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Gonick explores a paradigm shift underway in education: moving from “ed tech,” where technology imitates the old classroom model, to “tech ed,” where innovation starts with the learner. He describes how AI and data are enabling a student-centered approach that follows the individual learning journey instead of reinforcing institutional silos.
Organizational models for I.T across the world typically are aligned to and a reflection of the broader organizational model. So in some situations, for example, as was traditionally the case at ASU 25 years ago, there were all of these even centrally. There were all kinds of siloed ways of organizing it. The academic didn't talk to the administrative IT, which didn't talk to the teaching-and-learning IT.
And so at ASU, under President Crow's vision of the enterprise model and a national services model, and of course, the whole idea of building a new American university, we've flattened out almost all of the central. It functions with the idea that we should be leveraging our ability to build infrastructure and platforms that allow the institution to scale.
But that doesn't mean that we are centralized because we believe fundamentally that innovation happens both at the center but also at the edge of the university at the unit level. And so at ASU, we have 1 in 13 employees at the university, is an IT professional, about 750 of the 2200 IT professionals say if you work in enterprise technology, the rest of the university's IT professionals contributing to the units, whether those are academic units, research labs, other administrative functions that are going on there are really in service to the local needs, the hyper local needs of those business units that are out there.
And our job in enterprise technology is to serve as an orchestrator, to serve as the team that actually pulls together and creates important technical efforts like standards like security, like orientation to technical architecture. Now, we don't impose that. That's actually a prescription for a turning. The word chief information officer CIO into career is over. That is not the sort of prescription for success.
Our job is to consult. Our job is to engage and to socialize, and to have those conversations about the standards that will allow the institution to achieve its highest aspirations, and the right balance between what we can do centrally to innovate and to operate, and to have the right tactical toolkit. And at the same time, make it possible for the other parts of the university to unlock value, whether that's our online effort, where we work extensively with the Ed Plus technology team to let them leverage our infrastructure, but we also leverage their infrastructure along the way.
So the point here is that it's actually for other presidents and other senior administrators. There is no one size fits all. The way you organize it is almost always reflective of the way you think about the broader organizational model of your university.
The Chief Information Officer has historically been the “Chief Utility Officer” running the railway, running the power, in this case, running the technology. And that can actually be a C-suite person, or it can just be a director, if you will, a world class mechanic. At ASU, and in fact, in most of higher education in the United States over the last 40 years, the CIO role has continued to evolve.
And at ASU, which I believe to be among the most evolved institutions that we have, the CIO is actually a strategic partner in the design of the institution, and perhaps more importantly, the one executive who can actually help mobilize the technical resources to support the highest design aspirations of the institution in terms of its goals and its mission. And as a strategic partner, that is what I would say, the central opportunity that a CIO can perform if the institution sees its future tied to leveraging the technology to help achieve its highest aspirations.