#CIORadio | Julie Ouska (Colorado Community College System) on Strategic Collaboration to Meet New Learner Models (live @ Educause 2022)

On today’s episode of the Illumination by Modern Campus podcast, guest host Sharon Schwarzmiller was joined by Julie Ouska to discuss the shift in how IT is perceived and the balancing act that occurs when it comes to collective decision-making around new modern learner needs. This episode was recorded live at Modern Campus's Educause 2022 booth in Denver.

Transcript

(00:02) Voiceover: Welcome to Illumination by Modern Campus, the leading podcast focused on transformation and change in the higher education space. We’re continuing our CIO Radio series, where we speak with technology leaders about the trends and challenges reshaping our increasingly digital space. 

(00:20) On today’s episode, we speak with Julie Ouska, CIO and Vice President of IT for the Colorado Community College System. Speaking live at EDUCAUSE, Julie and podcast guest-host Sharon Schwarzmiller discuss the shift in how IT is perceived and the balancing act that occurs when it comes to collective decision-making around new modern learner needs. 

(00:41) Sharon Schwarzmiller: Hello everyone. I'd like to welcome you to the Illumination Podcast where I am welcoming Julie Ouska, who's the CIO and vice president of IT for the Colorado Community College System. Welcome, Julie.

(00:55) Julie Ouska: Well, thank you. I'm glad to be here. 

(00:57) Sharon Schwarzmiller: We're super happy to have you. We are here at EDUCAUSE Live, so if you can hear any background sounds or talking, that's because that's where we are and we're happy to be here live. Are you enjoying the conference so far?

(01:11) Julie Ouska: The little bit I've gotten to attend, yes.

(01:13) Sharon Schwarzmiller: So you've been kind of bouncing around. Okay, very good. Well, thank you for being here with us and spending a couple minutes. We appreciate it. We just have a couple questions for you. So I'll start off with, you've led it at the Colorado Community College system since 2007. How have you seen the role of technology leaders evolve over that time?

(01:39) Julie Ouska: Well, I think it leaders have had to become much more strategic in their leadership. I think IT now has to always be framed in the context of the business of the organization or in support of the customers of the organization and our case students. Nobody wants to hear techie talk anymore, and most technical solutions really involve business process change, procedure change, other kinds of change initiatives. So if you're not talking about the business of the organization, I think you've will not be heard.

(02:19) Sharon Schwarzmiller: That's fascinating. Right. So if I'm hearing you, it's gone from this technical aspect to being far more around the business and the community or the students in which IT serves. Which I'm hearing that across the board with a lot of the folks that we talk with really. So what are some of the unique challenges involved with delivering enterprise technology services across 13 colleges, 35 campuses and nearly 150,000 employees and learners across the state?

(02:50) Julie Ouska: Well, we do a lot of arm wrestling. You know, because we run all of the enterprise systems centrally. There's a lot of negotiation conversations, stakeholder meetings to come to decisions so that it's a decision that everyone's okay with. It may not be their best decision always, but it's one that works for the whole organization with, you know, community colleges–from front range, which is over 15,000 students to little, tiny Lamar Community College of maybe seven or 800 students. You have to fit your technology into that framework. And so sometimes what would really work out well for a big school isn't gonna work out very well for a small school. And so we have to balance that. And when we make decisions about implementations, you know, everyone has to agree because we're all in a single instance of banner. We all use D2L, we all use AB Navigate. So those have to be very collective decisions at all levels of the organization.

(04:05) Sharon Schwarzmiller: Now, do you find yourself having to, and I guess you said you do, right? Like do they have the latitude to do different things at all at smaller versus larger campuses? Do they have some latitude or is it really trying to just find a happy medium there for everybody?

(04:22) Julie Ouska: Mostly it's a happy medium. With some systems it's more of an opt-in option because some of our small rural colleges might not need a particular technology. It's just they don't even have the staff to use it perhaps. So, what we don't do is really allow two solutions to the same problem. So if we're going to integrate a system into Banner, then if you're going to use the system, you're going to use that one. Because we just can't support multi, we're not staffed for that.

(04:56) Sharon Schwarzmiller: No, no. And that it's most efficient, right? That's the most efficient option. That makes total sense. So, I love this question. Some of the trends that you are kind of keeping your eye on right now in IT, things that are top of mind for you?

(05:13) Julie Ouska: Well, it's been really interesting. You know, we're quite consolidated because of being a system, because of being on the same technologies. But I'm seeing we have seven new presidents. And so I'm seeing much more interest in maybe moving more towards shared services as opposed to trying to do everything on their own. So there's where they want to really focus on their core activities. They're willing to maybe look towards shared services to save either some costs or to possibly serve our students better. So I think that's really important to be looking at that. 

Higher ed's changing and I don't think we know exactly how it's changing, but we certainly see a need to be really able to meet the students where they are. Whether it be a non-credit course, whether it's a certificate, whether it's a transfer degree, a couple of courses, an evening class, a weekend class, an online class. You know, we just have to be very flexible and provide different options for our different students.

(06:31) Sharon Schwarzmiller: Yeah. And again, that's a key. It's amazing to me in a really positive way, the student centricity that you're hearing thematically across even EDUCAUSE. I just had some other folks talking with me about EDUCAUSE’s first session today around the 10 biggest trends. Really being responsive to students right now and giving them an experience that's similar to the experiences that they are having with the brands they know and trust. It’s just interesting right now that that's some of the stuff that as our CIOs and our vice presidents of IT are really thinking about. 

(07:18) So I'd hate to think that you're being kept up at night, but if you were, are there things at your institution or just things that are coming down the pike in it that you think, oh we’re going to have to deal with that. Or I'm trying to deal with that, or I want to get more arms around that or do it the right way?

(07:36) Julie Ouska: Certainly. I think one of the problems that everyone is facing right now is really staffing and finding the right staff. You know, we're a public community college, so we're at the low end of the financial spectrum. So sometimes we can't get the people we want at the salaries we can afford to pay them. I'm fortunate in that because we operate at an enterprise level, I can hire, and my staff are just wonderful and they're really good. And we try and be as competitive as we can salary wise, but we'll never compete with private industry. 

But what we're kind of looking at are what are the new models? So for example, as part of our rural college consortium, we're implementing brand new network connectivity, new hardware so that our rural colleges can synchronously share their courses using video and other means. So that rather than running their own class of three or four students, they can combine from six other colleges and hopefully have a class of 20, which is much more academics. So you have students from all of the rural classes attending it. It offers more courses for students, more courses, more programs. But it's really, you know, when we hand over this technology to them, we feel we probably need to support at the system level because they can't get those staff in Lamar or in Sterling and other places that are very rural. And so we're starting to change our model a little bit, I think, and perhaps at different levels supporting things centrally that we didn't used to.

(09:28) Sharon Schwarzmiller: All right. See, that's fascinating. So yeah, I would imagine that is a lot, right? Because there's training that needs to go into all of that change management for the assume the faculty right, at those different campuses. And you’re feeling is though you need to offer more support centrally.

(09:48) Julie Ouska: Yes, we can do the highly technical stuff centrally, but then let them do the hands-on with the faculty, be in the classrooms when needed with faculty, things like that. That is a much more local high touched kind of activity. You know, nobody loves networks except maybe my network specialists. But you know, you don't need to be there supporting them. No one really wants to hear about them either. So, taking over those kind of support activities and freeing up their staff to do more personable things at the campus.

(10:26) Sharon Schwarzmiller: Yeah, that's great. All right, so we ask everybody who does Illumination podcasts with us this same ending question. Okay. So here we go. It's gonna be…it stumps everybody. No, I'm kidding. So if someone is going to go to dinner in your hometown, where would you tell them to go?

(10:55) Julie Ouska: Oh my goodness. Denver has some wonderful restaurants. Rioja is, I think in Lamore Square. That's very nice. They're just some wonderful chefs in the Denver area, so you can't go wrong.

(11:14) Sharon Schwarzmiller: Nice. Well, we appreciate you taking your time out of your day to be here and do CIO radio for us. Thank you for being here with us.

(11:25) Voiceover: This podcast is made possible by a partnership between Modern Campus and The EvoLLLution. The Modern Campus engagement platform, powered solutions for non-traditional student management, web content management, catalog and curriculum management, student engagement and development, conversational text messaging, career pathways, and campus maps and virtual tours. The result innovative institutions can create learner to earner life cycle that engages modern learners for life, while providing modern administrators with the tools needed to streamline workflows and drive high efficiency. To learn more and to find out how to modernize your campus, visit moderncampus.com. That's moderncampus.com.