I was fortunate to be invited to be in a panel titled “Evolution of the CIO: IT leadership for the smart, sustainable campus” along with Klara Jelinkova from Harvard and Lev Gonick from Arizona State University. Unfortunately Lev could not join us, so it was just Klara and me. It was moderated by Sara Custer.

I want to share some of the things we discussed and possibly things I really wanted to say but may not have. Bottom line, whether it is Harvard or Wellesley, there is so much similarity in terms of what the CIOs have to manage. However, the scale and some of the details are distinctly different.

We began the conversation about how we each became CIOs. I will spare you the details, but we both were trained in different things – Klara in Economics and me in Computational Chemistry. We then moved to working in Higher Ed IT and rose through the ranks to become CIOs. This is acommon story you will hear. CIOs of most Higher Eds are from long careers in Higher Ed. Whereas some institutions have tried to bring in outsiders, such as corportate IT leaders, to the best of my knowledge, they have not gone well. Frankly, I am not sure about this – have corporations tried to hire CIOs from Higher Ed and succeeded?

We then started to talk about how things changed during the pandemic and how they are likely to influence the future. I took this opportunity to explain that even before the pandemic, the community’s appreciation of what LTS does for them was pretty high and what we were able to do during the pandemic elevated that further.  I proudly mentioned LTS receiving the Apgar Award Teaching Award in recognition of  the excellent work by LTS staff to support remote instruction. I strongly believe that being a  merged IT-Library organization  gives us the ability to support our core academic mission in ways that may not be possible when these functions are separated. I have written enough about this that I don’t want to repeat the reasons why I feel this way. I therefore believe that the College looks at us as a strategic partner and not simply as tactical.

One of the other questions was about the short term future and how things are likely to change and what skills do we expect in our staff to be able to support. I said that there are so many unknowns at this stage and it is hard to predict. However, the College is in the process of developing an implementation plan for out strategic plan which gives us a sense of direction. During this question and to an answer to a question from the audience, I mentioned that we have developed an organizational culture of agility whereby we have built knowledge transfers and redundancies among staff that allows us to respond to emerging needs fairly quickly. Currently, everyone is exhauted from COVID and once things settle, there will be new expectations emerging, and I feel confident that our organization is agile enough to respond to the needs of the community. At the same time, we will continue our leadership in bringing new ideas to the community.

Both Klara and I mentioned how one of the things we are seriously looking into is making our classrooms to be hyflex ones. I also mentioned how making sure that all our students have a “viable” computer is another priority for us.

Both Klara and I agreed that we need to be in constant communication with our community and that the more personalized it is, the better it is. Obviously, our scale makes it easier than Harvard. I mentioned some of the communication strategies we use, such as visiting academic department meetings, Chairs meeting etc. But forgot to mention how we provide updates in Administrative Council for administrative staff. I also mentioned the importance of empathy. We need to communicate in ways our faculty, students and staff feel that their concerns and questions are cleary understood and avoid using highly technical language during these conversations. Also, I mentioned how in the merged IT/Library settings, the conversations by librarians and technologists begin with pedagogy rather than technology, which helps conversations with the faculty in finding appropriate solutions. I did refer to my “Multilingual Technologist” blog, but forgot that it was written when I was at Pace University and it is no longer available.

There were a few other questions, but in the interest of time, I would like to wrap up. I hope you got a sense of what the rest of the questions were.

In my opinion, the CIOs of the future need to be prepared for a lot more things than their core expertise – Technology. Technology is pervasive and touches every single area of a Higher Ed institution. They need to be seen by the senior administrators as a partner who is willing to work with them to support them. We should not allow them to call us “CI(N)O”! They need to constantly remind themselves that IT departments in Higher Ed are a service organization and should strive to provide nothing but the best support for all members of the community with existing resources. This requires constantly innovating and being creative in the way IT staff do business.

They also should remind themselves that our mission should be to support the academic mission of the College and not run a technology company. CIOs need to be excellent communicators and be agile enough to respond to new and emerging rsponsibilities. For example, we are involved far more in risk management and compliance areas than ever before and a CIO needs to be at the table, reallocate existing resources to respond to these important needs.

I have given a couple of talks on how being a CIO involes solving a complex constrained optimization problem (I should write about this one of these days). It really is. Our objective is to maximize the user satisfaction while juggling umpteen constraints. And this is what we need to master. It is also the case that these maxima are short lived!

I had fun doing this, though I was pretty down at the beginning. The cricket team that I support back home (Chennai Super Kings) was off to a real bad start in a do-or-die match. Though essnetially eliminated from the next rounds (though they were the champs lasst year), keep on winning the remaining matches gave fans like us some hope. But then I was OK, because I put my phone away.

And I behaved – did not tweet during the entire panel discussion!