Top of Mind with Tambellini Group
Top of Mind with Tambellini Group
A CTO’s Role in Driving Transformation
Simon Blackwell didn’t have a long-standing career in academia before he became Chief Transformation Officer of Mount Saint Mary’s University. His background included ecommerce banking, aerospace, and Wall Street. The institution brought him on initially as a consultant, saw promise, and the rest is history. Whether small or large innovative projects, his approach is to first create a framework to instill a common understanding of the transformation, enlist a committee of manageable size with fresh thinkers, then find the intersection of what they’re good at and passionate about. Blackwell provides many examples with detail in this Top of Mind podcast.
Hello and welcome to our Top of Mind Podcast. In this program, we will sit down with a higher education technology thought leader and discuss the innovative projects they are working on now and into the future. Today we're going to go beyond technology tools, discuss how a former CIO is driving change at a small liberal arts university. I'm your host, Katelyn Ilkani, vice president of client services and cybersecurity research at The Tambellini Group. I'm joined today by Simon Blackwell, the chief transformation officer at Mount Saint Mary's university. Over the next few minutes we are going to hear assignments, thoughts on the role of the chief transformation officer. Let's get started. Welcome to the program, Simon.
Speaker 2:Thanks so much for having me today, Katelyn. Let me give you a little bit of background on myself and my role in higher ed. I had about 25 years, multiple, industry experience and, ecommerce banking, aerospace and I entered the higher ed space about four years ago when I was asked to perform a consulting engagement to assess the state of technology at Mount Saint Mary's university. I a new president who'd also transitioned in from a commercial sector. Yeah. The assessment took about three months at the end of which I made a number of technology recommendations. But I also pointed out that if the university did not address a substantive number of non technology issues, any money that they spent on technology would in many ways be wasted. Uh, the university then asked me to become an employee and assist in addressing these other issues, which included integrated cross institution planning, ongoing training of back office staff, formalized pedagogical instruction of faculty and a whole bunch of technology, a platform improvements as well, both in the back end and then the uh, and the academic a space. So, you know, that's how I got here. And with that I'll hand it back to you.
Speaker 1:Thank you, Simon. We're excited for you to be here today.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:My first question for you around the current role of the chief transformation officer, that's not a highly use title. What does that encompass?
Speaker 2:Innovation and change and involves identifying opportunities for the university to which improve its products or its operations and then starting development and deployment of the innovations required to, to make those changes much. But not all of this is dependent on technology. So I do effectively serve as the CIO. Yeah. And, and in this role, uh, what's really important is actually all of the nonacademic things that I've done because it's in doing those things and not operating in the same context that I'm actually able to see the different opportunities that are available to the university. Okay.
Speaker 1:So tell us a little bit more about your transition from the private sector to academia and how will that may have given you an advantage or a different perspective?
Speaker 2:Yeah, well I think that um, you know, anytime that people are in any industry for an extended period of time, and the longest I've ever been in one industry is, uh, is six years, they tend to kind of lose sight of, uh, I guess I'd say the opportunities that surround that and they start operating in a box and a set of constraints and a set of the way things are. I could quite frankly have come in from, from any industry before I came into this one. I happened to be coming in from the ECOMMERCE industry immediately before or this, that before that I was in banking. Before that I was in cyberspace purity. Uh, and before that I've spent time in pharmaceuticals, uh, spent time, uh, uh, and Wall Street and also spend time working on, on aerospace, uh, issues. And I think know every industry has a slightly different way that they, they do things. Although at the end of the day it all comes down to it's a managing people.
Speaker 1:You mentioned earlier that you are effectively the CIO at Mount Saint Mary's. Is your role encompassing a larger responsibility than it?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so about 75% of my time is spent on technology and about 25% is spent on other things. Of the 75%, this technology, about 50% of that is his core technology meeting the networks and the servers and the Erp and the student information system. And the other 50% in the technology space is spent focused on what I call, I guess academic technology. Whether it be academic computing or tools to support pedagogy tools to support instruction of the students. When I first arrived, there was no distinction in this space and it was left very little effort or energy that was for them too. How can we get technology into the classrooms that helps faculty, Yeah. And help students learn. So over the last four years, we've actually made a substantive budget shift, but more money in space of the 25% of my time that's not spent on technology. It really varies depending on the current needs and opportunities in front of the university. So during my tenure here, I led the effort to outsource student health care to a local hospital leveraging experience I had in the commercial sector in outsourcing and focusing on what's the core business that we're doing and getting rid of those things. Yeah. That we don't, it's not part of our core that don't provide us for sure. Cedric advantage. Okay. This allowed us to double the hours, uh, of our available healthcare practitioner without increasing any costs while also improving the quality of care to the students by having a broader set of providers skills. Wow. As a result of it, the hospitals now actually working towards the construction of an urgent care and Primary Care Facility with radiology and lab services on our campus. There will also be open to the local community. We live in a fairly rural area. The hospital could not justify building a healthcare clinic up in this area, but there's, the draw is only about 25,000 people, not 50,000 people. We got together with them after we developed this relationship to provide healthcare to the students and we said, look, we have 400,000 visitors a year that come to our campus or athletic events or a visiting what's called the grotto, which is a religious shrine. Uh, on campus. We have another 50,000 people that visited another religious shrine right next to campus. We have 200 to 300 students a week that come to the Federal Emergency Management Center next to campus. And you're not taking into account any of those people in your demographics. On top of that, one quarter of our students are division one athletes and they're more prone to injury and need more help. So perhaps you could justify a clinic and they said, well maybe Nah, we still can't do it. And we said, well what if we lease you the land that are really low cost because we own a lot of land and that made the shift. Um, so now they're doing, you know that work as well. They're going to be building a clinic here. I've also done the business modeling and the negotiations for setting up dual enrollment programs with private high schools establishing a master's in education program. Was it 14,000 employee school district. And currently I'm working on a split classroom with campus initiative with an international university so that we can export the things that we do to South America and, and other areas.
Speaker 1:Wow. That sounds great. It seems like you are doing a lot of very transformational work.
Speaker 2:Uh, I'd say it's transformational, but it's exciting too. I mean it's, it's to be engaged when you get to do exciting things. I mean, to be honest, you know, part of the, uh, the pleasure and the grace that I get with my job, part of the art of transforming is identifying opportunities and then figuring out which ones you can get traction on, which ones you can move. Oh. So there were plenty of ideas that we come up with it are great ideas and then we put them aside because either they're going to be too expensive or the reality is there's going to be too much organizational change, too much culture change, too many people to persuade. So I feel like I'm lucky I actually get to kind of choose the things that are going to succeed and to start down the path with them. Okay.
Speaker 1:Well, and it seems like a lot of your really innovative projects are leading to savings and repurposing of assets. Can you share some more of the details?
Speaker 2:Sure, sure. So, uh, one of the things I like to do when I'm looking at things to innovate is to try and find two things that are negative in terms of turn them into a positive. So a very simple example at the university is that, you know, we have several hundred laptops that's come up for replacement every year. It used to be that people would pay us for those laptops. Now we have to pay somebody to take them away. Yeah. We also had a situation that we had a large number of thin clients on campus for use in the library and elsewhere. These thin clients, we're getting old and then we're going to need to be replaced. So, uh, my lead infrastructure engineer said, you know what, how about if we turn these laptops into thin client? You said, I know they're out of warranty and they might break, but so what if they break? We'll just replace them. It's not like they're breaking while somebody is using them and they're critical. There's 25, 10 clients in the library. So if a couple of arms available any given day, it's not a big deal. We don't have to buy new thin clients, we don't have to manage your different kinds of technology. It's the same as the rest of our laptops. We'll just lock them down and the only thing on them will be a web browser. And so we did that. So we avoided paying money to have somebody take our laptops away and we avoided paying money, uh, in order to buy new AH, in clients. Then a faculty member jumped onboard and said, wait a second, if you're willing to do that, how about we take some other laptops if you've got more leftover after that and reconfigure them as Chromebooks. I didn't know this, but you can put chrome on an Intel PC. It doesn't have to be an actual rolling book and effectively put it into a Chromebook. So the faculty member got a bunch of students together and computer science who rebuilt a whole bunch of Chromebooks and we took it. Okay. Bunch of pcs, turn them into Chromebooks and we took them out to high schools in need. That's technology. So we, we, we saved money and we made a whole bunch of people happy. At the same time.
Speaker 1:So new ideas can sometimes be met with resistance. When you present these ideas to leadership at the university, um, including perhaps your board, what are they expecting and how do you go about soliciting support?
Speaker 2:Okay. Well it's interesting you asked that because the, the board of two years ago created a committee on innovation and I was asked to kind of be the lead on that from an internal perspective. It isn't. Okay. I did an inventory of the things I thought that we were doing that were innovative here and took them to the committee and they all said, well, those aren't animo innovative. Those are just saving money. And uh, I thought, well yeah, but they're pretty innovative ways to save money. And that led me to doing some, some research and saying, okay, how can I present to the board the opportunities for innovation that we actually haven't yet on at West is a small university that's not heavily that. And Dowd, we don't have the money to go do a big giant research project. Okay. And came across a great book by a gentleman named Greg Satell called"Mapping Innovation." It speaks about how you split your efforts on innovative activities. And he says, yeah, and actually has evidence from a number of large companies, Google and others, but you really need to spend about 70% of your time doing a sustaining innovation. And most of those things are actually cost saving measures or increasing service to a current constituent base, making things somewhat more profitable. 20% of your time should be spent on what's called disruptive innovation. That means attacking adjacent markets or adjacent activities with skills you've already got resources. You already have. A great example there in higher ed is going from the academic education space into the professional education patient space, which is adjacent and serving the needs of professionals and a noncredit bearing, uh, a way. And only 10% of your time should be spent focused on the big, the big breakthrough things. The thing is that many people think of is as innovative, right? The, Oh, I can lay my phone down on this little pad and I don't have to plug it in and it's going to charge it. Yeah. You know, only 10% of the time should be spent looking at those kinds of things. And the great thing about spending 70% of your time on the sustaining innovations is the entire culture gets to feel like they're engaged in innovation, which starts creating momentum for the organization and the that you saved, you can invest in doing the 20% or the 10%. Uh, so what I found was after educating the board on this, they did a very quick ship. They got it. Yeah. Then I was asked to make a presentation to the cabinet then to all of the deans and then to all of the staff of the, uh, the university. And I've actually been asked to speak at a couple of conferences, uh, on this topic. So it's really, as I said, it's that intersection of innovation and change management that creates transformation.
Speaker 1:Simon, how do you determine which activities to focus on as part of the sustaining innovation?
Speaker 2:Well, you know, I mentioned some of that beforehand. It's, it's really about looking for those places where there is an opportunity to save money. There's an opportunity to do something different. Yeah, and assessing the cultural readiness of the organization, do it. It's those kinds of innovations in their nature aren't supposed to cost month. There is one area I kind of, I call it the black hole and Greg's hotels book business speak about, yes, there's this air and almost every industry has it. It's that area where you have a whole bunch of people who are really, really, really good at doing something, but that's something is for a market that doesn't want it to anymore or a group of people that don't exist any more. That area is the hardest thing to change. You've got to figure out how to reallocate those resources and have them do something different. And although that's the place where there's the biggest cost saving, the biggest, a sustaining innovation return, it's also the area that's, you know, hardest the change in higher Ed plastically this has to do with force, with, with tenure programs that changed. And what I've been finding is as in many places in the business world, I've got to focus on the wins first, get some momentum going and get everybody to doing the[inaudible]. We can do this and we can do that. And instead of saying, stop doing this thing, focus on the positive conversation, look, here's these other things that you could be doing that could be bringing in more students, more revenue. It could be having you as a faculty member, learn more of his most faculty members, you know, our learners, uh, and get engaged and have the shift B, uh, at least at the beginning, kind of a gradual thing rather than, hey, we simply have to stop teaching this. Because what happens when you do that? Not only you, you're not going to accomplish that because you get too many people offended about it. Now people are just out to have you not do anything because they don't like,
Speaker 1:Right. It's interesting that you mentioned that. My personal area of research is in cybersecurity and time and time again, I come across a lot of pushback from the faculty around trying to institute more cybersecurity measures. And so I see that a lot from this conversation of no security versus usability or accessibility. And how do you manage that? It's pretty interesting thinking about it from a transformation perspective and how do you focus on the wins? Because I think you're right, these conversations come up in a lot of different ways across campus.
Speaker 2:Some ways it's not fair. At least the person isn't in the room. Being hurt is deflected off too. You know, compliance things low. We've got these FERPA regulations. We bet these HIPAA regulations and if we violate those things, our accrediting bodies are not going to be happy with us. And if we get in the press about those things, well, uh, you know, it's not going to be good for our student retention. And I'd say for the most part that kind of conversation has been working with uh, full time staff of the university. We're still a bit challenged on the, on the adjunct side of things. One of my cybersecurity person actually came up with a great, I think it's a great idea. We're going to test it out last week of having a fishing attack award. So we've got really good at stopping fishing attacks over the last, uh, couple of years, but they still get through occasionally. So he's going to get one of these singing basses. You've probably seen them on that. Whoever is the first person to report the phishing attack to our technology support center when a phishing attack comes in, is going to get to have the singing bass until the next phishing attacks. Oh,
Speaker 1:That's very creative to other institutions that are wanting to incorporate more innovation into their work. What would you recommend that they do first?
Speaker 2:Well, it's hard, but not impossible to drive innovation. An organization that doesn't introduce new influences from the outside, outside of the university, an outside of the industry. But cause it's often the inquiry into the how and why by an outsider that doesn't really understand what you're doing and why you're doing it. Right. That reveals the areas of opportunity. Uh, that being said, innovation also requires diversity in the largest sense of the word. You've got to build a group of people and it doesn't have to be giant, but you've got to have varying race there in spiritual focus, sexual or gender orientation, cultural background, age, organizational role, uh, all of those kinds of things in the mix in order to be best positioned to support innovation, to try and create an innovation committee. That's kind of off to the side build with the smart people are those you've already identified as creative, uh, rarely, rarely succeeds. And to build a committee that's more than eight to 10, people will probably get bogged down and make little progress just because it'll all be spent in doing, communicating rather than action. And sometimes, you know, institutional governance gets in the way. One of our faculty members actually came up with this term. You said, let's call this thing a task force, not a committee, but this committee means governance task force. So we've got a task to do and when the task is done, we'll move on. So the other thing too is to, is to rotate people through. So rather than having the innovation committee, it's people come up with ideas and then we tackle this innovation or tackle that innovation or examples that other innovation, um, and people move, kind of rotate in and out of the activities. I've also found it, it's, it's vital for the institution to come to a common understanding of innovation. Perhaps this would be the first thing to get people to have a common understanding of innovation and transformation by providing a framework for conversation and a framework for prioritization. I happen to like Brexit tell us mapping innovation framework and I really loved Tim Collins as good to great book. Uh, but what I'm talking about here is not being able to define it in one sentence. I've actually found that counterproductive people start arguing about words, right? Rather than have everybody have a common sense of it so that when they see something that's innovative or they hear something about something that might be innovative, they can say, yeah, that's innovative or it's not a given that the team in place and there's a common understanding and hopefully you've got some type of outside resource. Then kind of start an inventory of the inventory isn't an inventory of things that are innovative. It's an inventory off. What skills and resources do we have that we might be under utilizing that we could potentially utilize in another way and rex hotel speaks about markets. I speak about activities because sometimes when you speak about markets, people think that, oh, it's just the external world and then you lose sight of the internal, an inventory of what are all the activities that we're doing, what are the activities that people are passionate about? What are the activities that we've got to do, but their drudge risk for everybody. One of the activities that, that people don't think we should be doing to have those two lists of things. MMM. And, and then put those into the framework that Tim Collins provides in good to great find the intersection of the things that drive your resource engine that you're really good at and that people are passionate about. Find the intersection of those. And those are the areas to try and try and work on and, and, and, and move forward.
Speaker 1:Simon, thank you so much for your thoughts today. This has been a great conversation. I've really learned a lot from you.
Speaker 2:Well, thanks so much for having me, Katelyn. I'm having a delightful experience at Mount Saint Mary's and uh, it's really nice to be able to share the kinds of things that we're doing here. Before we close out the conversation today, do you have any final thoughts that you would like to leave with other higher education leaders who might be trying to transition more into the role of a chief transformation officer? Yeah, I'd say, you know, given that we have retired brigadier general as our president now who came out of west point and he brought a couple of people with him and you know, as he says, we've got to focus on the commander's intent, right? So people should focus on the business intent. Where are you trying to go as a business? If your organization doesn't have a strategic plan, don't even think about trying to take on innovation. All right. I mean that actually is the step before all of them is what's the strategic plan of the, the organization. Other than that, uh, make sure that you're doing something that you're good at, that you're passionate about, the drives, the resource engine of your institution. And uh, you know, every day try and get up and make today and I'll make yesterday jealous of what you're doing today and you know, that that should lead to good things. Okay.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much Simon. This has been just a wonderful conversation with you. We appreciate you participating in are Top of Mind Podcast. And that concludes our Top of Mind Podcast for this month. Good luck making yesterday jealous of today.