversation by letting you summarize the important but different influences that the last two presidents of SUNY Oswego have had on you and your work there.

Sean Moriarty: 5:24

So we had the same president at the university for 26 years, which is a tremendously long time, as I'm sure anyone in higher ed knows. So Deborah F. Stanley, she served from 1995 to 2021. Very forward- thinking individual. She later served as a SUNY chancellor, the interim chancellor for about two and a half years. And she was a great believer in technology. And she viewed technology as a dream. So I happened to be in a meeting once when I had only been here for about four or five months and she was talking to faculty and she was really talking about how important she felt that we were a digital campus and how we embrace technology and pass that on to our students. So we really started from that point creating the plan that we did. We created a strategic plan.

Sean Moriarty: 6:24

Started in 2014, completed the plan in 2015. And I'd say it was a typical in the sense that we really focused on our customers, had four different areas in terms of going, how we would support academics, how we would support the business aspect, how CTS would work together and make sure we had the infrastructure and security, and the fourth one, how we would govern and be innovative. And we used a number of guiding principles, which was really how I looked at our team and becoming a client- centered group of people who worked with all aspects of the university. We collaborate and cooperate with everyone that we work with. We communicate relentlessly so that people know what's going on and that we're really being results driven organization. Now, after the pandemic, like Deborah retired, and so now we have a new president who has really, I would say, a very bold vision that we just rolled out a strategic plan in the last three weeks, basically. And it's focused on growing our institution, connecting with our region, and thriving and creating an environment for our faculty, staff, and students to do their best work as we move forward.

Sean Moriarty: 7:45

This area is changing. There's a good chance Syracuse is about to go through a growth period as we build a new chip plant that's valued at $100 billion. And so we started as a teacher's college. So we can really feel like we can go and take our strengths, whether it be like the teacher's college component, the mental health, the psychology programs that we have, starting a nursing school, social work. And we have what's called Vision 4040 in terms of how we're going to move towards 2040 and raise the number of credentials that we give out at our school by about 40,000 in the next decade, which would really be doubling what our impact is right now.

Joe Gottlieb: 8:37

Fascinating. And it's amazing to see how... The region is changing and you're starting to embrace that. The timing seems right with your 4040 vision. That obviously will lead to an ongoing strategic plan execution for SUNY Oswego that your new digital strategy will have to embrace and continue to support and collaborate with. I know we'll get more into that. You said something really interesting about when you were talking about your background that you sent your team to management leadership training. And I really want to talk about that. So sending your IT leadership to management training, I'm really curious how it was received, how long it took before the team really appreciated it and adopted those key principles. But I'm also really interested to know how this injection of management training helped you to establish your personal leadership style at SUNY Oswego.

Sean Moriarty: 9:40

So, actually, I became a manager. I was probably around 40 years old. And... You know, I had just actually finished my MBA at that point. And I wondered, how do I go about starting? I was lucky and I had a mentor at the University of Windsor as I moved into management training. But I also started listening to this podcast, Manager Tools. And really, they covered the fundamentals and what it is to be a manager and, you know, the different skills that you needed to have, but also the different processes, which is something that really appeals to all of us as we move, you know, all of us IT folks. So when I think of moving into management positions, people get there by doing a great job at what they're doing. But that doesn't necessarily mean that you'll be a great manager. Being a manager is a whole different skill set. It really needs to be taken, you know, people need to be coached in terms of how to go and to move forward. And when you look back at the most important person really in any workers, you know, day-to-day interactions is usually their boss. So we really wanted to go and as people move into management and we wanted to go and have really a consistent way of handling things. So when I first came, we did ITSM training probably in the first six months for all of the staff and move them through that. And it got us all speaking in the same consistent way. IT manager manner. Then we went and sent all the management team to manager training. And actually it was very well received. People really appreciated, you know, that we would go and invest in them, but we also create this consistent way of managing our staff, whether it be how we did goal setting with them, how we would have consistent communication in terms of having one-on-ones, how we handled our one-on-ones, how we went and checked up on the results and look for towards continuous improvement. So I think going through and doing that and having that consistent manner really helped to bring us together. And it also helps both in staff, I think, satisfaction, but also, you know, managers feeling confident in what they're doing and... Being a manager is a hard job and you haven't necessarily been prepared for it. It also means that we have your back and we're going to work together and I'm going to go and help you to become the best manager you can. Just as I would send, as we roll out new services, we send people to training on the technical aspects. We're also investing in their management careers as they move forward.

Joe Gottlieb: 12:39

Seems so fundamental, but I know a lot of organizations don't make that investment, right? They don't take the opportunity to anticipate that gap and that you pointed out so wisely, which is you get promoted typically by doing something well, and that was a specialized thing typically, and you get promoted into something that has to understand the broader view so that you can manage the person that might be in your last role and but all of your former peers, or perhaps you're in a different part of the organization, doesn't matter. It's a different animal entirely. So it's great that you've seized upon that. Okay, so once you had those management fundamentals in place, I'm now going back to that president, Deborah Stanley, that was there for a really long time and helped you to create your first digital strategy. How did you leverage these management fundamentals to create a digital ecosystem around that first digital strategy?

Sean Moriarty: 13:41

Yeah. So I really liked the thinking that we had around an ecosystem in terms of going and creating this strong technical area where people can go and utilize it to do their jobs and work efficiently. You know, so that part of it is having the right digital tools to help them, but also to create this method and way for them to go into innovate and be, you know, go and keep pushing tools. So when we have a school like ours that wants to be a digital campus, I think going and creating this environment where people can go and be at the leading edge of work. So one of the things I'd learned in business school was Roger's theory of innovation, which really talks about how new technologies are integrated into different areas of an institution. It can be both like Apple goes and introduces something new, or it can be bringing in new ideas. So we've really tried to do that by focusing on finding the faculty who want to go and to be at the leading edge, give them innovation grants in order to go and to work on what they're doing, and then see how we can go and have that lead to other areas and have it grow in the campus. So there's a few areas that I give examples of what we do. And we call it really like going and finding the coalition of the willing and then growing that group. So one thing that we've done is digital accessibility fellows and we allow faculty to go and to spend a year and to dive into what it means to create digital accessible content and how it goes and allows them in essence to go in to spend time with universal design learning techniques really at the time. So we started this program in 2018, which was really ideal for us. We had seven faculty run through the program in 2019, and then we grew the program by another five people in 2020, just as the pandemic hit. And we were able to really go back and have these 12 people to go back. And they were in different units throughout the school. And they could be a resource for people as we moved into digital learning and really helped our instructional designers to help and prepare people. So at this point, we've moved to, we probably have about 25 people through the whole program. And it's really been able to help us, particularly as we move towards Title II.

Sean Moriarty: 16:42

The latest example is AI Fellows. So AI is really moving quickly, and the pace of change has just changed, ramped up so quickly. We started a program here that's run by our Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching. We have a couple of people running the program who are really strong in terms of their AI skills. And we offered a program who would like to go and work with them for a semester. And they're responsible for going and infusing it in their class somehow. And there's a couple of ways that you can do that, either assignments and what you're doing, you know, and how you do it. 25 people. 25 faculty decided they wanted to be part of the program, which is just outstanding, really, that we can have that infusion right at the beginning of the program right now. So and it's really good in the sense like we have first year faculty that are going and teaching students. And so they can go and talk about how AI is going to be really part of the university, what expectations are, what it means to academic integrity. And then when we get to the third and fourth year students, uh, uh, faculty that are teaching those classes, they'll go and look at how it's going to go and change their discipline. What kind of skill set should students be leaving the institution with and how's it going to go and prepare them with these jobs? So I think one of the things we really focus on when I think back to Roger's theory of innovation is how we go with the innovators and the early adopters and use those people to drag the rest of the campus along and really try not to get involved with that group of people who are anti-AI or anti-using the latest thing. And in the innovation model, that would be the laggards. And certainly we don't want to let the laggards lead. We don't want to go, we want to be cognizant of what they're asking, be aware of what their concerns are, and then go and use these people who want to be the early users of the technology to go and to address all those items and then drag everyone through.

Joe Gottlieb: 18:57

I love the reference to a coalition of the willing. It's just a great concept to embrace how change needs to happen typically. It's really hard to change when the willing are not part of the change and really helping to a broader adoption of a change for an organization. And I also love the reference to Roger's theory of innovation, which for some may be unfamiliar, it certainly was a precursor to Geoffrey Moore's Crossing the Chasm. And they even traded some perspectives, I think, in the end, maybe some of them a little bit sensitively charged. But Geoffrey Moore is a neighbor since I live here in Silicon Valley. But both produced very useful insights into the way that people and organizations adopt technology, which has become so important for us to heed and understand. I have a question about the grants. You mentioned in the first example, you made a reference to grants. And I'm just wondering if that has remained a method that you've used to keep stimulating, not just those that are willing, but creating some funds that might make it sort of financially and organizationally more viable to do new things. Is that something that's an active part of your playbook?

Sean Moriarty: 20:26

Yeah. So we put aside about $25,000 a year. This would be separate than the other two programs I talked about. But to allow faculty to go and to ask for something they might want to do in their class. And what we really look for is ways that interdisciplinary projects are really one of our main focuses here at Oswego. And so if there's interdisciplinary projects where people might have some technology that will help them to go and implement something. So, I mean, we've started with things. The first time we got lynda.com, which is now, of course, LinkedIn Learning, was through an innovation grant for a couple of faculty who wanted to go and integrate it and, in essence, flip their classes. Okay. And then we just built from there as more faculty used it. And it became really an integral part of what we're doing. But we've put all kinds of little technology. I remember actually a project from last year was a virtual reality project that was in one of our web courses. And the professor there, who's an art professor in graphic design, went and brought the virtual reality into the classroom. And all the students had access to the equipment and could just go build from there. So really, we've tried to go and see where faculty are doing something that's innovative that we don't necessarily have here at Oswego that can really help and move the students along.

Joe Gottlieb: 22:02

Fantastic. All right. I want to throw a wrench in the machine here and talk about COVID because we've pre-shadowed all of this, but you have your digital ecosystem in place that was built on your approach that was staffed by folks that had been to some management training. So they're really employing those methods inside this ecosystem. And then the pandemic hits. How did the pandemic impact your ecosystem and how did you navigate those impacts?

Sean Moriarty: 22:34

When the pandemic hit, we were lucky in the sense that we were able to build on the technologies we had. We didn't need to add anything. We already had Zoom. We had the VPN. We had the Accessibility Fellow. So we had really the people and the resources. We didn't have it in the scale we needed, but we were able to scale up. So I think that was a big advantage in terms of what we didn't have to go and learn new things. We just, in essence, had to go and implement at a whole different scale. Now, but one of the difference was pre-pandemic, like being CIO, I would generally feel like I'm living a couple years ahead of the organization and feel I know where we're going, technology, how the team's working. Once the pandemic hit, it felt like it was day to day in terms of where we're going. And it took a while to move out of that. And I'm going to say, you know, as we move through the pandemic, we're very lucky and people, you know, grew our ability to go in to run courses digitally was good. We had good faculty in order that would go. The instructional designers were wonderful. Like everyone just pitched in, like you would see everywhere in higher ed. What's kind of interesting now is that I kind of feel we're moving in the same direction. Like the pace of change is, has only accelerated and AI is just the latest example of that. So AI just hit, it feels to me like Thanksgiving 2023. You know, you go home for Christmas break, you come back for the start of the spring 2024 semester and like AI is everywhere and the whole world has changed. But I think this is something that we need to get used to because this is the way the world is going to move from now on as we move forward. So having everything set in our base layer, our infrastructure, our team, those kinds of things need to be set and that can really help to have the agility that we're going to need to respond to the new challenges we face.

Joe Gottlieb: 24:51

It's true. This is the way. And it's also, I love... hearing the fact that there was some great serendipity in something that you had done with that innovation grant to do universal design for accessibility in courses that became so useful to you as you went through the pandemic. And I'm hearing more and more of these stories. Obviously, everyone has the story of how shattering it was, how challenging it was to reinvent many things to become a day-to-day thing until you got through it, right? Or got some rhythm going. But there are also some great serendipity stories that really were earned. Serendipity does not mean to take away the fact that they were earned. You were proactive in putting something in place and it came in very, very handy. So great example of that.

Joe Gottlieb: 25:47

We'll be right back.

Emily Rudin: 25:50

Hi, I'm Emily Rudin, Chief Client Officer at Hire Digital and proud sponsor of the Transformed podcast. Higher Digital is a full-service, product-agnostic consulting company providing strategic, functional, and technical expertise to help colleges and universities navigate digital transformation successfully. We believe true transformation isn't about forcing change. It's about unlocking the potential already within your institution. Our expert teams specialize in creating tailored solutions for your unique challenges, enabling meaningful and measurable progress. Higher education is evolving faster than ever. How is your institution adapting? Let's start the conversation today. Visit higher.digital to learn more.

Joe Gottlieb: 26:38

And now, back to our program.

Sean Moriarty: 26:45

I've got one more for you, Joe, just to share with you. So in the December of 2019, we had our first disaster day. And so we take our CTS team and we create a disaster. And the disaster that we created was somebody driving into our data center and what effect that would have on our service delivery. And we spent about four or five hours. And I got to say, the team came away with a number of takeaways and that they didn't you know they said oh we depend too much on our the way that we authenticate here on campus ,we don't have any backup, and we don't have like a multiple path, and I have to tell you the team was so proactive and within two months they had gone through about half of the issues that we had. And then that's where COVID hit. And we never would have made it through that part of COVID if we had not had that disaster day, which has become part of our annual, like December, January, Christmas kind of planning time over winter break. It was just very serendipitous, just as you say.

Joe Gottlieb: 27:59

This... Great. I'm glad you added that example because I feel like I'm on a little bit of a treasure hunt here now. So it's going through this story. So now I'm going to turn our attention to another area where I want to have a little fun with this, right? You've told me that you feel lucky to have two bosses. Often, I hear the opposite, that two bosses can create a difficult to manage tension. But your two bosses, the provost and the CFO, allow you to do more in the organization. So let's put some substance behind that. How do you leverage this dual reporting relationship to accomplish that which is expected from IT and frankly also elevate the role of... You made the reference to CTS. I imagine that stands for...

Sean Moriarty: 28:46

Campus Technology Services.

Joe Gottlieb: 28:50

Yeah.

Sean Moriarty: 28:51

Yes.

Joe Gottlieb: 28:51

So it really can elevate the role of CTS there at SUNY Oswego.

Sean Moriarty: 28:57

Yeah, so... IT is integral, really, to running everything inside the institution. And really, there's multiple ways to tap into an organization. So some universities might have a VP of IT who is at the president's cabinet and executive table and can integrate technology at that level. But at our institution, and it's something in our size, I think it's more common to have the CIO report to a VP. But my concern with that is that IT could become siloed and focused in on the issues of that part of the organization. Now, I happen to sit both on provost council and on business council because I report, my direct report is the provost. But I also have a dotted line to the chief financial officer and I meet with them both every other week. But sitting on provost council and sitting on business council are just two different conversations that we're having that support one another, but are just totally different sides of the university. But both are integral in terms of what we're working on and how we go and, you know, really go and develop what we're doing with IT at the university. So having good trusting relationships with those people is critical. But there's also the VPs of alumni and development at our place. We have student affairs and then we have enrollment management. So I think, we're able to go and integrate that teamwork and work with all of them. There's different conversations that we have with everyone, but somehow you're going to have to go and find a way to be plugged into those conversations. And I just find for me, having those regular meetings with the provost and with our chief financial officer, really around the academics and what we're trying to accomplish, but also like where the budget is and how we're going to go and implement and what the priorities from the financial side are that we're going to go and need to navigate are really great opportunities for us to go.

Joe Gottlieb: 31:15

This is fascinating. So I'm going to double click on this a little bit because oftentimes I talk to CIOs about the importance of being in the cabinet and reporting to the president being part of the president's cabinet. And it is at least, one way to be present in the deliberations of the institution that might be informed by your technology leader such that those deliberations actually can consider trade-offs that might relate to technology or the way that the institution operates with processes that are dependent upon certain systems and certain data flows, et cetera, et cetera. But what you've unveiled here, I think, is the nature of the fact that those two different councils that you sit on are actually probably more useful than typical cabinet meetings for getting into the, I won't say the weeds, but the necessary details and trade-offs of how the institution spends money, how the institution serves the student, how the institution stays aligned by devoting its finite resources to things that the entire institution is going to benefit from, consistent with strategy and mission, etc. Do I have that right? I'd love to give you a chance to react to that.

Sean Moriarty: 32:54

I think that is really, really key to what you're talking about. So, I mean, there's multiple ways of doing and depending on your, you know, the level of control that you feel you need to have. But I also look at it as a given that this is what we have. But I like it like this. And I do think it's really going to the meetings and having the relationships with the people at that level you know every dean's on provost council and our research persons uh they're our librarian and then when you get to business council we got facilities and we've got the bursar's office and we've got um really our uh sustainability office so all of those people are at the table and Ii can go and connect with them but we also have all of my my director's team that go and some of them are in some of those other meetings as well. But you're right, like going and having that understanding of the institution is really what helps us to go and to focus the technology and the projects and the prioritization that we need.

Joe Gottlieb: 34:08

All right, let's bring this to a close. In summary, what three takeaways can we offer our listeners on the topic of customer-focused coach? as technology leadership model?

Sean Moriarty: 34:19

Well, Joe, when I think the number one thing that I have is the more things change, the more you need to stay the same. And as we go, we've been a higher education institution for over 160 years by focusing on student success and enriching the lives of the people who came here. And as the world changes, this remains our mission in terms of going and how we implement new tools, new technology, but we're still going and delivering students and preparing them for the world that we have. So staying true to who we are I think is my number one takeaway. The second one is to invest in people, both the staff that are delivering the IT services and our end users who want to utilize technology in the new and innovative ways to reach their goals. And investing in these people and this coalition of the willing, I think really goes to leading to success and developing the use of technology inside the institution. And the last one is what we just touched on, is I think developing trust and having sound infrastructure, responsive processes, but having strong relationships and developing trust with your stakeholders and allows you to pivot to the work that needs to be done in the present to reach your goals.

Joe Gottlieb: 35:41

Sean, great summary. Thank you so much for joining me today.

Sean Moriarty: 35:45

Well, thanks a lot, Joe. I really enjoyed being here

Joe Gottlieb: 35:47

And thanks to our guests for 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. 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.