Read the interview:
Lev Gonick redefines what it means to be a Chief Information Officer in modern higher education. At Arizona State University, the CIO isn’t just maintaining systems but actively shaping strategy, innovation, and institutional vision. Gonick explains how collaboration across departments, and a mindset shift from “keeping the lights on” to driving transformation, turned ASU’s technology organization into a true strategic partner.
ASU is a really amazing organization to be working in. It's big, it's complicated, it's innovative. It's got all kinds of things that make the CIO's job a really, really first great opportunity for someone like myself. The CIO, whose role historically has been really responsible for keeping the trains on the track. That's not what the CIO does at ASU.
Yes, we have operational responsibility for making sure that the lights stay on, that all of the services get delivered. In fact, that's table stakes conversation. However, at ASU, in particular, the role of the CIO is really a partner to all of the different business units across the university at their strategic level. That's to say, in order for our research, in order for our faculty, in order for the president's initiatives, for all of those initiatives, the opportunity here is for the CIO to participate as a partner in the design of the solutions that will create the distinction and design of the solutions that will allow the business units to achieve their strategic goals, tied typically at ASU to our charter.
So at ASU, the role of the CIO is both strategic, tactical and operational. It's the strategic part of my role here at ASU, which makes this job so much fun, but it also keeps me up at night. There is so much going on at ASU, whether it's at the cutting edge of AI or whether it is on the scale of the work that we do globally.
All of that requires a degree of agility that is unprecedented in higher education because of our size and our and our ambition as an institution. So it keeps me up at night, not on a daily basis, but that opportunity or that responsibility actually, weighs heavily on not only myself, but the whole team to be able to really help the institution be everything it aspires to be.