Read the interview:
Gonick takes us behind ASU’s decade-long digital transformation — from physical server rooms and siloed systems to a cloud-first, data-driven model. He explains how breaking free from legacy infrastructure required not just new tools, but a new culture built on agility, transparency, and growth. The conversation touches on identity management, data architecture, and rethinking how institutions deliver digital experiences, core issues for universities looking to modernize at scale.
There are all kinds of conversations going on in technology about different applications, different platform technologies, different choices in the marketplace. I think the first thing to do is to actually have a strategic conversation about the design of how you think about the organization of the institution itself, not starting with the question, we need a technology strategy, and we need someone to lead that work.We're not quite sure what the strategy is nor what kind of person we need.
So I think it starts with, again, a more comprehensive view of the design aspirations of the organization and then the opportunity in terms of bringing the CIO on board or evolving the CIO — no matter where you have started from along the way — is to be thinking about where you need to assess the legacy, where you basically have 20 or 30 years of inherited ways of doing business, reflecting usually a previous design model, one that probably most of the leadership has inherited rather than actually been responsible for, someone who can actually deconstruct the inherited legacy technologies and point out where there are technology opportunities, as well as where there are organizational opportunities to rethink and redesign, to actually not try to simply bring forward all of the legacy organization and the legacy technology, and to somehow magically — as CIOs sometimes are asked to do —to somehow enable the most amazing experience for faculty, students, staff, constituents outside of the university based on all of that legacy, legacy technology and legacy design work.
So assuming that you've got some of that sorted out in the design of the organization, certainly from our experience here at ASU, we start with what are the technologies that have historically been locked in the university world that no longer service the goals of the institution?
So, for example, server infrastructure, legacy campuses have server infrastructure in every closet, under every desk, reflecting the ways in which server technology got introduced to the university world 35 years ago. At ASU a decade ago, we developed a consensus that, with almost no exception, we were going to be a cloud-first organization. That is a fundamental redesign of the way we think about the importance of the information and the architecture of the data that lived in these actually siloed servers that really didn't allow for any sharing, and also required an upkeep, a caring and feeding that actually was no longer necessary and was actually a locked set of investments at the organizational level. So cloud technology is one piece of the puzzle that institutions need to very quickly evolve along the way. There's also different ways of thinking about identity management, which is one of the central ways in which you actually give access to all of your resources across the university.
And in fact, most universities have a legacy way of provisioning access to network resources, whether that is the teaching and learning environment with the student information system, and the learning management system, or whether it is access to any number of other services along the way. That too is a legacy way of thinking about identity and access management. And at ASU, we have redesigned because we have aspirations tied to the overall mission of the institution to be of service, not only to the matriculating students who are pursuing degrees here, but also to allow access to education for all learners.
While all learners don't have to have the gold standard for identity management, which typically is a formal piece of government identity, in fact, two of them, in order to get what we call essentially here that gold standard. But learners who are coming for three hours or a weekend or a short course for a microcredential or a digital credential of sorts, needs to also have some identity so that they can access that information,and from the institution's perspective, an opportunity to develop a relationship with that individual to help them through their education journey with a bit of interest and luck, hopefully a pathway into the university's matriculating environment. So identity management is another central way. How you approach data, how you approach AI, how you approach the experience, the actual way in which people actually access the information at the university. TheWeb is 35 years old in itsdesign. That is actually not how most of our learners actually experience anything in their lives,if we only force them to actually experience it through the traditional desktop web, we're missing an opportunity to have an impact on our learners. So mobile experiences, what are essentially the web experiences that are designed for the mobile and native, mobile experiences are central to the evolution of the needs at the university.