From the Archives with Dr. Bradley Wheeler

On this episode of Digital Squared: From the Archives, we're revisiting a conversation with Dr. Bradley Wheeler from Indiana University. He joins Tom for a thought-provoking conversation on the profound impacts of COVID-19 on our industry, the incredible acceleration it has created for the role of information technology in the university’s mission, and the once-in-a-generation opportunity for IT leaders to capitalize on.

Transcript

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Intro 0:00

Tom Andriola 0:39
Hello and welcome to Gradually, Gradually, Then Suddenly – a blog and interview series with leaders to discuss current issues and how data and technology are shaping our world. My name is Tom Andriola, and I’m the Vice Chancellor for Information, Technology and Data at UC Irvine. My guest today is Dr. Bradley Wheeler. Bradley comes to us as a tenured professor from Indiana University Kelley School of Business for 24 years and interim dean of the School of Informatics Computing and Engineering. He spent 19 years in administration in eight different roles, including 13 as their vice president and CIO and most recently, concurrently two years as the vice president for communications and marketing. Brad’s responsibilities have been broad and wide as you can imagine, from a suite of supercomputers to 1000 classrooms, and I’ve known him most personally in his distinguished career as a thought leader and nationally recognized figure in technology and higher education via through his writing his service to EDUCAUSE and Internet 2 and I could go on and on and on. Brad, thanks so much for joining us today.

Brad Wheeler 1:32
Tom, it’s a pleasure to see you.

Tom Andriola 1:34
Absolutely. Well, hey, we’re gonna jump right into the questions here. So congratulations on surviving 13 years as a chief information officer in our industry. You spent those years at a major public research university and just recently turned over the reins to your successor. In looking back, what are you most proud of in the work you did in that role as CIO?

Brad Wheeler 2:05
I think the thing that really stands out to me is bringing people together. Every CIO or every school or research lab, they would recognize the the challenges sometimes of centralization versus decentralization, or those darn old people with their policies or their big common systems that don’t meet our needs or the converse of that conversation. And I think one of the things that we accomplished at IU – you know, we’re pretty big. We’re seven campuses spread across the state and a whole bunch of health initiatives, etc. But the thing that we were able to do was to change the conversation from centralized to decentralized, which are kind of fighting words and everybody’s got a view about, to recasting it as edge leverage and trust. And that’s just part of our vocabulary around here Edge, Leverage and Trust and that is some IT services that sometimes really belong in schools and departments and local groups, labs, and something’s really belong leveraged and scaled, because there’s efficiency and controls and automation and the trust part is getting the people to automatically self balance that over time, there’s no – with tech changing, with needs changing. Let that work itself out. And that really brought schools and department IT folks and our central it, folks, the leverage folks, it just changed our conversation and really has just become who we are around here.

Tom Andriola 3:36
So here you are going back to the faculty in a monumental moment in what’s going on in our society today on many different levels. I’ve adopted the quote from Vladimir Lenin, there are decades when nothing happens. And then there are weeks when decades happen. And I think that so perfectly captures what we’re going through right now. You and I talked about COVID and how it’s accelerating some of the, you know, some of the directionality that’s been going on in our industry. What do you think is going to accelerate over the next couple of years for us in higher education?

Brad Wheeler 4:09
Well, I think the the core thing is the market forces raining down on us that his students are increasingly consumeristic in terms of how they shop for the experiences they want, whether they’re residential or online or blended time to completion, what life experience they want, how they expect us to interact with them to even get noticed. So I think that’s accelerating and it I thought it would play out a longer period of time. But COVID has put a big ole exclamation point on it. And the other side of that is it’s caused our institutions to innovate swiftly in ways that we never thought possible. You know Tom, if you and I had been sitting for drinks last October, and I would have said, I tell you what, next March, let’s just give the order. And we’ll move all the curriculum, all the classes, we’ll move it all online, and we’ll do it in the middle the semester as a surprise to everyone.

Tom Andriola 5:10
We both would have been looking for jobs.

Brad Wheeler 5:13
Yes, yes. Yeah, they’d be checking to see if your head is still attached. But but that happened, and it was imperfect for sure. But gosh, did we learn a lot in that time, and some good part of that is going to stick. I think one of the things that I see across a lot of institutions was a level of innovation in the academic calendar of when things start and stop and intercessions and blended that I don’t think that’s going away. I think that was an innovation we needed. We didn’t think possible. And it happened all at once.

Tom Andriola 5:37
Curious, one of the things I found interesting in higher education is, you know, we have students that are digital natives. And then we have a lot of faculty who are, let’s just say, not digital natives. In speaking with your colleagues, where are their heads in terms of comfort level with using these things on an ongoing basis?

Brad Wheeler 6:05
I think fairly far behind is a fair statement. I think we tend to conceptualize that problem of, well, would you know how to do a campaign on social? would you know, how to do these certain tricks or, or things on a computer or converting document formats or whatever they would be. But what’s really running up on us fast or running over us is a better way of saying it is just thinking differently. And that is thinking about a consumer’s experience, students experience. It makes no sense to our students and quite frankly, to many of our faculty and staff, the bureaucracy that we’ve created internally, and then when you try to simplify that, to bring it up to what, what really can be done. Functional owners who have long had narrow but deep responsibilities in areas of academic records, or financials or technology policy or whatever it may be. They have trouble really reconceptualizing new business process reengineering, for radical simplification, in a way that still achieves compliance and the efficacy, but does it in a way that just makes their head explode because it’s often very horizontal rather than deep vertical.

Tom Andriola 7:20
Right before the pandemic hit you know, you published a piece with EDUCAUSE in February. If you had a chance to rewrite that piece now, would you rewrite it differently?

Brad Wheeler 7:33
So the article addressed 10 trends or 10 curves to the decade I was really motivated as much as anything out of my role as Vice President for marketing, and just seeing how fast things were changing in the competitive landscape out there. So uh,

Tom Andriola 7:39
that’s interesting. So it wasn’t reflective. Let’s say the motivation wasn’t there about a reflective look backwards about being a CIO in what you’ve learned and translating it forward. It was being channeled through your mar comm role.

Brad Wheeler 8:00
It really was coming in motivated from the mar comm and the economics role, for which technology is a huge part of what will or will not happen. And I gently suggested that a lot of these things would play out over a decade. Most importantly, an industry shakeout of some sort. We are an industry like any other industry in overcapacity, we have too much capacity seats capability, chasing diminishing demand, in the way that we’ve defined a student right now and the modalities that we offer, so others have written deeply about what that will mean over time. I thought this would play out through 2025 2028, etc. and COVID if anything as just rapidly accelerated a lot of these trends in consumerism in strained financials operating models, the balance sheets of many institutions, chasms between tenure track faculty, non tenure track faculty, students and parents expectation, the pricing and discounting game has become economically ridiculous. I’m not sure what other words you apply. I mean in hospitals look rational in comparison, sometimes. So the one thing I mean, I missed the article popped out on February, literally in the eve of COVID. And I think I miscalibrated the time that we as an industry would have to deal with it. I think it’s going to play out much faster. Three years hence, I think the finances already be greatly under strain which will either cause innovation or exit.

Tom Andriola 9:36
You know, you have in the time that I’ve known you, you know, you have been a big advocate, a champion, and really a driver, you know, we call it a catalyst for higher education working closer together, leveraging our scale differently and not thinking so siloed as institutions, and you’ve said to me at times, you know, we failed to use our scale. you expand on what you mean by that, for those out there who are listening, who are our leaders for tomorrow to really learn from what you’ve seen as a missed opportunity for us.

Brad Wheeler 10:08
Absolutely. Economies of scale, are an innate function of the technology artifact itself. So boxes and wires, services software, running them, they get cheaper as they scale within a particular use. You can’t even argue that in any way. So Apple top $2 trillion in value this week. Why don’t we have 10 apples? Why do we really only have two mobile phone platforms and a handful of vendors underneath him. Because there are extraordinary economies of scale, and the incentives over time made that made that happen. So when we look within the Academy in, I think the summer is a very telling narrative. You know, we we had it into the summer by and large with many of our institutions and leadership sharing information with what their plans are amongst their Provost or their CIOs or their CFOs, etc. But by and large, we processed the planning and testing protocols and what we were going to do or not going to do. We all threw enormous energy at that campus by campus by campus. It was a common threat. It was largely a common goal, but look how much we spent trying to figure that out all separately. So when we think about the academy and systems to admit students, systems that help provide support that are teaching and learning and data platforms, etc. You look and you see so many institutions that were all just imitating each other leading and lagging one to two years apart, spending a ton of money and doing it and not getting much efficiency or scale out of it. And that causes our prices to need to be higher. And the howling you appropriately hear about tuition. So I do think the academy we can come together, it is innate in the values of the academy. We could do more of these things together. We did it in building internet two – that was one of our greatest successes. Over time, we’ve done it somewhat in building out the unison Consortium, but I think we need a whole lot more of that. And I’ll offer just one more observation on that. Moody’s credit rating, bond rating agency – IU it has the lowest operating cost per student from Moody’s of any of the triple A bond rated institutions. And the reason I bring that point up is not because we’re super smart and how much we spend on anything. But we run it across seven campuses and the online program and part of the health enterprise. So it’s the economies of scale. And we also have a common attorney across all of them. We have a common CFO, across all we do not have a system office. This is a single line authority thing, it doesn’t create a double layer. So I just bring that out is any savings we can have in the administrative operation we can put back into the mission.

Tom Andriola 13:19
Yeah.

Brad Wheeler 13:20
You know your question Tom, I think about our institutions working together, really James Hilton, who’s up at the University of Michigan coined the phrase, intentional interdependence. And that’s not saying we consolidate and roll everything together. But we actually look for where could we be intentionally interdependent in a way that serves our mission. It’s not just cooperation. It’s not just passing notes at the conference. But we are intentionally interdependent with each other, because we have areas of expertise at one place or another.

Tom Andriola 13:54
Yeah, yeah. We have you know, and we’re more mature on this on the healthcare side of the of our UC enterprise versus the campuses at this stage. But you know, I always use try to use the tension of health systems, talking positively about what they’re doing as a way of inspiring the campuses to do more. And I would say that the campuses are actually doing more now. But we have this model in healthcare where, you know, we have communities of interest who don’t have a formal charter, but they spend time together, but they can elevate up to the next level, which is a formalized group who have goals and you know, deliverables and then we have the CIOs, but we have these, you know, we’ll allow models that say, we’re all going to go with the same platform, but everyone’s going to do their vote. And, and you know, what I’ve sold to our CEOs is, there’s still tremendous benefit in that. And it’s not just the procurement benefit of we got great pricing. But it’s the fact that we’re able to get additional benefit of co-terming service agreements, right, which is also a cost. And if you’re implementing in 2020, but I’m not implementing until 2022, because that’s when I can find the capital budget to do it. I’m going to pull three resources and pick your team’s brain so that my implementation line is not 12 months, it’s eight months, because I’m learning off of the lessons that you learned before me. And I can’t necessarily put dollar value on that goes to the bottom line on that. But I can talk about it in terms of that we’re creating the value we need to for the organization faster, because we’re leveraging the collective intelligence of our organization. And that is sold really well in our health care because again, it runs more like a business. It runs more like a really understanding how do we maintain, create maintain competitive advantage. So they’re all about hearing those stories and they’ll accept the tangible versus intangible benefit component. Still haven’t figured out the right formula, you know, on the campuses to create the same type of thing, but we get cracks at every once in a while.

Brad Wheeler 15:59
I think we got a whole decade ahead of that on the healthcare side and on the academic side of, are we proactively figuring out how to do it? Or are we reactively under duress having to do it?

Tom Andriola 16:11
In these times, one of my favorite phrases is fortune favors the bold. I know you to be bold, from my interactions with you – both our personal conversations and watching you work the room to try to inspire our colleagues towards greater levels of working together. I know you’ve retired from that CIO role. But if you were in that cabinet meeting this week, how would you be talking about ‘We need to be bold and leverage the opportunity that COVID affords us.’

Brad Wheeler 16:44
I think the key thing always goes back to your mission and to your values. And if we simply stay at the mission, particularly of the leading public’s as to educate as many as we can, who qualified to be in particular programs and our research mission as well, for the public good. The question very quickly becomes how can we do more of that? What’s in the way? What’s enabling? What are the possibilities that this particular moment gives us? And I think some part of this will come from lots of little incremental innovations, by and large, it will be through radical simplification of what we do, because we we spend a lot of money on complexity in both the administrative and the academic enterprise for sure. So radical simplification, and that’s not a big large program. It’s like It’s one process at a time, how do we keep making it simpler and shorter? And then how do we look to scale – back to scale – and that is in the educational programs. I think we can educate a lot more people at quality, at probably a lower cost than we’re doing it now, in ways that quite frankly, enable our faculty. A lot of them have learned they can do online teaching very well. They can do blended, they can do flipped classrooms. I am seeing amongst some of our most senior faculty, lightbulbs go on and innovation and ideas. So that’s the thing I would talk to the cabinet about. I don’t know that it would be you know, buying a campus, you know, in the Middle East somewhere or something. I think it would be rabid innovation in incremental improvement across the program.

Tom Andriola 18:31
But you’ve set up my last question perfectly right. So I talk about this thing called the 1% better model, which is real change happens when large numbers of people create those incremental 1% changes in the world. And when you can align them, massive tsunamis of change can happen. We have an audience here of really up and coming IT leaders who are going to drive our industry forward. Probably some healthcare people on here as well. If you were to give them advice, sage advice to them, what are the two to three things that you can give make a 1% difference on – that if we all did, it would make a big collective difference? What would those things you’d want them to walk away remembering?

Brad Wheeler 19:12
Boy, Tom, the first thing that just leaps to mind is improving the user experience or UX. And that’s not just about where the icons are on the screen and things like that. But the experience again, back to radical simplification, ease of use, never having to enter data twice things that we already know. So I would focus very heavily on improving the user experience, and I’ll be so bold here is to say it folks, we have spent more than a decade in many cases giving too much deference to functional owners who have a preference for how finance per transaction should be or a student enrollment transaction should be. And I think we really need to look through and beyond them to the person using the system, whether it’s a student or a staff member, or whomever it would be, how do we improve that user experience for the end user while we accomplish compliance and other things so UX would be number one, and just press on it don’t sacrifice and the second would be the connected journey. We tend to work on systems, business processes, unit by unit you know, at a time or as you take a research professor, he or she is working on travel for grad students going to a conference Someday we’ll travel again, you know, figuring out which student gets paid off of which grant getting something submitted, you know, they got this whole range of things that they interact with. And we try to optimize them as point solutions. We need to think about constituent journeys, and how that works. And students are our constituents, parents are constituents, faculty and staff are, we’re in the middle of a big Salesforce implementation. I mean, it’s huge. It’s hard, but it’s a horizontal system to put in. And we’re really having to rework a lot of our verticals, you know, finance student, even it etcetera to think more about how do we build a connected journey for students. And so I would, I would just encourage our young IT leaders and others, think about that end user experience, make it better, connect the journeys in their eyes.

Tom Andriola 21:32
Brad, as always, thought provoking. Insightful. Thank you so much for joining us today. And best of luck on the next chapter for you.

Brad Wheeler 21:41
Thank you. Pleasure to be with you. Always glad to see you.