Speaker 0 | 00:09.647

All right, welcome everyone back to Dissecting Popularity Nerves today, talking with Christopher Driscoll on his last day of 2021. We are in 2021, right? And that is because you… work at the University of Pittsburgh and you don’t have to come back to work until January 4th. Must be nice. That doesn’t come out as paid vacation. That doesn’t come out as vacation, right? That just comes with the job.

Speaker 1 | 00:39.871

We’re typically not off that much, but universities do give you a pretty nice winter break. The university did feel generous to throw some extra days at us at the end of this year.

Speaker 0 | 00:52.762

Super cool. You had a little bit of an AWS outage today, not of any fault of your own or anything like that, but interesting how those type of things affect students. What does an AWS, how does that affect, just out of curiosity, outages in universities? And we’ll get into this in a second as to why you’re so special and why I really want to talk with you because it’s a different kind of dynamic in the, I guess we’d say, community. the IT community that you work for, but since it’s just happened to come up today, how does a cloud outage affect a university?

Speaker 1 | 01:33.368

Yeah, I mean, just like a lot of businesses, I mean, a lot of our services that we subscribe to are hosted in the cloud, and those are typically hosted in one of the big server farms, if it’s AWS or Azure or Google. So I think the Canvas platform is hosted in AWS, which is an LMS system, learning management system that our campus uses and a lot of campuses do. So when those go down, we go down with it. But again, we were talking earlier, I think it’s so infrequent that it still wouldn’t push me away from the cloud. But there has been a couple this semester. So hopefully it’s not that.

Speaker 0 | 02:19.613

Let’s go back in time. Let’s go back in time for a second. Back to when you were in college and I was in college. None of this mattered. And outage was like, eh, go to the library and use the Dewey decimal system.

Speaker 1 | 02:37.668

We had blue books or something that we used to write in, I guess, back in the day.

Speaker 0 | 02:41.491

Blue books. Oh my God.

Speaker 1 | 02:42.732

Remember those things?

Speaker 0 | 02:44.613

That’s a nightmare. I’m going to have recurring nightmares tonight. Do you ever have those recurring nightmares where you’re like, where you show up for an exam and you realize that you haven’t gone to a single class all semester and then you’ve just found out that you were in this class and you show up on the last day of exam and the teacher’s like, oh, Mr. Howard, so nice for you to have joined us this semester. Here’s your test. And you’re going through like abacadabra. Like, remember abacadabra? Anywho, but it is amazing now how much a university, how much technology affects the students. Now, you don’t really have, you have this title of director of technology at the University of Pittsburgh, but you have department relationship manager as a title underneath, which is. So let’s just kind of go over the university network in general and what IT looks like at a large university. And I find it fascinating because typically when you think IT, you think IT of a particular company all kind of doing the same thing. But you have multiple different departments. You have, I don’t know, biology or sciences departments. You have business. You’ve got English. whatever, what do we call that? The humanities. We have these different departments, all with very special needs. How does that even work? I mean, from an IT perspective, how do you guys make that all work? And how do you, from an end user perspective, you’ve got students as end users, you’ve got faculty, and then you’ve got all these different departments and all these different needs. To me, it sounds like a nightmare, but you guys all make it work and probably have fun doing it.

Speaker 1 | 04:43.424

Well, yeah, I mean, I’ve worked at four different universities and they all were big enough that there was a central IT organization. And then the larger departments and schools, you know, generally five schools makes up a university, five or more. They each have their own IT operation or people that are employed by those departments to just focus on their own. needs, whether it’s equipment or systems or support or whatever. There was an IT survey at the University of Pittsburgh, which is a very big research institution, at least the biggest I’ve worked at. I think there were 700 and some IT people.

Speaker 0 | 05:26.482

Guys, I’m recording.

Speaker 1 | 05:27.282

Half of those were in central IT. So there’s, you know, half the IT folks around campus are running around doing their own thing. Now, the central IT generally runs the network and the infrastructure backbone and enterprise services, whether it be authentication, things like that. But so I worked in the business school, which had a pretty robust IT organization. We had about 10 folks, our own web applications, our own desktops, support, operation, help desk, Salesforce, org. um classroom support um and over the last year we’ve merged into the central it because there’s initiative to kind of centralize a lot of services and it makes sense because we’re we’re doing a lot of the same work there’s a lot of overlap um so just describe that just

Speaker 0 | 06:24.498

describe that real quick so when we talk about centralizing it versus i’m assuming versus each school having its own it department right and How do you do that?

Speaker 1 | 06:39.918

Slowly is how we did it.

Speaker 0 | 06:42.600

Well, slowly. Yeah, and can you do it fast enough that new technology doesn’t come out and doesn’t… That’s actually what you just said is kind of this interesting thing we all deal with on a daily basis. How do we make change fast enough that it’s beneficial without it taking so long to make a change that by the time we make the change, it’s already… What do you call it? antiquated or siloed into some other thing? How do we change fast enough?

Speaker 1 | 07:10.818

Yeah. Well, I mean, universities are not known for changing very quickly. That’s a common thread, no matter where you are. I imagine there are some that probably very dynamic and move quickly on change, but a lot of them have been around for hundreds of years and it’s just not the way that work is done at universities. But- You know, we’re trying to change that. Ideally, by being all part of the same organization, we could be a little more agile and nimble and move on a dime a lot faster. When we were in our own IT or smaller IT organization, we did move pretty nimble. So that’s one of the things I’m really hoping that we can bring over to the larger enterprise in terms of being able to shift as needs change, as new technology. is available. I like to be able to pilot it in a smaller fashion and see if it has enterprise, you know, capabilities. And you think about like, uh, often things are tried out at the smaller school levels, uh, to see if it makes sense. And a lot of the schools are doing the same thing or want to be doing the same thing. So, uh, if we can kind of scale that up, I think there’s a lot of opportunity to push the envelope. I mean, if you can’t try,

Speaker 0 | 08:34.273

new stuff at a university where where can you try right yeah um so give me an idea then there there was this this kind of aspect of these schools and colleges or your smaller your smaller kind of like test environments getting to test things out and then kind of move them up further to the university level can you give me an example

Speaker 1 | 09:03.469

where you’ve done that yeah i think uh some of the classroom av technology um we’ve we’ve tried some things that i think are kind of more towards the future um you know because a lot of you know all the universities moved online during the pandemic right and now students got a taste of you know whether long term they’re going to want to continue to you know kind of dial into a class if they can’t be there, if they don’t want to be there in person. You know, all the kind of hybrid classroom capabilities that really does make the student feel like they’re in the classroom, but remote. It also presents a lot of opportunities for, you know, to kind of expand your base, right? You know, the students that could attend if, you know, say they’re in another country or whatever, you can offer coursework to them if they’re not there. But, you know, Zooming is not… you know. I think, acceptable long-term. So you need to be able to deliver kind of a more immersive experience. So we’ve been piloting kind of a next-gen classroom in the business school. And I think it has scalability across campus. So that’d be one example.

Speaker 0 | 10:19.723

I think what you brought up is, I wonder how many organizations, universities or not, healthcare, hospitals, different organizations that are larger. actually pilot test various different programs without rolling it out throughout the entire organization uh just being and just be it would to me it would be make sense and be a good best practice to of course do a pilot of multiple different things maybe simultaneously across different departments to see how that worked when covid hit and you had a bunch of people all of a What was the mass migration or sudden strategy? Like what happened? I’m just curious. Was everyone like, hey, hey, we’re going to do this. Or like, was everyone just kind of like, hey, let’s try this. Let’s do this. Let’s use this. And everyone just like, you know, was it, was it drinking from the fire hose? Was it a bunch of different test things? Was there any organization around it? How did it work?

Speaker 1 | 11:23.364

Yeah, I can’t speak to other schools at the university, but for us, it was actually fairly painless because we were already had. a number of faculty that were teaching online with Zoom. We already had a Zoom license for the entire school. So we had a lot of faculty that are already pretty familiar with, you know, the best practices and the technology. And they were able to kind of work with the faculty that needed a lot more help, as well as IT did as well. So we basically had, I think, a week and a half to get everybody ready, if I remember correctly. It’s kind of a blur back in March of 2020. But yeah. I think it was a pretty seamless transition. I mean, you know, to teach online is more of an art than anything. To do it well, right? But to at least get them online, get them connected, I think it was a fairly painless transition. The students, they obviously adapt pretty quickly to almost anything. So for us, it wasn’t too bad. I heard.

Speaker 0 | 12:26.635

Was it about? Just emailing every student. Hey, email. Do teachers just have an email list now? Do they just email all their students and text them? I mean, students don’t read your email.

Speaker 1 | 12:35.983

I don’t know.

Speaker 0 | 12:36.503

I just didn’t even think about it. Yeah. I’m sorry. Hey, Instagram group, Facebook group. I mean, really, like think about the options that teachers have now of communicating with students. I didn’t even think about it now, you know, because those days for me are gone. How are teachers communicating with students most effectively now?

Speaker 1 | 12:56.288

Yeah, like the Canvas learning management system we had. A lot of campuses use Canvas or Blackboard or Google, these different platforms. That really can deliver a lot of the information. The syllabus, the coursework, quizzes, a link to the Zoom session or recordings of all previous Zoom sessions. So it’s pretty… well integrated i mean there’s still some work to be done but um our goal is always to make it as easy for a student as possible right so they’re not clicking here or there yeah um yeah that the user experience um you know it’s it’s not too bad i mean there’s always work to be done like i said but i think we make it as easy for them as possible and what so canvas and blackboard you had mentioned last time

Speaker 0 | 13:54.400

a, a more robust video conferencing experience. Is that built into Blackboard or what were you guys, you know, what were we looking to do in the future there?

Speaker 1 | 14:07.323

I mean, Zoom is, I think Blackboard, I think had some kind of video conferencing system built into it, but Zoom is pretty much what we used. And the university picked up a Zoom site license very quickly back in March of, 2020. But what we’re looking at is a different product and it kind of, yeah, it’s really for the, I think the instructor, it helps them get a better feel for the remote students and the students get kind of an interface on their end that has a lot more options than Zoom. There might be like four different feeds, four different video feeds, you know, the chats, right? their other tools for quizzing and things like that are all just kind of a little more intuitive. I wouldn’t be surprised if Zoom, you know, to kind of just… builds these kind of features or teams you know teams has been a pretty big player it is actually possible to to maybe get an educational experience that might be better than actually sitting in the classroom you

Speaker 0 | 15:18.932

know it sounds weird yeah i think for those larger you know 100 person plus classes you probably could get a better experience with like you said with quizzes chatting hand raising multiple different camera angles, maybe demonstrations, maybe not a lab environment, like a chemistry lab, certainly not. But certain large lecture halls, I would imagine that could be very beneficial.

Speaker 1 | 15:45.685

Yeah. I mean, that could even mean down the road, you don’t need those big lecture halls, which are, none of them are, they’re very hard to design. None of them are, they take a lot of space, a lot of resources. They cost a ton of money. yeah, those might be a thing of the past. And then, you know, maybe you deliver those online, those 100-level classes, and, you know, you have the in-person experience for the higher-level classes.

Speaker 0 | 16:13.374

We talked about this aspect of an IT community last time versus an IT department or an IT hierarchy, so to speak. Can you maybe just expand on that a little bit?

Speaker 1 | 16:28.845

Yeah, I mean, I think higher education, IT is like unique and, you know, think about all different places you could choose to work at, you know. When I was younger, I knew I wanted to work at a university because I liked just the feeling it had. You know, it was a nonprofit and, you know, you feel like you’re a part of a community. I still feel the same way to that today after 20 some years. working at universities.

Speaker 0 | 17:00.038

Explain that though. I get it. I mean, I can understand it because I can remember what it was like being in college, I guess, and high school. But, you know, I just maybe dig just… It’s interesting because I never really thought of that. I don’t know if many people in the IT field think, necessarily think about… I don’t know if they think about… choosing where they work and maybe putting a lot of thought into that, like in-depth thought into choosing a winner when it comes to a job and like maybe where you want to be. I think, and a lot of times the theme, and I asked that because the theme that I want to ask IT guys all the time is like, well, what’s your end game? You’re not, are you just going to stay at in IT manufacturing forever? I mean, the company is probably going to sell eventually or something’s going to happen. you’re going to be it director or CTO or CIO at another company, but what’s the end game. And if I asked you that question, how would you answer it? It would be probably, no, I love the community. I’ll be here till, uh, I don’t know. Like, um, like the, you know, wrinkled up old it guy walking down, you know, maybe on some, I don’t know, would you be walking down the hall? Who knows wherever we’ll be in the future, but I’m just, you know, Is there an end game where it’s just like, no, I’m riding this one out?

Speaker 1 | 18:26.652

Well, I mean, the benefits, I mean, typically you don’t get paid as much as you would in the corporate world. I mean, that’s, yeah, that’s to be expected, I think. But there are the other benefits, you know, such as your own education is typically covered or very heavily discounted as well as your spouse and your children. So a lot of people, once they get into, you know, have some kids in. eighth grade, high school, whatever, you know, they’re riding it out for another eight, 10 years, right? Because they’re saving hundreds of thousands of dollars on the back end there.

Speaker 0 | 19:02.446

Can’t we write a tax rate though? Okay.

Speaker 1 | 19:05.308

Yeah. There’s typically very good retirement benefits and things like that. It may make it hard for you to leave. You have to really have a good opportunity that with the money, you just can’t deny, you know, to leave, which is why a lot of people don’t leave.

Speaker 0 | 19:21.465

It doesn’t happen. No one’s paying that much unless it’s something really crazy. Yeah,

Speaker 1 | 19:29.790

I think once you get to a certain level, you start getting calls from outside agencies and things like that. But it has to be really worthwhile to beat the other benefits. Especially with children. I mean, they got to throw you another couple hundred thousand or something, right? To be worthwhile.

Speaker 0 | 19:50.705

It’s maybe $200,000, $300,000 Which like I said is Probably rare

Speaker 1 | 19:57.234

And Like I said I mean Like There’s a different kind of community feel, I think, to universities. I mean, they’re like little cities in a lot of ways. You know, there’s a lot of different things you can do and a lot of interesting things happening there that you just aren’t going to find, I think, in your corporate world.

Speaker 0 | 20:17.359

How’s the work-life balance?

Speaker 1 | 20:20.020

Well, obviously, that’s been on everyone’s radar more so than ever in the last year and a half, two years. I know at Pitt, they’re very concerned about making sure that that’s… an important aspect of retention of employees of attracting employees um like what goes on in the summertime what do you do in the summertime yeah well we don’t summer that’s always a confusing thing like oh do you have off in the summer i’m like no that’s when we’re super busy doing projects implementing

Speaker 0 | 20:49.970

things that’s our worst time because that’s when that’s when we can have downtime yeah so that’s that’s typically busier time all right so what’s the summer project what we got going on for this summer

Speaker 1 | 21:02.622

Uh, well this summer, probably some classrooms. Um,

Speaker 0 | 21:07.844

what can I have some vendors call you about and try to sell? Yeah, that’s a good question, Bill. You know, we’re looking for, no, um,

Speaker 1 | 21:16.927

my phone rings from vendors all day long. It’s never anybody that wants to really talk to me.

Speaker 0 | 21:22.690

Who’s the number one, who’s the number one, who’s the number one vendor? I’m just curious, like, which I should do an aspect of the show that’s like number one vendor call. Like what? What is it? Is it, is it, who calls you? I’m just curious. Like what’s the most common vendor call?

Speaker 1 | 21:38.575

Probably staffing agencies.

Speaker 0 | 21:41.336

Interesting.

Speaker 1 | 21:42.616

Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 21:43.697

Staffing agencies. So they’re the biggest, they’re the biggest churn and burn people.

Speaker 1 | 21:49.318

Well, for me, I’m sure other areas.

Speaker 0 | 21:51.599

Trying to staff for you or trying to hire you?

Speaker 1 | 21:55.460

No, to provide staff to augment, you know, our current staff. Do you need?

Speaker 0 | 22:00.962

Do you need a help desk? Do you need this? Do you need that? Yeah. Okay, okay.

Speaker 1 | 22:05.205

Yeah, I mean, I guess that’s big business now. Most universities don’t outsource that, but…

Speaker 0 | 22:14.752

Is it hard to find good staff? Do you do… Let me ask you this. Do you do any of the hiring?

Speaker 1 | 22:21.437

I do.

Speaker 0 | 22:22.277

This is like red light for calls. I should ask you this. No, I don’t, Phil. I don’t do any of it at all. If you were to do any of the hiring, what would you, is it hard to find good IT staff?

Speaker 1 | 22:36.329

You know, I mean, I haven’t really had a hard time. I was up for somebody that, you know, I’m not going to micromanage anybody. If I have to do that, you’re pretty much on your way out. Do you prefer,

Speaker 0 | 22:49.301

do they have to have degrees? Do they have to have certifications? What are you looking for?

Speaker 1 | 22:52.925

Yeah. No, I don’t. I mean, obviously we work at a university, so a degree is important, but I have hired people that didn’t have degrees that, you know, their experience just outweighs that. So yeah. Okay.

Speaker 0 | 23:06.889

So for example, this is, this is key because I’ve always asked this. So in your opinion, where does experience outweigh, where does that tip the scale? What, what, what has just been like, Oh, wow. I don’t care what you, whether you have a degree or not, I’m hiring you because why?

Speaker 1 | 23:25.602

A certain amount of years of experience certainly outweighs education. It depends on the area of expertise, if it’s programming or things like that. I think a degree is probably less important.

Speaker 0 | 23:43.838

Is that just because of straight experience? There are certain things that a degree can’t teach?

Speaker 1 | 23:48.422

Yeah, I mean, certain things you can’t get a degree in, right? Certainly a degree, I think, is very important. But, you know, if someone’s life didn’t take them down that journey, they’ll work at the university and they have an opportunity to pursue that that they wouldn’t have had otherwise.

Speaker 0 | 24:04.827

I know it’s a tough question asking you because you work at a university. It’s a tough question to ask someone that, you know, where your entire everything that you support is getting people degrees. But it’s an interesting theme that comes up a lot is. How badly do you need a degree in technology or a degree in anything for that aspect? Because so much of everything we learn in life comes from real hands-on experience. And I’m trying to think of something where we get a degree in something that helps so much. Certainly writing, only because I got a degree in creative writing. But look at me, I work in IT. So there’s a perfect example of like, I can write pretty… darn good emails. Okay. And I’ve gotten, you know, people have told me, Phil, this is the best email I’ve ever received in my life. They do. Yeah, absolutely. Because I make sure that it’s very comical and worth reading. Okay. Cause sometimes, you know, I mean, look at, if I look at my email box right now, I don’t know about you, but I’ve got 103,000 unread emails and there’s a certain, you know, there’s always that, what’s your philosophy? Keep your inbox empty or use email as a database.

Speaker 1 | 25:15.176

Yeah, that’s a good question. Cause I used to be, you know, that was my task list. I kept it, you know, under 50 or so. And I shuffled things away, categorized them, put in folders when they were done for reference. And then over the, over the pandemic, I, I just had to let that go. So I don’t delete anything now. And it was probably a thousand. I read them all.

Speaker 0 | 25:38.665

Christopher Driscoll let himself go over the, over the, I let myself go.

Speaker 1 | 25:43.447

Oh,

Speaker 0 | 25:43.567

it’s over now. Yeah, there’s just no going back for me. There’s absolutely no going back for me. I’ve thought of the, what do they call that when you just do like a complete wipe of your email and just hit delete? Oh, no, that would, I think I would, I wouldn’t, I couldn’t sleep with myself if I deleted my, if I just did a complete, you know, like atomic wipe of my email, it would be disastrous.

Speaker 1 | 26:06.285

The problem is that there are things that could fall through the cracks this way. Like I’ll flag a message to come back to it. But, you know, after a while, you just. Can’t keep track of all those either. So I think email is kind of on its way out in my opinion, but.

Speaker 0 | 26:20.436

Okay.

Speaker 1 | 26:20.956

Where are we going? We use Salesforce for tracking all of our cases. So I keep everything in there.

Speaker 0 | 26:30.262

Salesforce in a university makes sense from a business standpoint, of course, because you’re in the business school. Keep going. I want to hear more about how great Salesforce is for you guys.

Speaker 1 | 26:39.388

Well, I implemented Salesforce. It was an enterprise. It was an enterprise. implementation, but I implemented it within our own school for our own school’s use. So, yeah, I mean.

Speaker 0 | 26:52.022

So how does your school use Salesforce?

Speaker 1 | 26:55.165

Mostly for CRM functionality. So it’s, you know, career advisors keeping communication with students. You know, otherwise that communication is sitting in their inbox, which isn’t helping anybody else, you know, if that person leaves or. If you want to keep a record of this, it goes away.

Speaker 0 | 27:15.674

Was there custom dev work? So is a student like a client? Do we look at students? So in other words, in Salesforce, did you guys do custom dev work? And how is yours set up? Is the student like the customer?

Speaker 1 | 27:32.508

Well, they can be in that situation. We also keep track of communications with employers. So again, we have… A potential employer is a contact record and we have their information and we see all the history of communications with them and we can market to them as well. So it’s only about two years old in our school, but otherwise this stuff was all kept in people’s personal inboxes, which wasn’t helping anybody else. So, yeah, there’s a reason why it’s.

Speaker 0 | 28:07.526

So let’s say. Well, yeah, but do teachers use this? So would a teacher go into Salesforce?

Speaker 1 | 28:14.240

Faculty, no. It’s mostly on a staff end.

Speaker 0 | 28:18.162

Okay. Is every student in Salesforce?

Speaker 1 | 28:23.804

They’re not like a user, but they’re a record.

Speaker 0 | 28:26.826

Yeah, like a record and would have like, you know, because you said email is dying. So I’m just trying to think of how we replace.

Speaker 1 | 28:33.688

That’s the problem though, is that the information that’s going to keep in Salesforce is the email history, right? Yeah. So email didn’t exist. And then what was Salesforce keep track of phone numbers? Yeah. I don’t know. Um,

Speaker 0 | 28:48.275

but as far as like Instagram handles, Twitter, Facebook, I don’t know any of that.

Speaker 1 | 28:52.938

Yeah. I don’t know.

Speaker 0 | 28:54.519

Text messages, texting. Do you have texting integrated?

Speaker 1 | 28:58.861

We do, but it hasn’t really taken off. Um, I think it’s always been kind of like a slippery slope. Like,

Speaker 0 | 29:05.945

I mean, I’m in my CRM looking at your name right now. It has the notes. We’ve got. bullet points. No tasks. There’s no really task here. There’s activity. Definitely shows the conversation that we’ve had. Emails back and forth. If there’s a text message, it would integrate text messaging as well. I’m not using Salesforce. I did use Salesforce. But the thing, you know, for kind of like a startup podcast, you know what I mean? It would be hard.

Speaker 1 | 29:34.046

The big lift.

Speaker 0 | 29:36.168

Yeah, you know what I mean? I’m just not going to do it. But Yes, this is fascinating to see how Salesforce would be used in all these different things. And maybe we can, it would be great. Salesforce, you should, you know, I don’t know, sponsor Dissecting Popular IT Nerds and give me some, give me a dev staff and we’ll, you know.

Speaker 1 | 29:55.976

You can actually go in and roll up your own Salesforce org for learning purposes. I’m sure you’d probably get away with it.

Speaker 0 | 30:06.261

Yes, along with a million other things that I have to do. Yeah,

Speaker 1 | 30:09.123

I’m on the hot list.

Speaker 0 | 30:12.050

So without getting too far off track. I don’t even know what we’re on track with, but the idea, I guess the theme is around where you work in IT, why you work in IT, and being part of a community or that feel of a university feel as opposed to kind of a, I don’t know, top-down hierarchy, so to speak. How are you, say the IT staff, how big is the IT staff?

Speaker 1 | 30:40.503

Well, it’s unique now that… the staff that I had are all put into different departments within our, the bigger IT organizations. So.

Speaker 0 | 30:51.330

How do you guys communicate? How do you guys communicate? What’s your most.

Speaker 1 | 30:54.572

We’re a Microsoft shop. So we use teams for all of our meetings and chats and everything like that. So, you know, we obviously have meetings periodically. I still get the group together. We all have cases together, things like that. And we do go in the office together still as well. So we do need to support people on campus face-to-face.

Speaker 0 | 31:21.528

Do you guys have a vision, mission statement, anything like that that you guys are pushing to support at the university?

Speaker 1 | 31:27.191

Well, yeah, it’s funny you should ask that. So the IT organization actually brought in the Disney Institute to help us work with all that. So we do have a new kind of… mission statement, so to speak, and, you know, things that we, our values that we feel are most important to us. So that’s the sky I’m walking together actually in the last month or two.

Speaker 0 | 31:54.366

So what’s the, give me something mind blowing out of that. They came out of that.

Speaker 1 | 31:59.770

I got a handy one pager sheet right here.

Speaker 0 | 32:04.414

Just so you know, for everyone out there listening, this is not filled in with pencils or anything. This actually looks like a professional slick that was printed out on an all-color. Did that come from a university printing machine or did that come from somewhere else?

Speaker 1 | 32:18.079

I think I printed it.

Speaker 0 | 32:19.700

Okay, good. So this is the propaganda, school propaganda in a good way. What do we got for vision, mission statement, what we’re moving towards?

Speaker 1 | 32:29.384

Yeah, I don’t think any of this is proprietary. So, um…

Speaker 0 | 32:34.810

Yeah. Nope, not. Well, you know, just give me the high level then. Give me something new. In other words, how does it help having a central, is this a mission statement for the IT staff or all of the university in general?

Speaker 1 | 32:47.477

No, this is for the IT organization.

Speaker 0 | 32:49.358

Okay. Yeah.

Speaker 1 | 32:50.619

So our, you know, our top four service standards are security, connection, liability, and resourcefulness in that order. Yeah. it goes into a little more detail of each of those. Uh, we do have a common purpose statement. Um, so I think it’s pretty good. I actually, some of these things can be kind of cheesy and I’m not one of the guys that tends to like, just kind of,

Speaker 0 | 33:20.137

you know, I want the cheesiest thing on that list. What’s the cheesiest thing there?

Speaker 1 | 33:25.920

Oh man, you’re going to get me in trouble.

Speaker 0 | 33:27.662

Okay. We don’t have to do it then. But security, I mean,

Speaker 1 | 33:32.065

well, that was interesting. Yeah, that’s the number one. And, you know, that makes sense. When they asked us to kind of, they presented the four to us and they asked us to rank them. I didn’t put security at the top of my list, honestly.

Speaker 0 | 33:48.994

Yeah, I would have done it backwards. From a business perspective, if you look at a greedy business owner, you know, the purpose of a business is to make money. I’m, you know, being a little bit. Is facetious the right word here? I am talking, we are talking about the university here. But anyways, I would think that most people would put this backwards. In fact, most security guys are going to be upset. I mean, or be happy with what you said because security number one. Whereas most of the time they’re fighting because I would say that most businesses in general are thinking IT needs to be a resource and provide and be resourceful and provide, you know. keep the cash register open, make money for the company, and then not be a liability. And, well, all I can tell you is it better not go down, and then that would be connectivity. And, you know, well, security, we haven’t had any breaches yet, so, yeah, it’s important, but, you know, yeah, make sure nothing happens. But you guys did the opposite way, which is fantastic. Why?

Speaker 1 | 34:51.729

Well, I mean, a university, you know, it does have a bottom line, but I don’t. you’re not bottom line driven right you know it is it is a business there’s a budget there’s a budget there’s a bit it’s a business uh the motivation is different and uh uh i think this reflects that right um so yeah security yeah i mean obviously i think if i was a CIO, I would probably have that on my list. You know, that’s what keeps you up at night, right?

Speaker 0 | 35:20.587

These are the biggest things that stop you. Security shuts the universe. I mean, security breach shut things down. Connectivity, everything’s just not working, period. What’s around liability? This is interesting. Why is that third? And what were some of the bullet points that came up?

Speaker 1 | 35:38.639

Yeah, reliability. Yeah, it’s talking about having a consistent and trustworthy experience.

Speaker 0 | 35:44.783

Reliability. reliability yeah not my ability i’m thinking what the okay reliability okay that’s the lawyers didn’t get their hands on it so yeah okay okay um okay this is outstanding okay um but then you guys have to actually put together you know plans or in in different kind of action items and things around this yeah so now we’re you know in the in the phase where we’re talking about you know how we put this into action how do our uh the things we do

Speaker 1 | 36:14.836

reflect upon how are they driven by this framework right um so it’s great to have this because otherwise you know would things move along probably but uh i think to have a kind of that north star really is pretty helpful and i’m glad to see that you know we’re bringing in uh something that’s the same the same level of visiting institute obviously that’s their business right is making people happy at the happiest place in the world, I guess. Right. So, um, so yeah, I feel like leadership’s moving everything in the right direction.

Speaker 0 | 36:55.707

Is there, um, uh, as far as the, you know, mission statement or vision for the team, is there anything else around these, these four bullet points or a mission that is there like something like, Hey, we’re trying to accomplish this in 2022.

Speaker 1 | 37:14.708

No, I think it’s more broad than that. You know, it’s not like specific goals of, you know, we want to implement this new enterprise system by the end of 2002. There’s nothing, you know, it doesn’t speak to any of those kind of specific goals, you know, but those goals, those things should all be driven by meeting what’s outlined in our service standards, right?

Speaker 0 | 37:39.122

Uh-huh. Yep. Yep. What is the… So when you guys have security, though, is there, I mean, do we have pen testers? Do we have anything like that? When we go, when we talk about security, are we doing, you know, hey, we got to step up our phishing game, you know, like, what are we doing?

Speaker 1 | 37:58.911

Yeah, I mean, there’s a pretty in-depth security review of any new application that, you know, is considered.

Speaker 0 | 38:08.336

So you have a pretty serious security policy in place already.

Speaker 1 | 38:13.379

Yeah. Yeah, we’ve had a duo authentication since I’ve been there for the last four or five years, which actually was one of the services that I guess is run on AWS that went down briefly.

Speaker 0 | 38:27.129

Connectivity, check. Check. Reliability, check. How resourceful were you guys on getting around that?

Speaker 1 | 38:41.779

Yeah. Well, there are other ways to, to other things you can do to get around some of that when it does go down. But, um,

Speaker 0 | 38:51.522

no, I gotcha.

Speaker 1 | 38:52.122

Yeah. I feel like we do take, uh, security very seriously. Um, and there are, you know, they, they do send out kind of phishing tests, uh, to faculty and staff. Um, which, you know, they’re pretty good, actually. I don’t know if we write them internally. they’re purchased through a program or what, but, um,

Speaker 0 | 39:14.293

I would love that job. I would, I think, you know, if it came down to money not being an issue, yeah. I would love to work at a university and just write phishing emails. I love to just write phishing emails in general. Maybe, you know, like the phishing guy, maybe I could be known as the, the best fit. There’s gotta be like the best fisher out there. As you know, I mean, there’s, yeah, that’s wow. It’s great. Look at what we’re coming up with here. Um, but is there a guy that’s known for writing the best fishing emails? There’s gotta be someone.

Speaker 1 | 39:45.129

He’s the best fisher,

Speaker 0 | 39:46.329

the best fisher, Phil Fisher.

Speaker 1 | 39:49.210

All right.

Speaker 0 | 39:50.010

Um, outstanding. What’s the most exciting, fun thing about your job?

Speaker 1 | 39:58.052

Uh, I think it’s like working with all the different faculty and staff. I mean, um, I, since I worked at, you know, so many universities, I were always, was in a different discipline, whether it was law or, science now business and there’s just a lot of interesting people doing a lot of interesting things you know research and you know, the way they look at the world or different topics and such. So getting to know people over time, I really like that. So that’s one of the things I think it’s really hard to do online. You know, with everybody remote, I really get concerns about what that looks like, you know, when we’re post-pandemic and people can actually be on site. You know, are people… What’s that going to look like? How do you have a culture around everyone sitting in their homes 24-7?

Speaker 0 | 41:00.993

That’s a great question.

Speaker 1 | 41:02.393

Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 41:03.614

How do you have a culture when everyone’s sitting in their home?

Speaker 1 | 41:07.596

Yeah, because if you work in the corporate world doing the same thing, making twice as much, maybe. What’s the difference at that point, right? Not advocating for that by any means or saying that’s what I’m interested in.

Speaker 0 | 41:28.386

I have no clue around the answer to that. But it’s certainly, how do you have a culture when everyone’s plugged into the matrix and not moving and in a pod somewhere on a Zoom call? How do you have a culture? I mean, you’re still talking with people. We still use the telephone, I guess. Kind of. That’s just a great question. I don’t know. I don’t know. Maybe we’ll figure that out. Someone’s going to come along. Thank you so much for being on the show. Outstanding to see a different perspective from, you know, IT in a larger, I guess, enterprise university environment. I think it’s just something to be said for other IT people that are growing up in the world and looking to get into IT. or choosing where they want to work, I think the university might be the place for a lot of people. Just like you said, because of the culture, the relationships, and just a completely different feel and an ability to connect with a vast array of different types of people that are passionate about all kinds of different things. And you still have Salesforce. So, hey, there you go.

Speaker 1 | 42:48.657

Phil, that’s a great, that’s actually probably the best summary I’ve ever heard of. Kudos to you, yeah. Yeah, I think that, but there are a lot of university jobs out there in IT. If you look for them, you’ll find them.

Speaker 0 | 43:09.814

Thank you so much for being on the show, sir.

Speaker 1 | 43:11.796

Thank you, Phil.