788: LIVE from Jenzabar's Annual Meeting (JAM)⁠⁠ 2023 - with Al Anderson, CIO, Salish Kootenai College

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Welcome back everybody. It's your time to add up on the EdUp Experience podcast where we make education your business. We're doing that here live at GENSOVAR JAM 2023 in Orlando, Florida, at the beautiful Gaylord Palm Resort. It's warm outside, but I wouldn't know that other than my little break from lunch because I've been in here interviewing amazing people in higher education, talking about their product, the technology, GENSOVAR, how they're using technology. We're talking about challenges and successes in higher education today. Somebody that keeps coming back to the chair and we love having him. He's the one and only Jeff Elliott. He's director of product management at GENSOVAR. Jeff, welcome back.

Jeff Elliott: Good to be back, Joe. You've almost done as many episodes as me now.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Exactly. But now you know how it feels when we're at JAM, we come in from the sun and then we don't leave until Saturday, right? This is just what it is. Live in the now!

Jeff Elliott: You just got to live it when you can.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Well, we're going to talk to an amazing individual today who's doing pretty incredible work to serve some of the underserved out there. Here he is. He is Al Anderson, CIO at Salish Kootenai College. Right on. You got it. That was good. I've been sweating the whole time landing. I've been sweating. My back's a mess right now. I'm sweating. Al, what's going on? How are you?

Al Anderson: I'm doing well, thank you. I'm enjoying myself here. I was just talking a little bit ago about how inspired I was at the opening keynote with Amy and just how what she said resonates with all the things that we're trying to accomplish, both GENSOVAR and tribal colleges in this organization we're going to talk about.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Well, before we get into that, I do want to find out about how your conference has been going so far. Are you learning? Are you delivering information? Are you learning information? Reestablishing or establishing relationships? How's it going so far?

Al Anderson: Yeah, you know, it's always funny, you're walking down the hallway and somebody, especially GENSOVAR people say, "Hey, I've been emailing you" and you're like, "Yeah." In fact, I ran into one person, you're like, "No, here comes Jeff." The first night I was here, I get on the elevator to go down and I see a person that was helping our integration stuff and she had turned on her webcam right at the last meeting that we had said, "Well, here's what I look like and you can see me there." And she grabs me in the elevator and she's like, "Hey, I know you." And I'm like, wow.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Whoever invented the name tag is really underrated in history because without these, you wouldn't know who you're talking to. You might be having good conversations still like we are today. I want to just recognize your work. I mean, you're sitting on the leadership board of the Minority Serving Cyber Infrastructure Consortium. I think I have that right.

Al Anderson: Yeah, you got it.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: So what is this? And it's very intriguing. So tell us about it.

Al Anderson: So this is a consortium group of over 300 minority serving institutions. They vary in size from little tiny schools to great big schools. And our effort is improving the cyber infrastructure of these institutions. And in cyber infrastructure, what does that mean? Well, that means all that technology that's used for education, to provide education, provide research opportunities. And a lot of these institutions have kind of poor infrastructures. They have poor internet, they have poor networks, they just are underfunded. And this is an effort for these schools to come together and as one voice and say, "You come talk to us and we'll tell you what we need" because so many efforts in the past have been these piecemeal little things to this little group of schools or that little group of schools. But this effort is to approach things as one voice. And one of our tag lines is that we can do more together than alone.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Nailed it. I love it. Serving students is obviously important work, particularly those coming from lower economic means, people of color and so on. Going back to your institution and then let's go back, let's go to your institution, then we'll come back and talk about the consortium. The tribal colleges are really unique and needed in the US, but also invisible at times almost. It's funny. And that word has come to me as I've interviewed people who work at tribal institutions to say the students and the community, Native American community has felt invisible as the conversation has evolved through the years. And one way to make sure the visibility continues for this population is through college degrees, is to get that degree, get into positions of influence to ensure that the culture is maintained. How important is that work to you?

Al Anderson: It's the most important. I've been at SKC for 30 years and I'm not native. I'm just, you know, a white guy from North Dakota. But I found a place that I knew was special. I knew their mission was special and I was able to connect with that and they gave me the opportunity to grow. I mean, I went from they hired me as a network administrator and I kind of made my way around could plug in some routers and stuff and that's about it. I have a master's degree in computer science from Johns Hopkins. That college helped me do that. So even my personal story has been uplifted by them. To see all the students over the years have those similar successes and go from places of real, utter poverty to having families and stable, nice places that they're living at and bringing it back to their communities. I mean, you can't beat that.

Jeff Elliott: You're passionate about this. I know you are. Absolutely. You know, we referenced earlier the message of the keynote speaker and you all heard Ling talk about what makes Al's story and his colleagues so important to GENSOVAR is becoming a masterpiece. Like that is the theme of this year's JAM. That is something that is absolutely fundamental to Ling's core, our CEO, right? So, you know, being able to help schools... And I thought it was a great perspective. Like, there's no doubt everybody wants to help underprivileged, underrepresented populations. Tribal schools absolutely fit into that bucket. But listen to Al's story, too, right? His ability to grow and all that. And that's what is so important to us at GENSOVAR is helping you, our staff, our partners. We've talked about relationships. Your students just become the best masterpiece they can.

A lot of what GENSOVAR does in terms of its own outreach and philanthropic work is all around and centered around that type of effort. So yeah, it's very important to me and it's very important to a lot of my colleagues. And it's really central to what GENSOVAR tries to be.

Al Anderson: And just to follow up on that, I think that's really important to point out that GENSOVAR has really stepped up from the early days. Early 2000s when we first were of CMDS teams elite customer and then GENSOVAR bought CMDS and pretty quickly you guys got on board with that tribal colleges were unique. You brought in account managers that were specific to us. You worked on a consortium agreement and that was early on you were on board with that and we appreciate that. I mean we really do appreciate that.

Jeff Elliott: No, it's and it's been a great relationship again. We've talked a number of times, you know, what makes good partnerships? Why do we have 40 schools that have been with us for 40 years? Why do we have 240 schools that have been with us for 25 plus years? Validated numbers, by the way.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Absolutely, validated numbers. I did go back and do the math.

Jeff Elliott: And it's stories like Al's, it's stories like Jen's, it's stories like Lisa's, everyone we've talked to this week is, you know, they do such important work. Al, you and your colleagues, this initiative that we're about to talk more about is so important. And it gets me excited as a staff member who I don't work with your students on a daily basis, all that stuff. But just to hear the stories and just to know the great work that's being done energizes us. And it just feeds and feeds and it grows and it builds.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: I've heard a lot about you. I got to tell you. I like your style, dude. And you get on this board. You get on this board of leadership board of the MSCC. And I want to remind everybody the Minority Serving Cyber Infrastructure Consortium. I feel like cyber infrastructure in my mind is two words, but I like that it's one. It's easier MSCC. It's easy to understand. Is the intent here? OK, look, we've got these minority serving institutions. Their resources are low. Their staffs are low. We need to provide them with guidance with what with a path.

Al Anderson: No, because it's not "we" in terms of somebody doing something. What we're working towards is "us", us being the MSIs, where it's our voice that you're going to listen to of what our needs are, how you can reach us. One of the things that we spend a lot of time doing and I do is literally educating people. You talked about tribal people and tribal colleges being invisible. People don't know. You go and talk and say, "There's a tribal college," they have no concept of what that even means. Because we're there's different legal stuff that we have to deal with because we exist differently, we're funded completely differently. So we do a lot of education. But a key part of it is, you know, we have a lot of the same needs as an R1. Of course, we serve students, we do research, we do all these things. But how we accomplish those, how we're funded to do those things is way different and you have to listen to us and like when GENSOVAR, they listened to us. You're how this is going to work this way. And that's what we're trying to do as a larger organization, especially with the HBCUs is they say no, we have these unique stories and if you actually want to help us because everybody right now is like, "Yeah, we'll help you." They're to help you. But they just want to force the help and it's like it isn't going to work that way. It isn't going to work.

Jeff Elliott: And it's little things too, Al, right? Like you and I were talking on the side a little bit. It's even something as simple as really good, strong Wi-Fi. You know, you have students that want to take online classes. And even if the campus is well wired, where they are is not. And how do we bring these types of... So, you know, everyone thinks about all the complicated routers and infrastructures and all this stuff. And sometimes it's just as simple as providing great access to students to the tools they need to do the learning they want to do.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: So talk to me about the consortium a little bit, how it works, how it's set up, how many members there are. I think you mentioned it earlier, but say it again. What is the operational piece of it look like?

Al Anderson: Sure. So the history of it, because that plays into this, is that it started out as essentially some CIOs from HBCUs getting together and just talking about their struggles. And at some point, some other folks started saying, "Hey, this can be bigger." And I don't remember the exact timelines here, but at some point, NSF, National Science Foundation, got interested and said to them, "Look, we're seeing something here." And because National Science Foundation doesn't give money to just some guys sitting having a meeting, they needed a fiscal agent. And Internet2 stepped in and said, "Hey, let's form a relationship. We'll be the fiscal agent." And then they got their first grant two years ago from National Science Foundation that started helping kickstart some of these efforts. Then last year we got a second grant from NSF. And we're at the point now where we are working on our actual governance structure to an eye towards turning into like a 501(c)(3) or something else like that. We're looking at the legal options there. So we are quickly growing. We're trying to get our feet under us so we can be our own organization at some point, some level. We're not sure what that looks like. But we're getting there. And it just it's a lot of work, sending up a national organization like that all the board members are just like, our eyes are big as saucers because it's just like every day you're like, "We got to do that now."

Dr. Joe Sallustio: And so is the intent of the consortium to say, listen to us, because there's more of us. There's a lot of, you know, minority serving institutions. We have buying power. We have influence. So we're talking like public policy influence.

Al Anderson: Yes, all those aspects. Public policy influence, you know, at the highest level. We're talking interfacing with businesses, going and saying, "Look, we want to approach this like the tribal colleges did with GENSOVAR as a consortium," going to Microsoft or Google or whoever. We have this relationship with Internet2, so we're going to be able to leverage some of those already established things that Internet2 has. We're still in the throes of negotiating what that actually looks like. But the effort is to approach it and say, as a block, we want to talk to you as this block.

Jeff Elliott: So shared services, potentially savings, right? For institutions that might be financially rocky. That's huge. Shared services is a big piece, right? You're talking about institutions, and Al, I don't know that I'll speak specifically to your need, but I'm curious. You're talking about institutions where one, two, three heads or not is a budget year or not, right? It's that type of sustainability that we're talking about. Al and his colleagues trying to create here where, you know, those enrollments are so fragile and every little bit, every little thing you can do to kind of make sure, you know, because we always talk about the students needing the opportunity and how those, the schools that provide that are great, but these schools don't stay open if they don't make budget and we can't get that funding in there. So anytime you can share resources or you can get funding through grants because of the power of a group this size. That's just fantastic.

Al Anderson: Yeah, the key here, one of the key things you just said, and you just said it now is the shared resources. And even to the point of where we're sharing personnel. In other words, if we can get a person that works over here that maybe they're on this person's payroll, but other institutions are putting money into that and that person can be shared because, you know, some of these positions, you know, like a cyber infrastructure engineer, you know how much money those people make if I was 10, 20 years younger? I'd be in that business. That's almost a specialty where if you can share those types of skill sets and knowledge, knowledge bases, that's tremendous.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: You know, it's interesting when you talk about modeling in higher ed. This is something I deal with all the time. How do you run a successful model, institutional model? We know that the model has changed. It's unless you're an R1 or an Ivy and you've got billion dollar endowments, you need to do something. You need to partner. You need to merge or affiliate or do a consortium. There's lots of... There's other industries that have very unique models. When I hear you talking about that, like sharing a staff over institutions, I'm starting to think about like the English Premier League, where you lend your player out on a contract to another institution.

Jeff Elliott: That model of shared resources is really interesting because everybody's getting something and we can take lessons from healthcare, from sports, from hotel chains.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: You went right to healthcare, Joe.

Jeff Elliott: We're the shared responsibility of developing new technology and all that stuff. That's really opened up in the healthcare industry. And I think, it's been higher ed's general approach to things is to be protective and to be siloed, but not siloed in a way of ignorance or we don't, it's protective. If anyone gets my secret, I'll lose five students that will then go to them. And that's going to be very interesting to see higher ed kind of melt away on that a little bit and just kind of let it happen more organically, the types of things you're trying to do.

Al Anderson: And the thing is for, I think that's true in a lot of mainstream institutions that kind of challenge that way. Tribal colleges, it's a little bit more unique because we serve our populations. And by and large, you know, a tribal member from the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, they're either going to go to SKC or they're going to go to generally one of the Montana anchor institutions. And that's about it. And that's the same for the other tribal colleges. It's the local members are going there. Now, that being said, I'll state up front you know, SKC is a little bit unique in that way amongst tribal colleges because we have like 50, we have students that represent 53 different tribes. So we're a little bit different.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Yeah, yeah. There might be a couple other schools like SIPI and a few others that are more general, but most of them are very focused on their own tribes. And I suspect that HBCUs are that way, but they're more community based, you know, their local communities kind of thing. So in that sense, we're not quite as competitive for students. But you still need students to operate.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: For sure. For sure. So as you move forward with the consortium, where are you, what's next? Is next like incorporating and figuring out your regulatory model for funding?

Al Anderson: Yeah, I would say, you know, doing something like getting, you know, as a legal organization, probably two years. But it's not like, yeah, that's down the road. That's literally two years of hard work to get everything in shape because you have to have all your governance structure set up. You have to make sure you have bylaws and all that kind of stuff ready to go. You have to have like your relationships like with Internet2 firmly established. So we're kind of got these parallel tracks because we have these grants going on. So we have pilot programs right now. We have five proof of concepts going on where we have cyber infrastructure facilitators helping these schools, these five schools, improve their cyber infrastructure. They each have their own individual plans of what that means, improving their cyber infrastructure. We also have something called Tiger Teams, which are these teams of very skilled people that are going up to these schools and helping them.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Yeah. I did have a Tiger growl. I was going to look for the Tiger. That was the one you were shooting for.

Jeff Elliott: Yeah, if I knew that in advance.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: So what I love about this, though, is that the work can start now, can't it? It is. The advocacy, the, we're going to be a group that you must reckon with, that we're going to have a voice. It's going on right now.

Al Anderson: I mean, we just had our first annual meeting in Atlanta a couple of weeks ago. It was great. The turnout was great. We actually had a person from the White House, from the HBCU office in the White House, was one of our keynote people. So we already have a presence. And we're already doing things. These proof of concept pilot programs are ongoing right now. Literally, just last week, they were down at Jackson State doing a process or whatever they do. They haven't visited me yet, so I don't know what they all do.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Well, they'll come and they'll visit you and hopefully it'll be a positive one that you get a lot out of, right?

Al Anderson: Yeah, for sure.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Jeff, what do you think about all of this? I mean, you think about, is this, this is important work.

Jeff Elliott: It's very important. And it's very encouraging to hear. Yes, it is. You know, it's I don't want to say dark times, but they're cloudy times, right? And higher ed federal funding is uncertain. Like you said, you know, if you're not Harvard, who owns Cambridge and if you're not BU, who owns Brookline Ave and all that stuff, man, where's the money coming from? These types of efforts, I think are unique. They're cutting edge. And, you know, again, who can't get excited about helping underrepresented and underprivileged students.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: That's right. And you actually are getting us excited, Al. I got to be honest, your passion comes straight through the microphone like a dart. Bullseye. Nice. Nice. I the tiger though. You know what? Too much pressure for me to get it right now. I won't find you even if I go looking for it. Here we go, guys. What a great conversation. The main takeaway from this conversation needs to be is that there is a minority-serving cyber infrastructure consortium. It exists. It is going to grow in its prominence. If you didn't know it, you learned it here at GENSOVAR JAM with me, Jeff and Al, my guest co-host today. He's Jeff Elliott, Director of Product Management at GENSOVAR. Jeff, thanks for being a part of this episode.

Jeff Elliott: Absolutely a pleasure, Al. I agree with Joe more. The passion is just palpable. And, you know, thank you for the work you're doing because I'm guessing this is above and beyond everything else you have to do. And, you know, so it has to be a passion project. But students need folks like you. So, you know, help them become their best masterpiece as they've helped you.

Al Anderson: I appreciate being inspired by, you know, the keynote sessions here and even your guys' word. It helps me get up in the morning on those days that are kind of a little rough.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Well, CIOs don't really have that much to do these days. Artificial intelligence isn't a thing. I mean, you know, if you really think about this, go back to what January of this year and AI wasn't even a thing. And then here we are six months later and it's dominating conversation. They say ChatGPT like they're asking for a Kleenex. Seriously, people have no idea there's all different types of AI and all that stuff. And more reason why you need a cyber infrastructure in a consortium to help you navigate through these items. Guest of the hour, your guest, here he is. He's Al Anderson, the CIO at Salish Kootenai College. How did you feel about your podcast experience today?

Al Anderson: I enjoyed it completely. It was a great conversation. I thank you for having me here.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: We loved having you here. Ladies and gentlemen, you've just ed-upped!