 First, can I just make sure that I have your name, title, and everything correct? Could you just introduce yourself to me real quick? Okay. So, I'm Aaron Brooks, and of course, I'm here at East Mississippi Community College. My title currently is Director of Administrative Computing and System Supporting. Great. Perfect. So, I'll just get into the questions here, and we'll just get through them. I've got four questions. You've said that IT departments need to leave the data center. What do you mean by that? Okay. So, it's something I've learned, I guess you would say, by trial and error, right, with a lot of strategies that we have going on campus. So, I've been at the institution for about 18 years. I've touched almost every part of the IT department, except for in what network administration, right? But I've run my share of cabling and that kind of thing, too. We were on a mainframe back in the day, and we sort of just stayed in the data center. And, you know, we took requests, we ran reports, we did data. At that time, we ran the grades. We even did some payroll. I mean, you know, they looked at the data processing center at that time, as, you know, those guys in the closet that just output stuff. And a lot of decisions were made around us, but not with us, not having us as a part of the decision-making process. And so we were brought in on the tip land and told to make it work, figure it out. And if we couldn't figure it out in-house, then, you know, figure out what sort of software we could layer on top of the process to make it work. And what we started presenting to them was that these are expensive decisions, right? When you make these decisions that are not in tandem with the strategic moves that we're making in the back office, in the data center, you know, we're moving stuff to cloud, we're changing our email services, our communication services. We're finding applications that maybe bring some departments together and removing silos. And we're trying to implement these things, and you all are functioning without us. And so we're tripping over each other, right? So I begin to ask, hey, can I be a part of this particular meeting that's about orientation? Can I be a part of this meeting that's about registration? This meeting that is about, you know, student success initiatives and what have you? And as I started asking, they started allowing me to participate. You know, I started raising questions. I started offering comments and suggestions that they started realizing actually fits within our business processes. And these are things that we need to think about. If we didn't realize technology could fit here, you know, student success initiatives, for instance, they were trying to start early alert processes, right? And they were using email. And then they had this paper copy that sort of followed the email, except the paper copy went in the opposite direction that the email went, you know? And things were just all out of sync, all out of sorts. It was causing frustrations, you know? And I was like, well, shucks, if somebody had told me, you know, we can maybe create a communication flow for you. You know? Kind of a deal. Oh, we didn't know you could do that, you know? And, you know, that just, just one little piece that began to represent how we could, you know, sort of cheapen, you know, make less expensive. Some of these business processes, if they just allowed us to marry technology with the decision-making. And so that sort of gave us an assigned seat at the table, right? So now, you know, when these meetings are formed and before these decisions are made, we have an assigned seat at the table that says, okay, let's make sure that we have a representative from IT, admin, computing, what have you here to help us sort of think this through. But even then, I would say that that was still sort of a lag process. Now we get a seat at the table to brainstorm, right, to actually help create ideas, you know? What can technology do is now the question, not necessarily, here's our process, how can you help us, right? Now we get to actually brainstorm and say, hey, did you know that there's some technology out there that'll text the student whenever they make an F on their test grade? And that text will actually put a link in there that'll show them where tutoring help is on the website and give them office hours and blah, you know, that kind of thing. We didn't know that existed. That's a good idea. Hey, let's brainstorm. How do we put a business process around that, you know, that kind of thing? And how does that help our persistence and our retention at the end game, our graduation rates, you know, that kind of thing? So now we're actually at the table, like I said, with the assigned seat, actually helping brainstorm with these ideas that soon develop into our business processes. I can't imagine the amount of money and efficiency that has been incorporated with you guys having a seat at the table. What's the return on investment of the collaboration, right, that we didn't previously have? And so we actually hired a person to sort of be a project manager. And what her thing was was to look at every business process that we have on campus, and she created this continuous improvement structure. But you know, she helped broker this relationship between IT and the rest of the business, saying that they have to be at the table in order for us to continuously improve this process, kind of a deal. So we're not wanting to put a dollar amount on. What does this collaboration save us, right? And what's, you know, what's the monetary value of having this and minimizing the rework that we have to do on the back end when we realize, oh, if we had to use our technology that we're already paying $30,000 a year for and maintenance fees, right, there was a tool inside of that, except some office went and bought this standalone piece for $5,000 a year, you know, you know, breaking down the silos, opening up communication, yeah, there's definitely a savings. Wow, that's great. Can you talk about, you've been talking about it, but can you talk a little more about IT as a collaborator? It's something I've been in the industry for 11 years and I've heard it discussed and discussed. What's held us back? What are the major challenges for our industry having never fully achieved this goal? Just my own personal hypothesis is that IT as a function, you know, we like being in the closet, right? Just give me some gadgets to work on and, you know, tell me what you want, you know, what your output needs to be. And I'll go in the closet and I'll take my tools and my expertise and I'll make it happen and then I'll send it to you and say, hey, is that what you want, right? And that's how we seem, especially here in Mississippi in our community college brotherhood or sisterhood, so there's 15 community colleges and, you know, we meet three times a year as IT or, you know, as technologists just to talk about our business of higher ed, you know, community college or whatever. And, you know, when you look around the room and in our discussions, it's kind of what we like. We like to be left alone and just given our box. You know, we go in the data center and we ooh and ah about our servers and, you know, gigabit switches and, you know, how fast our, you know, data recovery systems are and blah, blah, blah, right? And so there's some certain personalities that we actually have to have in IT now that are communicators, right? That are able to speak for and of the technology in a way that the business people get it, right, you know, without necessarily transgressing the boundaries within the business because the CFO is going to say, hey, don't touch my money. HR is going to say, hey, don't touch, you know, my EEOC stuff and payroll is going to say, hey, the way the feds make us keep up with this is just the way the feds make us keep up with this, right? So, you know, as a collaborator, we have to know our boundaries, but we also have to sort of be intentional and in saying, hey, we're here. We have these tools, you know, we know what these tools can do. Let us help you do what the business does with these tools that are available. So what I had to do is I had to go and learn the business processes. I had to figure out what does the registrar do? What does admissions, you know, do? You know, what happens over in the financial aid department, right? And so in learning all of these people's intentionally, then I could speak, you know, from what I've experienced in their departments, wedded with the technology that I know that we have available to us and the expertise that I know we have in our IT departments. I could wed them together and create, you know, a good business argument, saying, hey, you know, here's why we need to talk, right? Here are the gaps that I'm seeing. And you hear the things that I think can become advantageous to us. So we even did sort of a SWOT analysis, right? Of the business and also of IT and said, hey, here's where our threats and our opportunities and, you know, all those things actually criss-cross with each other. And if we fix it, if we fix this, we're actually fixing both sides, right? Yeah, yeah. And the business, you know, which then bodes well for our customer, which is the student, right? Because that's really the kind of work for is the student. So it took some serious intentionality of saying, all right, guys, you know, we really have to find a way to communicate, you know, with our dean of students, our dean of academics, our dean of career tech, you know, and show them that we've got this side, but we really need to know their side. They need to know our side so that we're not fighting each other. We're not competing anymore, right? Because when the budget comes out, you know, IT is saying, hey, we need $500,000 because we want to do this, this, and this, and this. Except none of that aligns with the strategies that they've said over there on the business side, over in academics, that they want so many labs for, you know, journalism and, you know, our radio production studios and blah, you know, kind of a deal. It's amazing. Right, and we're taking that dollar and we're stretching it two different ways when we can actually work to where that dollar actually works for all of us. That's a good starting point for this next question. What would your advice be to CIOs and people like yourself, directors, in terms of getting and having a seat at that strategic table? Because it sounds like you guys are pretty enlightened in terms of that relationship, but I would imagine there are some universities and institutions where that hasn't quite happened yet. And maybe it's the, maybe it's the executives who don't see the value. Maybe it's the other way around. I don't know. But what would your advice be to those guys like yourself that are looking to try to create that gap and create those efficiencies? So that's exactly what I had to do, what you mentioned. A lot of times our senior staff does not see that value. They consider us a utility, the same that they would look at the fiscal plan, right? So they keep the air conditions going, they keep the heat running, you know, whatever it is they do, they kind of look at IT the same way. As long as everybody can check email, get on the internet, log into the learning management system, IT's doing their job, right? Well, it's like that might have worked in 1991. Unfortunately, we have senior staff that still think that way because they became VPs in 1991, right? And, you know, the business still runs as the business according to them. So what I had to do was I had to find small pieces where I showed value, right? And then I had to tie that value to something that affected our funding, right? So my easy one was registration. How can IT help registration? Because registration affects headcount, which our funding model in Mississippi is directly tied to our headcount. More headcount, right? More funding, okay? So my thing was how do we increase registration as an IT? What can we do? Well, what we need to do is we need to streamline online registration. And then we need to help our recruiters push students to that online registration. So let's give the recruiters a really good tool, right? And let's make online registration really, you know, except that we didn't necessarily have the expertise in my IT department to, you know, create those outputs, create those applications and whatnot. So we sort of had to piece together what can we do in-house? What can we purchase at a really good price? Which means, you know, we had to do some product research and that kind of thing. And then let's talk to the VPM enrollment management and let's say, hey, here's what we got to offer. Here's a plan. We really feel like there's value in this, right? And they were a little iffy. You know, there wasn't much trust there, right? Because they're not used to IT saying, hey, we got a plan for you, right? So I had to really work on that relationship. And, you know, which is typically what it comes down to, relationships, right? And so in developing that relationship, I gave them something small that they could look at and that they could see, hey, if we test this with a small group, let's use some high school students. Let's test this with that dual enrolled group. And let's see how well that works, right? And it worked okay, right? And so we got feedback from the students. We got feedback from, you know, the instructors and advisors that were helping those students using the tools that we provided. And they said, well, hey, if you tweak these things, then it would be even better. So we take these things back. We tweak them. We talked to our third-party vendor that was supplying software. They did their tweaks. And we could see some increases in enrollment, right? That we could tie directly back to the tools, right? And they gave us some small wins, right? To where, hey, maybe you can trust us with student success initiatives where we're trying to do early alert, as I mentioned earlier. And tutoring services, you know, and those kinds of things. So we looked for some small places to where we could show our value. And of course, that value being directly tied to funding, right? That could show some places where it could move money that, you know, allowed them to now think of us whenever they're thinking of some other initiative that they have going on. That, yeah, remember, IT showed us this, hey, let's go talk to IT, right? The other thing that we did was I actually sort of invited myself to some of the grant writers on campus. As they began to brainstorm about grants that were going on, sort of invited myself to some of their brainstorming sessions. And we ended up getting a Bill and Melinda Gates grant, right? For technology, for student success. But it focused on retention. So because it was a technology grant, I had to be the lead writer and I partnered with the student success coordinator. We won the grant and, you know, that sort of married us with them. They got to sit beside us for two years and see how we work. We got to see how they work. And that created this bond and this relationship. To now, everything they do over at Student Success, they call us, you know? Come over here. We got to talk about this. Here's something new we're thinking about, you know? And so that created a relationship as well, you know? And it was tied once again to money, right? Grant funds, right? That with these initiatives, you know? So those small places where we were able to develop relationship helped prove to our senior staff that, you know what? We really need them to have a regular place at the table for decision-making. So at the end of last year, we actually got a seat at the table for our strategic planning, right? Ten-year plan. We want them at the table, you know? That's great. That's great. From where we were 10 years ago, asking, hey, notice us, notice us, notice us. You know, now we're a part of, you know, developing the strategic plan as well as our accreditation team. So that sounds like the main piece of advice you're saying. It's like the provables can't be abstract. It has to have some sort of meat on the bone, right? You know, as I said before, be intentional. But you have to pluck away at those relationships, you know? They're not built overnight. That trust isn't built overnight. And to be able to change their perception of IT as a collaborative partner, you know? It helps us move our business forward. It takes a while to do. It takes a while. So last question, and again, this question, if you don't have an answer for it, I totally understand. This is the $64,000 question. How do you see IT fitting into the university structure in the future? I mean, where do you go from here? You've established the relationship. You've got a seat at the table. Is there anything else you see that is another challenge that you want to overcome? Our high school classes are shrinking. You know, those that graduate from high school in Mississippi, we're getting smaller classes. And so, you know, and then those students are looking for different things. You know, their expectation to us, you know, their social, you know, methodology is just different from what the traditional classroom is, you know, with younger instructors that expect to teach differently, right? Our business office, you know, they're getting, they're seeing fewer people at the window, right? Because everybody's expecting to do business online. You know, a credit card ought to just follow me wherever, from the gambling area to the bookstore to the business office, you name it, you know? I shouldn't have to pay for a parking ticket at the business office window, right? So all of those things take strategic decisions, strategic foresight, that just has to be up there, that we see at the VP level, you know, where decisions are born, right? So that's really where we want to move forward. And we really see that as becoming sort of the model for universities, colleges, across the nation. That you have to have that person there that can see into the future. Not necessarily because we're state funded, we can't necessarily be bleeding edge or even cutting edge, right? But we have to be right behind that, you know? Because we don't have the advantage of being able to play with our dollars, right? Test out cool stuff, right? Well, it sounds like exciting stuff's going on in your college, though. Absolutely. But yeah, so that's kind of where I see it. Cool, man. That's all I have. Is there anything you want to add that we haven't touched on? I guess the other thing is for people, I guess, in my position to realize that you're not alone. So, you know, I read a lot of material. I get a lot of stuff from, you know, EDUCAUSE and I read the CIO magazine. And, you know, for us to be collaborative, I guess, you know, as a team and share this kind of information and sort of, you know, they're the, you know, the technical friends that are out there and, you know, a lot of those I would love to take advantage of. And, you know, there are private schools that can really do some amazing stuff. And so I sort of watch them and try to take some of that stuff and see if I can embed it, you know, in small ways here at our college, you know, kind of the deal. Let them be the test case. Absolutely, without breaking the bank. But we love for those types to share what they're doing and let it sort of trickle down