 Hi, this is the Integrated CIO podcast, broadcasting live from EDUCAUSE 2023 in beautiful Chicago. We're here today to talk with one of our colleagues. My name is Jack Seuss. I'm the vice president of IT at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, Cynthia was And I'm Cynthia Golden from the University of Pittsburgh, and we're here with our friend, Michael Berman. So nice to be here. Thank you. We're happy to see you. Like. So before you introduce yourself, Mike, I think we both want to just congratulate Cynthia for winning the 2023 EDUCAUSE Leadership in the Professional War. Thank you. Congratulations. Thank you so much, and I am in the presence of two other leadership award winners, I think 2020 and 2022 is that right? Yeah. We're the leaders of Goldfish Bowl. We are in a Goldfish Bowl watching all the conference attendees kind of walk on by. So, Mike, why don't you tell us a little bit about your career and your background? Sure. You know, I went to grad school thinking I would be a computer science researcher, and I found I wasn't really that good as a researcher, but I was good at teaching. And so after I left there, I became a college professor at a teaching oriented state university, last year of state college. But right away, I found there were resources that I needed in technology, particularly the internet. And that brought me into contact with trying to figure out where the money, how to get all the money, and how to make things happen in technology. And eventually I ended up as effectively their first CIO at that campus. And that was 1998, coincidentally, the year of the first EDUCAUSE conference. Yeah. I think we were all at that first EDUCAUSE conference, weren't we? It was an amazing experience. Yep, it was in Seattle. And, you know, as Cynthia and Mike were reminding me that we had Steve Jobs as one of the keynoters. He was our keynote speaker the first day, I think. Yeah, I can remember being in the room with him. It was before he had a black turtleneck. Yeah, he wore a yellow and black plaid shirt. I remember that. Are there any other sort of memories over the years from EDUCAUSE that you want to share right now? I would just say that, you know, coming here this year and seeing so many people, I know, I didn't meet all of them at EDUCAUSE, but so many of them. And I would say, we may talk about this later, not just from universities, colleges, but from industry as well, and the long-term relationships that I've built. And that's been the best thing about the careers of relationships that I've been able to build. And EDUCAUSE has been at the center of that all along. Yeah, for me, what I would say is that I've been to Nacubo, I've been to APLU, I've been to a lot of different internet, a lot of different conferences. But the breadth of people that come here year in, year out, and just the dynastism, dynamic nature of this conference makes it unique. And it's always one that I look forward to. And you know what, I think for me, knowing the two of you guys is a great example of how the connections work and how you can build relationships. And they will last. And we have a community where you can count on other people. And I know that I could contact either one of you at any time and bounce an idea or a problem off you and get really good feedback. And that has all been because of this association and being able to make these kind of connections. When I talk to younger people who are moving into IT leadership positions, a lot of times they'll tell me about how lonely it can be on their campus because they don't necessarily feel like they can trust people, that they realize that you have a different relationship with the people in your organization. You can't necessarily always be frank about what challenges you have. And then when you come to EDUCAUSE, you're in these big rules full of people understand your pain because we all have very similar problems. And it makes such a difference to have that network. It's just, I don't, my profession would have been so much different without it. And we're near as fun. Yeah, and we could probably talk all night on this, but the one last thing I was just going to add is to what you were saying, Mike, is that I believe that as people come here and they realize they're not alone in these problems, they realize it's not that, that, okay, this is happening elsewhere, now they can find people and talk about, well, what's worked or how have you done with this? And it's been a close, yeah, it is. We can just realize there is no solution. Yeah. Nobody's figured this out. It's not your fault. No one's figured this one out yet. Well, instead of talking about this the whole time, though, I know we wanted to talk a little bit about leadership because we've all been involved in leadership. I know you've written articles on leadership. So as we get started, I guess my first question, and I'm going to ask you, Cynthia, since you just gave a talk on leadership today, you know, some reflections that you have in thinking about the leadership journey that you've been on. And then maybe, Mike, you could talk a little bit about yours. Sure. So, you know, one of the things that I've had a bunch of conversations about today with different people is, has to do really with preparing the next generation of leaders in this crazy, crazy time that we're in. You know, we had challenges. I've had a lot of challenges as, you know, the years have gone by. But I don't think I've been in quite the same situation that we're in right now with, you know, all of these pressures. And the side effects are the after effects of the pandemic. And so I've been thinking a lot about what should we be doing differently to prepare the next generation? And how do we want to sell these jobs? IT leadership jobs are hard, you know? And how do we want to, you know, sell them to the people who are coming after us? And, you know, what are the things we should be doing? Or, well... That was a conversation, Stauber. That is. I think it's tough. And, you know, I just mentioned in my journey, I ended up leaving IT leadership a year and a half ago. And I think living through COVID was a big factor in there. Yeah. And it was both pressure that that brought as a leader to realize that every day you were getting in line with people who didn't know what was coming next. And they looked to the leaders in their organization, whether they were the formal leaders like those of us who are senior administrators, and then also the other people that they looked up to or trusted. And it was hard to show the vulnerability and the struggle that you were going through when everyone around you was looking for somebody to kind of be strong and hold it all together. And so I held it all together for a couple of years, and that was about it. I mean, I just felt at this point in my career, that was really tough. I mean, my organization, the Cal State system, I had 175 people in my group. And, you know, when you have 175 people in a group, every day, several of them really struggle it. And if you're an empathetic person and you take that seriously, it's a lot to absorb. Well, and they were struggling with, you know, people in their own families or some of our own staff, you know, giving sick and, you know, losing parents or, you know, losing family members. And that's something none of us ever had to deal with on that kind of scale. Certainly not at so many so close together, such a constant. And I have never, my staff, lost two members of their family, you know. And if you, I do think that a leader has to strike a balance between being a human, oh, you always have to leave with humanity. You also have to have a certain, some kind of detachment. And it's not the same as, you're not a member of these folks' family. And you have to, you're not, you're not a friend in the same way that you're a friend with other people. But, boy, if you are somebody who's empathetic and you respond to other people's pain, when you go through a time like that, it is very worrying. And I'm sure it was for all of us. Yeah. You know, yet as we look back, it might be probably technologies, finest tide, you know, when we think about all that was accomplished during the pandemic and how quickly we were able to sort of keep things going in ways that sometimes were really good. And sometimes we're like, but, you know, it was something that I think we can see that we've made a difference. And as we get into this period now where things are returning a little bit more towards normal, I think giving people the opportunity to breathe, step back and, and yeah, there's a lot that we still need to do. But we also have to be recognizing we're coming out of this major effort that has really taxed everyone. And for our own sake, we need to be ready to be sharing the fact that we need to slow down from time to time. I agree, but I don't know if that's a reality for many people because I think we're we're moving right into new sets of crises. Just the entire social situation that you face, the world situation, increasing the sense that there's increase in violence in the world. And that affects all of us and the folks in organizations as well. The budget pressures, the demographic pressures, it's a lot. It's a lot. And, you know, I don't think any of us have the answers to that, but it does seem like there was, I think I, I used to talk to my team and I would say, yeah, and this is going to end, and we're all going to get together for barbecue. And I think we thought it was like, there's going to be a day they turn the switch. Everyone will get the vaccine. We'd say we have herd immunity. No, it's going to be sick anymore. It's all over. We'll all come out of our caves and celebrate. And it didn't happen that way at all. It did not. And so there never was that. We didn't have VJ Day like they did in World War II. Not that I would swap what those folks went through, but there was never this crowning moment when you could say, ah, the sun is out, it's shining. We can all just plug and dance. It didn't really happen that way. So I'm going to turn us because I feel so depressed. Okay, no, it's all about some problems. And I think one of the things that we wanted to talk about was also the fact that you've taken on a new role. You've gone from being in higher ed now to being working part-time for a vendor. And you're doing no wonderful work, but could you talk a little bit? Sure, and I'm actually working for more than one vendor because I have a contractual relationship with and I'm doing other things as well. But the main thing I'm doing is working with a company called Vent Technology Consulting Group. And I actually think it's one model, one very successful model, for how higher education and the for-profit sector can work together, partly because it's made up almost completely of people from higher ed. So this particular group, there's 11 people in the group and 10 of them were in higher ed. One came from healthcare sector. So also an adjacent sector in higher education. So I do think that, and we were thinking about the future of the relationship between higher ed and all the different industries that support higher ed. I hope we're moving towards a time when there's a more porous relationship between those two. You know, there was a time when, if you knew a younger person early in their career and they said, I'd like to go work for this technology company, but I really think I'd like to come back and work for higher ed. I think most of us would have probably said, well, that's pretty risky because if you go work for that company, the chance that you're gonna be able to find a senior position in higher ed is not very good because people are gonna not take you seriously. They're gonna think you don't really accept the mission of higher ed or almost as if there's gonna be a taint or a mark on your format that says you're not a real higher ed person. I think we're moving beyond that and I think we're gonna see, if I know at least one high-profile person who went to a vendor is no SCIO. And I think that's really healthy and there's challenges with it, so in this case, yes, I am not getting my paycheck directly from higher education institution, but right now I just got off a call with community college. I'm working with them and they trust me not because I'm a technology expert but because I'm a higher education expert and I've been there in that role. So has your perspective changed at all about how higher ed should be working with the vendor community? Well, one of the things that I, you know, when I was in, most of my career I was in a state system which had very strict ethical rules about that made it very hard to work in intensive way of higher education. I can even remember going to, I remember going to a retreat with Zoom and everyone else is like drinking wine in a hotel and I'm going like, I really need to go and go back to my holiday in because if I, I don't even know how much this bottle of wine costs and I have to report it to the state, the value of it and it was difficult and there are good reasons for that, right? I'm not complaining. There are good reasons for those ethical rules but they make it very hard to really influence the future of those organizations because I literally was like walking out of a meeting with the CEO of a technology company because I couldn't be there because they're about to have an expensive dinner. Yeah. And so I hope we can find ways that are ethical and that protect the interest of the institutions but also I'd like it to be easier for people to move back and forth between those worlds without having a conflict of interest. You figure out a way to do it. Yeah. Well, one of the things that has sort of come to my mind is that and it's really a result of the move to software as a service and for applications but if you go back 20 years you might have had 20 major vendors. Now if when I go and I look at our software as a service list and other things we probably have 250. Right. Vendors that are really important and so we have to begin understanding how we can work better with the vendor community because it's essential for us to be better and do what we're gonna be doing as we go forward over the next few years. Sure. I mean we can remember times when there were people who literally bought some of their own equipment built their own servers, installed open source software on them. They really wanted to maintain that independence and it's a attractive idea to be able to do that for lots of reasons but in today's technology it's not practical anymore and you are gonna depend upon many major vendors and many, many more minor vendors and the more that we can work with them in a productive way they can understand us. We can understand them which is really important too. Sometimes I feel my colleagues are kind of beating the drum of well they need to understand us and that's true but we should take the time to understand what they need and then try to find a balance because it doesn't benefit us if our major suppliers go out of business because they can't figure out a way to be productive. We want them to understand us and we want them to be successful by their scales just as we want our students to be successful. Yeah, it's the whole idea of partnerships that we talk about all the time that we've been sometimes successful and sometimes not. Well, same as on campuses they really understand partnership means we all give a little and we listen to each other and those partnerships mean to do what I tell you. Had me a good partner. But I would say that and I hope maybe you can also give some guidance because of being at the CSU you really had a portfolio that was driving a lot of change but what I have found is that if you can get vendors if you listen to them about what they want to accomplish but then you're also prepared to be sharing your goals and priorities you can begin to really start to see if there's the basis for a productive thing. The other piece that I really enjoy is so we have a research park incubator on campus and I really love working with early stage companies and talking to them. One I often warn them against the higher ed sector just because we're slow to buy and it takes a long time to make decisions but if you do want to come into this space it's a great partnership and we'll often be long-time customers if you live up to your end and can deliver a product that is helping us meet our needs of supporting the university and that's just a blast to be sort of helping to shape where some of that direction goes. I agree and it works best and sometimes we don't always have a choice but it works best when we can find companies that are very ethical or very honest to transparent who will listen and will adjust their models just as they may ask us to adjust some of the things that we do so we can mix stuff work well and those are the kind of relationships I have with some of the folks that I see are on the floor and we really have a friend type relationship, partnership type relationship that goes beyond the transactional. They're not, I know that they're not nice to me just because I bought something or bought something. I'm not in position to buy anything from them now and they're still happy to see me so and then there are others who if I never saw them again that we'd probably both be happy. So, you know, it's finding that right balance. So Mike, as you're thinking about the work that you do at the CSU and some of the projects that you were involved in, are there any sort of things that you think really were sort of great examples of projects that the CSU undertook? Because for many years it was a highly collaborative group and it may still be. I'm just not as familiar with it in the most recent times around joint work across the 23 campuses. Sure, well, I mean, I think I found that collaboration waxes and wanes based on the personalities that people involved and I think there are people who naturally seem to lean into collaboration and are willing to develop trust and there are others who for whatever reason want to hold their own row, you know? And just as there are across other organizations and there are those who say they want to be partners but they're interested in only in as far as they get something out of it. At a good partnership, both sides get something and if you go into it just as a game where you're going to maximize what you get and you don't care what the other side gets, that's not a basis for long term partnership. So in a way it's not that different from working with a vendor supplier partner because the ones that are willing to play a long game and who play a game of trust or you can work well once. So it just varied and it varied over time as different leaders were institutions and institutions often will take on the character of the senior leader, the president, right? So California State University just as in, I think it's so many in a lot of other systems. Into the day, you don't report to the system, you report to the president or the leader of your campus and that's the person who tells you if you're doing a good job or not. So they tend to hire people in their own image. You were the inaugural CIO, right? For a system CIO? No, no. No? Oh, okay. I don't know why. I wasn't, there were others well before me. I think David Erst is the first. Oh, that's right, of course. Oh, I was the first CIO at a couple of campuses I worked at. Yeah, maybe that's what it was. I was a high-polythamone and I was first CIO there. And it's always an interesting role to play. I was gonna take us back a little bit to talking a little bit about leadership because I read a piece that you and your colleague at Vantage, Kirk Kelly wrote. About five keys to effective IT leadership or something. Five key habits. Five key habits. And one of them you've kind of just alluded to now about speaking the language of your stakeholders. And I think that's something that sometimes in IT we fall down on that a little bit. And why did you pick that one? I think that it's something that I always wanted to do. So it sort of came naturally to me because I desired it. I remember when I was a professor and they did orientation for the new faculty and somebody came from student affairs and they said, well, we always offer like a tour of student affairs. If you come by Friday at 10 o'clock, we'll show you all the stuff we do. So I came by Friday 10 o'clock, I was the only one there. And they were like, hello, what are you here for? I said, well, I'm here for the, is it always say that every orientation usually nobody comes by, you know? And so I was always curious. And I do think that it's not in there, but that would be another great habit of leaders to be curious. And so I always wanted to know what are all these people doing? I thought Dr. Kautum talked about that today, how people just don't understand the situation he works. But you know, it's not that hard to find out if you go and ask people and listen to them. My dad was a newspaper reporter, by the way, and he was always just curious how everything is. He's been asking a lot of questions. He loved to interview people, you know, and ask questions and listen to their answers, right? And so I always wanted to know what does the provost actually do, you know? And who actually makes us do? There's all these associate provosts. What did they do, you know, and find out, oh, they like do really important things. They can make or break a university by the decisions that they make. And this one is really great and kind of figures out how to fix all the problems that this other one causes, you know? So, but I do think that it maybe was easier for me coming from faculty. So I speak faculty language. I was a member of the faculty union. I was on the faculty senate. I was on the curriculum committee. I was on the promotion to tenure committee. So I kind of knew that side, but I didn't know the business side as well, but... Yeah, you had the shared governance piece, but... Right. I mean, I loved finding out how facilities worked. Oh, we have a campus architect. What does that person do? They're like drawing pictures of buildings. You know, what is that about? Help us with classrooms sometimes. What's there to a controller and a bursar and a chief financial officer? And how does that relate to this financial system that, oh, there's accounts payable and accounts receivable. What the heck is the difference there, you know? We know. I was always curious about that. And then I wanted to understand what their needs were. At one time we did a couple sessions. So we called it higher ed 101 for IT people who were coming from industry, coming into higher ed and didn't talked about exactly those kinds of things. Yeah. I know when I went to a new campus, I don't remember who was probably a student at your cause meeting or something. I learned this, but I would go to people and I would say, you know, what could I be doing to help you be successful? And most people would tell you, sometimes tell you, stop doing all those terrible things like these, but then, you know, to find out, well, you know, what is your goal? What is it you're trying to accomplish? What, you know, what's keeping you up at night? And then, oh, so, you know, with experience then you learn those pieces. I always encourage my team too. I'd always say, I want you to, like when we come to the Edgars meeting, one of my advice to people coming the first time, it said, go through the schedule and pick something that looks interestingly genome, nothing about, and go to that, right? If you're infrastructure person, don't just go to infrastructure sessions. Go to a session on learning this all in, you know, listen to that. That's great advice. So one of the things sort of in that vein, I always encourage, we have a staff senate, and I encourage our IT staff to consider being senators because they said, you know, it was really formative for me in the late 80s as I was starting out as a staff member, I got involved in the senate, and I just learned so much about the rest of the university. You know, what do people do here? How do they do it? But it's also the relationship you begin to make as you're reaching out and learning about other people and even just having conversations. What make your life better? How could we be helpful? You know, that's a great opener for, you know, learning more. Some campuses will have like a leadership academy where they'll bring people from different roles at campus. And it's sometimes surprising how few IT people take advantage of that, right? They sort of silo themselves. And that's okay, but not if you want to be a higher-end leader. Really feel like you want to be a leader. I think you have to be, have a broader view of be able to look out and see if you simply want to manage machines, you can probably do that. Although in the long term, that's not really a growth opportunity. You know, you coming into this role with a faculty background is incredibly helpful, I think, from a teaching and learning perspective. And always encourage people, other thing people would do is they would say, so I think I want to be a CIO and do you think I have the right background? I want to push that, I would ask them is have you ever taught a class? Yeah. And I encourage them to, you know, when you've got a master's, you could go to the community college and we'll teach the IT 101 class or something that interests you. Maybe it's something completely different that you know about that you could teach a class because when that instructor calls and says, that projector's not working for the third time this week, you need to understand what that means. It doesn't sound too bad to you if a projector didn't work for three times, but when you're an instructor and you've got two hours a week, in front of 40 students for 30 sessions and you've just lost 10% of your instruction dealing with the projector, that's a big deal. But I don't think some of our people realize that at first. Maybe we're just being cranky, you know, it's a big deal. No, you're definitely right. And I think, you know, we often hear, well, they just start teaching two classes a week or three classes a week. And I remember it early on in my career, I got to teach assembly language programming because they didn't know anyone, they didn't have anyone who knew the assembly language. And so I was in there teaching that. 8086? Oh no, no, no, this was actually a CDC cyber. Oh, yeah, so nobody knew it yet. But what was so funny with that is I realized I'm spending six, eight hours for every hour I was in the class trying to get ready because you just have to be so prepared when you're talking in front of students. And it may be that it's a myth too, or it's a rarity that instructors will just use the same notes year after year. It's certainly not a computer science. I mean, you're constantly revising and I think if you're at all a thoughtful person who cares about what you do, you're constantly revising and proving it. I think the vast majority of the faculty you're doing, it's a lot of work. It is. So we need to wrap up and I guess, Mike, but curious if you have any sort of parting thoughts for our audience that you want to share? Well, I just want to say how inspired I was to go see my colleague, Dr. Fayette Zuniga, give his talk today. I won the DEI award this year and I had the good fortune to work with him in the Cal State system. And I thought that to see someone who is so devoted to his family and so curious and so willing to give and to see it win that award and to see Macintosh giving him the, congratulating him one last year, it's just wonderful to be in a profession where you have people like that. So I'm really grateful for, I'm grateful for all of you and for so many other colleagues that I've worked with and Felix shows it's not just about CIOs or senior technical leaders, their leaders, all four organizations, I'm meaning to celebrate people at every level for what they do. I think that's a perfect way to... Couldn't have said it better. Thank you. Thank you for joining us, Mike.