#CIORadio | Lois Brooks (UW-Madison) on Balancing Priorities Like a CIO (live @ Educause 2022)

On today’s episode of the Illumination by Modern Campus podcast, EvoLLLution editor-in-chief and host Amrit Ahluwalia was joined by Lois Brooks to discuss meeting the needs of diverse audiences and competing priorities through technology without compromising security. This episode was recorded live at Modern Campus's Educause 2022 booth in Denver.

Transcript

(00:07) Amrit Ahluwalia: Welcome to Illumination by Modern Campus, the leading podcast focused on transformation and change in the higher education space. My name is Amrit Ahluwalia. I'm the host of the podcast and Editor-in-Chief of The EvoLLLution. In this episode, we continue our CIO radio series where we speak with technology leaders about the trends and challenges reshaping our increasingly digital world. In today's episode, we speak with the University of Wisconsin Madison, Vice Provost and CIO, Lois Brooks. This episode was recorded live at EDUCAUSE, and our conversation explored the strategic role technology leaders are playing at their respective institutions.

Lois Brooks, welcome to the Illumination Podcast. Thank you so much for joining me.

(00:46) Lois Brooks: Thanks for asking me. It's great to be here.

(00:49) Amrit Ahluwalia: Absolutely. Well, we're recording live at EDUCAUSE in Denver, so please do excuse any background noise. But we so appreciate you taking the time out. Now I'm curious how's the conference been for you so far? We're about halfway through the first day.

(01:01) Lois Brooks: It's great. It's so nice to see friends and colleagues who engage in freeform conversations. The energy here is terrific. 

(01:08) Amrit Ahluwalia: Yes, absolutely. Well it's actually, I'll tell you. I'm a little blown away by some of the booths in and around here. And this is coming from, we're sitting at a booth with a full podcast booth set up in it. But there really is—it's an incredible environment. Now you've been a tech leader in the higher ed space for the last decade. You've been involved with IT leadership at R1 institution since ‘99. How has the role of institutional IT leaders evolved over the course of your career?

(01:35) Lois Brooks: Well, you have to start with how It has evolved in the institution over the years. And at this point, it's a part of everything we do. It’s a part of teaching and research, business process, student success, athletic events, communication, collaboration, work in the communities. It's everywhere. And so what that means is that the role of the IT leader is now in every part of the business. Advocating, listening, making solutions come into play. Trying to help the institution find that balance between innovation, which is our hallmark, but then risk and privacy and those kinds of emerging issues. So it's really more part of the business than we've ever been.

(02:18) Amrit Ahluwalia: I'm curious about this because the University of Wisconsin, Madison it's big, it’s a traditional institution. It's steeped in history, and we are not an industry that's known for—how do we put this nicely—being fast moving, being responsive. But as an IT leader, there's an inclination, there's a natural alignment with keeping pace with what's happening in the world around us. How do you balance those sort of competing priorities of staying true to the mission and the values and the focus of the core institution while at the same time being oriented towards what's happening in the world around us and what's coming next from a technological perspective?

(03:01) Lois Brooks: Well, so there are a couple questions in there, and we are a traditional university. We're coming into our 175th year. We're very much, we do things across the state and across the world, but really do have a core center in Madison. So that's one piece of it. And higher ed is slow to change it’s activities on one hand. But on the other hand, think about research. So my university does 1.4 billion a year in research. We're doing cutting edge work across the earth sciences, the medical sciences, human health and wellbeing, pulling data in and out of telescopes. We have infrastructure buried 400 feet under the ice shelf and Antarctica tracking neutrinos. So, we're doing this cutting-edge work in research and that's moving at the pace of the innovation of our scholars, meaning it's flying. There are no bounds because there's no bound to their innovation where both inventing new technology and our research enterprise, but moving as quickly as we can to keep up with what our research community needs to be able to continue their innovation. And so, there's both kind of a traditional element, but also leading the world element as well.

(04:06) Amrit Ahluwalia: It's a fascinating balance. Just for our publication’s perspective, we tend to be more oriented towards the teaching and learning mission of the post-secondary institution, especially in that dissemination of expertise and of knowledge. And I'm curious, as you look at again, that this balancing act that needs to be struck between the research mission and the teaching mission, what does it take to balance those priorities? How do you make sure that resources are being allocated in a way that makes sense in two spaces that do have competing priorities at times and can intersect at times? What are some of the considerations you have to bring into account?

(04:46) Lois Brooks: Well, they're actually not separate. They're the same people doing teaching and research. Our students do research. We use research as part of our teaching enterprise. All of it is done by our faculty. And keep in mind that there are three reasons the university exists; to deliver an education, to do research and to improve the lives of people of Wisconsin. So anything we do to improve teaching and learning is closely aligned to the mission. So we don't actually have to choose between them.

What we do have to sometimes do is pace because we can't do everything at once. But we're always moving forward in teaching and research simultaneously. The things that may take a backseat sometimes are more of the kind of service operations. And we do invest in those as well. But we may make a choice to do something really interesting for teaching or move a teaching program forward and say, we'll get to this administrative option next year. 

(05:41) Amrit Ahluwalia: So now you share, or have a joint role, is that the way they describe it? You hold a position with Unizin— on Unizin's board of directors. Before we talk a little bit about Unizin, I'm curious, could you talk us through the mission of Unizin, the focus of the organization? It is something that we've published on in The EvoLLLution if anyone's interested in learning more about it, but for the purposes of the episode.

(06:06) Lois Brooks: So Unizin is a non-profit organization. It was founded by about half a dozen universities. It's now grown to about 15 I would guess. And the notion was that we came together looking at some core problems that are expensive and difficult to solve around learning analytics and the infrastructure that underpins learning analytics, which is extensive to build. And we decided to pool our resources together and build this together because we vary in our teaching programs, we vary in our research, but technology looks the same under the mud.

(06:41) And so we came together and pooled resource with the notion that you can move farther and faster together. Over time, we took this consortium and moved it into a non-profit space, but it's still comprised only of the members of the consortium working together to build infrastructure that supports our teaching and learning. And at this point, we've actually added some intellectual property around low cost course materials. Just at my university we've saved about 6 million dollars for our students because of Unizin. So it's meaningful. Then you mentioned that I have a position. We do have staff there, but nobody from the university is a paid staff. But I do serve on the board of directors and help guide the organization. 

(07:23) Amrit Ahluwalia: So this is one of a few examples of member driven collaboratives and I think that the Big 12 has one as well. So how do these sort of member driven collaboratives, how are they starting to shape higher ed's future?

(07:39) Lois Brooks: They're really interesting. There is quite a few that have been just successful by any measure, like the HathiTrust that does preservation of scholarly materials across many, many universities. What we do in IT and higher ed is expensive. And to do it well is expensive. And these dollars compete with other dollars at the university for financial aid, for hiring new faculty, for hiring more IT staff—whatever it might be. So anything we can do in IT to fulfill our mission, but do it in a way that moves quickly and is cost efficient is going to be our future. 

(08:13) As we look now at additional pressures on universities for cause for performance and frankly the rising expectations for IT and the rising cost of IT, I think this is it's not our only future. I believe there's a strong place for the vendor community as well, but I think you'll see more and more universities working together to solve common problems. And just one of their note on this, what makes some of this consortium like Unizin kind of special is that we actually figured out the sustainability model. We didn't start with a grant and then have to scramble, but we actually built financial sustainability in. So it's persisted now for probably seven or eight years. And it will keep going because we've figured out the money equation. 

(08:57) Amrit Ahluwalia: That's so important. As a technology leader, it's a bit of a balancing act. The theme of our conversation, as it turns out, has been balance. How do you balance the need to be more business oriented, more aligned with costs and benefits and return on investment with the need to be a mission oriented as a public organization. As a safety group, public trust, but also as someone who's oriented towards student success and has to be oriented to the mission of the organization?

(09:33) Lois Brooks: Well, this is the job of leader anywhere that you're always making tradeoffs. You're always thinking through what the right thing to do is for the university. We have many, many ideas and we have to sift through those and decide which of the most important, which are going to have the most impact. ROI is hard to measure in higher education. We can do some in the business side, maybe cost of transaction kinds of things, which are important, but they don't get to the heart of the matter. The heart of the matter is are students progressing? Are they more successful in their life? Does research make a difference? And so quantifying an IT investment against those can be pretty challenging. But on the other hand, we do this in a community form, we work with our faculty, we work with university leadership and really have those tough conversations about priorities that then leads us to what investments to make. And I'll just say one other thing in the middle of all this, the IT team then actually has to deliver. If you say you're going to do it, you have to do it. 

And so that's the other piece of it is that if you've made the business case and made the commitment to do something, you've got to execute.

(10:44) Amrit Ahluwalia: That's an interesting point you raise because that is, yeah, you really do. So where do you start to bring those kinds of questions of commitment versus nice to have? How do you communicate that across the organization? How do you ensure that the team is aligned with the commitments that have been made? And in some cases, how do you make sure that the commitments are adaptable to whatever the scenario might be at a point in time. 

(11:13) Lois Brooks: We just went through a planning exercise for our IT priorities. We started with 20 or 30 ideas on the page, and every single one of them was a good idea. Over time we worked with faculty, we worked with IT providers, presented to the university leadership, got a lot of input. We must have gone through 10 or 15 iterations of this to get down to five priorities and to really talk it through. So if we've got to make a tradeoff between educational innovation, trying to think. I was about to say accessibility, but that's not the trade off because we never trade off accessibility. But maybe we're trading off maybe accelerating in some pedagogically specific areas versus doing some student success measures. The way we get to that is we talk it through with the community, with the stakeholders. Get input and then weigh that out. And quite often it's not a yes or no, but a first, second, and third. Kind of a tradeoff.

(12:09) Amrit Ahluwalia: Interesting. Absolutely. Well, as you look to the next five to…10 years may be a little too far down the road. Let's say five to eight years, what are some of the trends that you're really keeping an eye on that you think are going to be most impactful in how we work?

(12:23) Lois Brooks: There is a lot going on right now in next generation cyber security. Thinking about how we move into layered security and just think about how big and complex a university is and how hard it is to keep everything secure. So we're looking at next generation there. That's also a pretty hot marketplace. There's a lot coming at us. I'm pretty excited about augmented reality, but I think it's early days. And the power potential for immersive 3D imagery and education and research. We're doing some interesting prototypes, but I think it's going be some years before that becomes mainstream. What is becoming very mainstream is augmented or AI, artificial intelligence, machine learning. We're doing a lot of work with data right now. So those are some of the trends we're following.

(13:08) Amrit Ahluwalia: Yeah, absolutely. I am curious about the cybersecurity piece because higher ed institutions seem to get targeted a heck of a lot in cyber attacks. Obviously there's a significant amount of data being collected by the institution. And as we move to virtual payment models, coming back to this idea of balance, how do you balance the need to be consumer-centric and the need to be accessible and seamless and easy for a student while at the same time making sure that the data that's being collected and kept is compliant and is secure?

(13:48) Lois Brooks: Well, before I get there, a quick set of numbers. I was just reading the Cyber Edge report. They interviewed 1200 people across 19 industries internationally. About 90% of the higher ed respondents reported at least one breach in the last year. But banking, finance, healthcare, everybody is in their government. The data reported that 85% of the respondents had six or more breaches in the past year. 

(14:24) But you think about what a breach is. Some of them are really big and rough. Some of them are pretty small and localized with this. So how do we balance it? For our enterprise systems, for medical data, those kinds of things. Social security numbers, credit card numbers. We really have a protective ring around that and very strict multilayered measures. 

As we move closer to the edge, closer to innovation, we still try to protect the devices. I shouldn't say try, we actually do protect the devices. But the measures we use are increasingly kind of user friendly, supporting research, supporting innovation and flexibility at the edge where coming toward the center for things like medical data or personnel data, we're going to have multiple measures to get through before you can get in. So that's really it. It's that balancing act of both keeping the money, the stuff is expensive, so keeping the money where it does the most good, but also securing, but not impeding research and education. And this is what keeps me up at night. 

(15:29) Amrit Ahluwalia: And that's where we're going next, because that that is a foundational challenge.

(15:34) Lois Brooks: Yes. Well, it is. And I will say, if you want to ask what keeps me up at night, I think that it's really the workforce. Thinking about the workforce and thinking about the things that other people talk about around retention and recruiting new talent. But I really think a lot about, as we go into this very flexible world, how do we make sure it's vibrant? How do we make sure people are connected? How do we make sure that opportunity for mentoring doesn't get bypassed because we might have missed an in-person connection. So really thinking about not just are we remote or not remote, but how are we really fantastic at being remote?

(16:13) Amrit Ahluwalia: Absolutely. Well, Lois, I so appreciate you taking the time out. I know we're right in the middle of lunch here, so hopefully I haven't kept you from a meal. But on that topic, the way we like to end every Illumination episode is just by asking folks their favorite restaurant. So if you're going out to dinner in Madison, where does someone need to go?

(16:32) Lois Brooks: In Madison, Wisconsin, our favorite restaurant is Fairchild on Monroe Street because they're very, very seasonal. Every week the menu changes very high quality and everything is coming from the farmer's market or the local farms. And so it's just love that. So if you're in Madison, checkout, Fairchild.

(16:50) Amrit Ahluwalia: Thank you so much, Lois, I so appreciated your time. Thanks so much for the conversation.

(16:54) Lois Brooks: Thanks for asking me. Have a great show. 

(16:56) Amrit Ahluwalia: This podcast is made possible by a partnership between Modern Campus and The EvoLLLution. The Modern Campus engagement platform, powered solutions for non-traditional student management, web content management, catalog and curriculum management, student engagement and development, conversational text messaging, career pathways, and campus maps and virtual tours. The result innovative institutions can create learner to earner life cycle that engages modern learners for life, while providing modern administrators with the tools needed to streamline workflows and drive high efficiency. To learn more and to find out how to modernize your campus, visit moderncampus.com. That's moderncampus.com.