Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: It used to be about building things. You know, I've got to build the network. I've got to build this system. Now. It's about all these systems are there and what I need to do is bring them together, make sure they're secure, make sure they're used well. Make sure that we're always scanning that environment and seeing what we need to change. And especially when you think about AI, and I know we're going to talk about AI, but especially when you think about AI, kind of pushing, but pushing appropriately in order to do the best we can for the institution.
[00:00:43] Speaker B: Welcome to the Edtech Connect podcast, your source for exploring the cutting edge world of educational technology. I'm your host, Jeff Dillon, and I'm excited to bring you insights and inspiration from the brightest minds and innovators shaping the future of education. We'll dive into conversations with leading experts, educators, and solution providers who are transforming the learning landscape. Be sure to subscribe and leave a review on your favorite podcast platform so.
[00:01:11] Speaker C: You don't miss an episode.
[00:01:13] Speaker B: So sit back, relax, and let's dive in.
[00:01:26] Speaker C: So we have another episode of Edtech Connect, and today we have Helen Norris. Helen is a nationally known expert in information technology, data analytics, cybersecurity. She's an experienced non profit board member and chair. She's served in leadership roles at multiple institutions, including UC Berkeley, CSU Sacramento, and currently serves as vice president for information technology and CIO at Chapman University, where she's responsible for leading the university's information technology strategy and services and oversight of the university library. Her volunteer work and board advisory roles are impressive. Helen has served on the educause board from 2019 to 2023. She's also spent more than eight years as board member for the National Endowment for Financial Education as well as the California cradle. Two career she's a board member on that organization as well as well as serving on many other boards, including the Women in Technology International, Power Institute, Society for Information Management, among others. So thank you for being here, Helen. Welcome.
[00:02:37] Speaker A: Thank you, Jeff. It's great to be here. I really appreciate it.
[00:02:40] Speaker C: And I got to work with Helen at CSU Sacramento and kind of in the middle of your journey to where you are now. I'd love to just learn more about did you have a vision to where you are now? How did you get to where you are as being the CIO and involved with all these boards? And I love seeing where you've been.
[00:03:02] Speaker A: Well, you know, when I was a little girl, I said I want to be a CIO when I grow up. No, not really. That did not happen. I grew up in Ireland, which I know a lot of people don't know that about me because I don't sound that way anymore. But I've been in the US for a long time. I was the first in my family to go to college because at that time, I didn't have the role models. I just picked the subject I was good at in school, which was maths, and that's what I studied in college. I have a degree in math. And it's interesting, I kind of assumed I'd be a math teacher or maybe an accountant. But while I was in college, I did take some, you know, early. This was early, early, a long time ago, some computer programming classes, and I kind of fell into a career in technology, which was very fortunate for me because I think I'm better suited to this than being a teacher or an actuary was the other one I looked at. So, you know, I started my career. I worked in, once I moved to the US, I worked in a variety of corporations, working in various IT roles. I have a. A broad background. I worked as a computer programmer. I worked as a systems administrator. Early in my career, I worked as a network engineer. And ultimately, after several years in corporate work, I went to work at UC Berkeley as an IT. UC Berkeley is a pretty decentralized IT environment, so I managed the IT organization at the university Health Services, moved to another role, finally into the central IT role at UC Berkeley, where I stayed for several years before getting the chance to work with you at Sacramento State or CSU Sacramento. And I think I had an experience at UC Berkeley where, honestly, I applied for a higher level position, and I was not successful, which is a really interesting learning experience. And I got some advice at the time to really, you know, part of the reason I applied for that job is because I kind of said, oh, you know, it's kind of the natural next step. But I got advice to really think about, what did I really want in my career? Instead of saying, well, that's next. And that was really helpful for me. So I looked, I thought about the types of institutions I wanted where I. That I preferred to work. I thought about the physical location where I wanted to work, and really was more intentional about my career. But that wasn't the way at the start. It took me a long time to get there, and so I knew I wanted to be a CIO. I went to Sacramento State, as you know, where I served as a deputy CIO, and then finally came to the right place for me. Which was Chapman University.
[00:05:54] Speaker C: Well, it's been really great to watch you on the second part of your journey. I guess I didn't know you at Berkeley, but to see what you've done since you've left and all the board work you've done, it's been really fun. Can you tell me a little bit about what you're seeing in the last, I guess the last few years? I have this thing, this theory, this concept that I've really noticed in that back when I worked with you, even before, it was almost a simpler job to be SEO. There's a handful of systems you're kind of figuring out, like, what do I upgrade next? How do they integrate bigger projects that you could kind of focus on? And really, in the last decade or so, I feel like there's just this proliferation of apps and systems and enterprise projects that we need to consider, that all need to work together. What do you think? How has the role of a CIO changed in the last five plus years? Ten plus years?
[00:06:47] Speaker A: Yeah. Well, even though back further than that, when I think about earlier in my career with people I reported to who are in that role, the focus was on utility. You know, you were kind of a service provider, you know, not a partner, but more of a, almost like an internal vendor. So, you know, your campus got utilities from you. They got the Wi Fi and the enterprise systems and maybe, and then eventually, and security and data. Now, I think with the, over the last several years, like you mentioned, apps kind of with the consumerization, in some ways of it, there is a different need, and it's a more, as you said, more complicated environment. So your role, I mean, my role, I guess, as a CIO is really to take those pieces and pull them together. So there's a very much an integration piece that's related to being a CIO. There's also, I think, sometimes somewhat overlooked, a kind of a change advocate. Right. You know, because an appropriate change advocate, I don't believe in. Let's just change this for the sake of change. But, you know, there will be a certain amount of inertia in an organization, particularly in higher ed. Right. And so to drive some of that change really falls on the CIO for us to kind of look at that changing environment, and that includes within our own organizations. But it does mean to build those relationships across the campus so we can drive change in that way, too. But I think it used to be about remembering, you can even think about this. It used to be about building things. I've got to build the network. I've got to build this system. Now it's about, oh, all these systems are there and what I need to do is bring them together, make sure they're secure, make sure they're used well, make sure that we're always scanning that environment and seeing what we need to change. And especially when you think about AI, and I know we're going to talk about AI, but especially when you think about AI kind of pushing, but pushing appropriately in order to, to do the best we can for the institution.
[00:09:03] Speaker C: Yeah, that makes sense. We will dig into that a little bit. I want to tell you a little story and see if you relate to this and that over the last two decades. Like I worked for a CIO back in Arizona and it was my first taste into how marketing, and it worked together. And, and basically I was the webmaster that worked in the marketing department. It was a newly new position that got pulled out of it. And so there was a little bit of, I don't know, tiptoeing between the marketing it people back in the day where my new marketing director had purchased a CMS, a real was like, they wowed us. It was personalization. Personalized decades ago. She purchased it without the it people being involved. And I was new. I didn't know that any better. Sounded great. She got it purchased so fast. We got called over to the CIO's office, like the next week, we walked over across campus and sat in his office and we ate crow, basically saying like, you cannot be purchasing stuff without our approval. And I totally understood our mistake back in the day. Like, why would we purchase something without it? Sign off? And since then, you know, later on in my career, for another CIO, you probably have other types of, you know, basically it was about process. You're not following our process. We need to be involved. You totally got that. But the only other spectrum, it's, hey, we need an outcome here. We need to get this done. Like, I understand we have process here at the university, but like, we know we need this system.
Do you see, where do you see yourself on the spectrum of process versus outcome when you're making decisions and in the university setting?
[00:10:36] Speaker A: Well, I think I'm probably more, a little bit more focused. You need process, right? Especially in an it area, because, you know, you have to think about information security. You have to think, think about accessibility and privacy and all of those things, but you have to process.
You can't process something to death, right? You've got to be a little, you've got to understand that people need things. And I think we learned this a lot in the pandemic. We couldn't take, you know, six years to buy something that we need or build whatever for an immediate situation.
So I think it's, I'm probably a little bit more on the outcome side, or maybe it's a little bit situational. If I'm looking at a system where it's got a broad student impact and it's going to hit a bunch of students, you know, we're going to take the time we need. We're not going to rush out and, you know, replace our student system because we saw a great demo. If we're looking at something a little bit smaller and, you know, maybe we can be a little bit more agile. But I tell you one thing that I think it's the responsibility of the CIO rather than, you know, the first situation you described. I'm sure the person, the CIO was really professional, but it's hard for, like you said, you were new, and I don't know about the marketing director, but I feel it's my responsibility. We have this still happening, right, where a dean will purchase something and we won't be in the loop. And, you know, when that happens, I kind of think that's on me.
You know, have I been out there making sure that they understand the process and that they understand that the process isn't scary? Can we make the process feel like, just call me, call me and we'll talk about it. Get me in the process, get me in early so that we can help and really make it feel like we're part of the team. So it's hard for me to take on that role of kind of beating somebody up for doing something. I think you do it cautiously, rarely, mostly take an opportunity to say, how can I do a better job of letting you know that we need to be involved?
[00:12:57] Speaker C: I really like that you recently told me you have a new chief marketing officer. I think coming over marketing, we really need that person involved where you and I are talking about solutions. And I really like that, you know, that marketing really has to drive a lot of these conversations. So it seems like that's what I'm seeing. Also, you mentioned, so we have all these legacy systems and we want to upgrade them, but it's really challenging, especially when they're so ingrained. Like maybe we have a student information system that's really touching everything and it would be so disruptive to modernize that, but we have to. How do you manage? How do you take that next step? Managing change in this challenging environment where things are moving so fast, but we're still stuck in so many ways.
[00:13:47] Speaker A: Yeah, well, you know, I think we have legacy systems. And, you know, if you think about the pillars in the university, you know, whether it's a student system or a HR system or a financial system or a fundraising system, you know, all of these kind of biggest behemoths of systems. I think the first thing that I think about when I think about those systems is what's the strategic value to the university? Right. If I look at my university's strategic plan, I don't see a lot in there about enterprise systems. It's all about student success, right? We want our students to be more successful. We want our faculty to be more successful. So unless there's a pressing need, if the legacy enterprise system, people are registering for classes and people are getting paid, there's not a strategic value to replacing the system. At the same time, you really need to provide better. I talked about student success.
The student system kind of has a lot of data in there that really helps with that. So I think it's about putting new tools in front of those systems. Let those systems do what they're good at in the back end, right. They're good at figuring out which classroom is the right classroom to use.
They're good at making sure that my paycheck shows up, which I really enjoy, but they're not that great at the letting me go in, and they're not that great at sharing the data or at the front facing pieces for our communities. So putting pieces in front of that to help, I think is a good solution for many of us. And I think that's going to be even more true with AI, because when you think about the student side, if I want to use AI tools to help predict when, you know, to do an intervention, maybe with a student who looks like they need help, what do I need for that? I need the data from the student system. I need the data from the learning management system. I need to pull it together and present it some way. I don't see building AI into either of those other two systems, but I sure need that data to get it out there. So I think it, again gets back to that change at the CIO. It's not so much focused on let's get a new enterprise system. It's more focused on, let's get a tool that really will make a difference to our students, to our faculty, and integrate it with those systems. Pull the data that we need appropriately. Keeping in mind the privacy issues and security issues. So that's how I see balancing those things.
[00:16:40] Speaker C: So I, I think what I'm hearing is that, in what I'm saying, that kind of aligns with what you've pointed out, is that with all these systems out there, rather than replacing many of the ones that are so entrenched, like we need to get better at integrating them, maybe buying best of breeds and integrating. So we've seen the emergence of integration platforms, and then there's all the flavors of those. There's really some that take weeks of training and some, there are more integration platforms as a service.
And you brought up AI. And so I almost feel like what I've seen with some of these integration platforms is that we could possibly get surpassed by AI, like where you might not need to make all these infrastructure changes. If we can wait a little longer and we can do things with AI. Do you see that happening?
[00:17:30] Speaker A: I hope so. It's funny because let me, an area that we talked or you mentioned is even when we think about data and maybe providing data to our end users, which has always been a big, you know, you pull the data out, you put it in a data lake or something, and you build things in front of it. Well, what if this reading works for us with AI, that instead of doing that, our customer can just say to an AI tool, tell me about students who aren't doing well in entry in first year mathematics, instead of having to go, I love dashboards, but imagine if you could even get away from that. So I'm hopeful. I think we're a little bit away from that. I think the issues I feel like we have to address around AI are explainability.
Can you make it clear how AI came to this solution? So if you pick on something, an area where I think maybe there's hope for long term is advising. Right. Advising is based on the student's past. Right. What, how have they, what classes have they taken? How have they performed? But that's a very, you know, it's a high risk area. If you don't, if you give student, student bad advice, you know, it's got a very high negative consequence. So we have to ensure that the AI tool that might plug into that kind of system, that we can really explain how it made the decision it made. So that's why I think what I see right now are in universities, are people using AI in, you know, in areas where it's a little bit less, less high stakes, so lower stakes area, you know, and maybe some win some.
[00:19:27] Speaker C: Low hanging fruit yeah, yeah.
[00:19:30] Speaker A: Like, you know, the obvious ones, you know, the chat bots, you know, so if it gets a person the wrong direction, wrong canvas, that's pretty low stakes.
[00:19:40] Speaker C: You mentioned advising. I heard that many times that schools will start with advising with Aihdem. What other. Some other ways I'm seeing it out there is personalization at the top of the funnel for enrollment marketing, where it's much easier to personalize a prospective student's experience with AI than maybe an infrastructure change. What other use cases are you thinking? Have you seen either in or in the classroom or on the administrative side?
[00:20:07] Speaker A: That might be, you know, I think some of the. Although I think there's a lot of work to be done here, I think some of the other areas are really around research.
In our university, students get. Very part of the reason students come to Chapman is because they have the opportunity to work on research, and so can we use AI in that context? Now that's got. There are challenges with that because we do have to, you know, it's one of the interesting areas because we do have to think about where our research is funded and what's permissible, those areas. But that's an area where I think people are starting to look and see, how can we use this? Can we use this? And what would be the right way to do so? I think that's one area. You know, I think.
[00:21:01] Speaker C: Go. Keep going, Helen.
[00:21:02] Speaker A: Yeah, I think I see students. You know, we had an interesting. I had an interesting conversation this week about students using it in the classroom. I think faculty are still working out the right way to use it in the classroom. Obviously, the answer is not, oh, my God, make sure they don't use it. But, you know, how do we use it when we're brainstorming, you know, as students, you know, are they in a classroom situation? If you're working on something, can you use it in a brainstorming way? I think those are interesting. Obviously, there's tons on the administrative side, you see, can we use it in recruiting? Which has had some negative press because it seems like there might be some bias built in, and so how can we work away from that? But even on the administrative side, if you can find some niche things to show some wins, I think it's positive.
[00:21:59] Speaker C: Do you think a campus needs academic advisory guidelines and policies at the highest level, or does that stay at the faculty member level?
[00:22:10] Speaker A: I think you need to have some consistency across the campus.
[00:22:15] Speaker C: So what do you see at Chapman? What are your top priorities for the next few years? What's on the top priorities.
[00:22:23] Speaker A: As you are aware, we think long term, we think short term if we think long term, and sometimes the short term gets in the way. So I think one of the things that I'm thinking about for the immediate future is how to navigate our next round of FAFSA. It was obviously challenging, and I think we expect it to continue to be challenging.
And the immediacy of needing to deal with issues that come up with FAFSA is just something that my team is trying to support our partners cross campus on.
[00:22:57] Speaker C: Is that an internal policy and procedure project, or is there actually some it involvement?
[00:23:04] Speaker A: I think there's some it involvement. I think it is more focused, obviously, on our partners who have to deal with it. But where we can offer support, we need to. And as, I mean, last year, our experience was that changes that came from the DoE, you just had to be ready for them. So we expect that there's probably data issues that are around that, that we need to think about. And then, you know, I think we're all thinking about enrollment and how we need to support the university in terms of enrollment, whether that's through, you know, supporting both our admissions office and marketing, in terms of the reaching out to prospective students or supporting our existing students in terms of increasing their retention. Right. Helping them be more successful so that we don't lose them. So I think enrollment is something we continue to focus on.
[00:24:06] Speaker C: Do you think an it strategic plan is going to really be more important now with the enrollment coming up? Do you think it is a big part of that at all?
[00:24:19] Speaker A: I think we're a supporting part of it, maybe, because I do think that data is critical to managing that issue and providing data, because I think data underlies helping students be more successful and reaching out to the right perspectives, too. So I think data is critical in that piece.
[00:24:44] Speaker C: So one more question I want to ask that I kind of just thought of is, as we brought up cmss over the last 1015 years, there's been this proliferation of content. It's been tough to kind of wrangle, like steel content and duplicate content. And have you experienced any of that at Chapman? I know you're maybe. Maybe more centralized than some decentralized, centralized schools. It might not be as big of a problem, but just content discoverability is what I'm getting at is it's real hard for people to find what they need on campus campuses. That's one of the problems is that, like, there's just so much content out there and it's hard to govern, you know, corporate sites only have a few people managing their site. We have hundreds of people. But then you have different data sources, you have different places, and so are you. Do you find that being a challenge at all at Chapman?
[00:25:34] Speaker A: Oh, yeah. Yeah, I think you're right. We're a little bit less decentralized than other campuses that I've worked at. But it's just our websites are big and they keep growing. And there is, in higher ed, I think there is a tendency or a leaning towards keeping as much data as you can out there. Right. We don't like to take down our convocation address from five or six years.
[00:26:00] Speaker C: We'll archive it. It'll never be deleted. We'll just archive it.
[00:26:02] Speaker A: Yeah, but sometimes you don't even want to have it archive. The other thing that I think is challenging, though, is that we produce content, right, whether it's centrally or in a department, but it's all produced within the university. But there was so much content about the university elsewhere. And I think we saw these, whether it's social media, you know, during the pandemic, obviously, we saw a lot of activity getting out around for any university. How is the university managing this? And people go to those places for information people want to hear from, whether it's a website run by students or a social media account of an influential student or a parenthood. And so I think that's even harder because there's a stale information out there.
So I think that those are things we want to kind of think.
[00:27:01] Speaker C: Yeah, well, is there anything you would like to share with maybe up and coming it leaders who are facing similar challenges?
[00:27:13] Speaker A: You know, I've been thinking about this a lot. I think one of the one, just one piece of advice I'd give to any it leader any time in their career is you're going to face challenges. You have contacts, you have a community. And in higher ed, it's a community. You have a community of people facing similar challenges. So I just encourage you to leverage that community, reach out, talk to other people, because in my experience, people are generous with their time. They'll. They'll take a moment to talk to you and to give you advice or to tell you their experience. And I just want to encourage everyone to do that. Feel free to reach out to me personally. It's not hard to find me.
I love to talk to other people. I learn a lot when I speak to people at other universities. I've always encouraged to see some of the great things that my colleagues are doing at other universities. And I learn a lot of so reach out to me and ask for advice because I learn at least as much as you do.
[00:28:19] Speaker C: Thank you so much Helen. You are always so generous with your time, so appreciate it and I will be in touch.
[00:28:26] Speaker A: Great. Thank you Jeff. Good to chat with you again.
[00:28:38] Speaker C: As.
[00:28:39] Speaker B: We wrap up this episode. Episode remember, edtech Connect is your trusted companion on your journey to enhance education through technology. Whether you're looking to spark student engagement, refine edtech implementation strategies, or stay ahead of the curve in emerging technologies, edtech Connect brings you the insights you need. Be sure to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform so you never miss an inspiring and informative episode. And while you're there, please leave us a review. Your feedback fuels us to keep bringing you valuable content. For even more resources and connections, head over to edtechConnect.com, your hub for edtech reviews trends and solutions. Until next time, thanks for tuning in.
