870: LIVE From Ellucian Live 2024 - with Anna Vakulick, Deputy CIO, The George Washington University

Joe Sallustio: Welcome back everybody. It's your time to up on the EdUp Experience podcast where we make education your business. This is Joe Sallustio back with you on another episode. We have been podcasting all day today and we've got amazing people continually coming to the microphone. As they say, always have your A game ready. Check up from the neck up because everyone has to be good. You have to be good in front of students. You have to be good in front of your colleagues.

My energy is high. I'm halfway through a venti soy milk latte with triple shots, so I'm feeling pretty good right now. We're going to have a conversation about technology. I've got an amazing guest in front of me who's going to tell me the answers to all the hard questions plaguing our industry today. She's going to give us her opinion about what's happening in and around higher ed today. Let's get her to the microphone. Here we go. Her name is Anna Vakulick, Deputy CIO at George Washington University.

Anna, what's going on? It's great to have you here today. You bring a lot of energy. This is exciting, especially at the end of the day.

Anna Vakulick: Well, thank you. I'm really trying to make it exciting.

Joe Sallustio: My energy is so high right now. We had the pleasure of meeting you last night, talking about some of the work that you're doing at George Washington University. It's a storied university out there, and you're the Deputy CIO. This is a big university. Give us an idea of GW. How big is it? Tell us about your role a little.

Anna Vakulick: Right, so George Washington University is based in Foggy Bottom, Washington DC. We have a hospital associated with our university. We are about 28,000 students. We offer great programs in medicine and nursing. We have a campus in Ashburn, Virginia. I'm the deputy CIO. We have a shared services IT organization, so we deliver all of the IT to the entire university. It's a big job, busy all the time.

Joe Sallustio: A shared services IT organization. Tell me how this works.

Anna Vakulick: Right. So a lot of universities have decentralized IT. A lot of colleges and schools have their own IT organization. That was what we had until 2020. Never waste a pandemic, but never waste an opportunity. So we took the opportunity to move into a shared services organization. We brought in all of that external IT into central IT. We now do all of the academic technology, all the classroom support into the schools. It was a bumpy ride, definitely through a pandemic as well, doing it in a hybrid environment. We also had a reduction in our headcount during that time. So we're kind of still recovering, but we're coming back strong and thriving and looking at how we can leap forward.

Joe Sallustio: Reduction in your headcount because people left the industry? Because you had enrollment declines and dips and you're recovering? Or just because it was a crazy time? Or what?

Anna Vakulick: Crazy time. Yikes! Loss of revenue when it comes to summer housing. We have a lot of buildings in DC that we rent out through the summer. So it was just an opportunity to kind of right-size the organization. But the problem is we had a lot of decentralized IT that we still had to consolidate. So while we did it in a couple of months, it actually is lasting three years longer than we really intended. So we're doing a lot of that cleanup, a lot of standardization. But now we're just looking at how we can leap forward. I don't want to keep going at that slow pace. So it's time to move forward into things like SaaS and cloud.

Joe Sallustio: Give me an idea of the shared services organization. Like your IT department in general, are we talking like 20 people, 2,000 people, or somewhere in between?

Anna Vakulick: Somewhere in between. 260 people.

Joe Sallustio: Wow, that's insane. I mean, that's a ton of people.

Anna Vakulick: It is, but we could use a few more.

Joe Sallustio: Well, it's a ton of people without understanding the full scope of what they're doing. When you just think of it in terms of how many people you need to service that infrastructure, that's a big team.

Anna Vakulick: Well, and I think we're focusing on those opportunities like cloud and SaaS that will free up some of those back-end resources, and we can move them more into the front end. So dealing with the classroom, dealing with faculty, instructional, academic technologies and things like that, LMS, that's where we want to move. That's where the value is for the university.

Joe Sallustio: So you're servicing multiple locations then, multiple schools and locations?

Anna Vakulick: Yeah, mostly in DC. But we do have a couple of small campuses in Alexandria and in Maryland, things like that.

Joe Sallustio: Does each unit want the same things?

Anna Vakulick: Of course not.

Joe Sallustio: Right. So how do you balance that? Like what you're giving to one, you're just blanketing across the users, or you're going, this group of people needs this, this needs this. Because then it's like your tracking spreadsheet on who's using what.

Anna Vakulick: It's difficult in IT a lot of times to know who's using what, how often it's being used, how many users there are, how many licenses we have. It's a lot of tracking involved. I kind of use the phrase, you have the haves and the have-nots. And so over the years, some of the schools that were more rich bought a lot of the handhold, you know, the white-glove service. And then the schools that were the have-nots struggled. And so in a shared service organization, we try to deliver the same level of service to everybody. And then yes, you have kind of the special areas. Obviously, our College of Engineering has higher tech demands on us. And so we provide some extra and different services to them. Our medical school has a lot of tech needs as well. So you have to tailor it to each school and to their demand. It's also kind of set for the strategic plan for the university and where the provost wants our academics to be going.

Joe Sallustio: One of the things that I've had – I don't know how many CIOs I've had on this week – and I'm asking typically the same question and I'm getting really different answers. There's a balance of, there was always a balance in being a CIO or deputy CIO, but it used to be, let's say pre-what we understand artificial intelligence to be like LLM and all that, where you were stabilizing operations, you were bringing in technology, you were making it work. It was very inward-focused. And now things are exploding outwardly, right? LLMs and you've got your AWSs and all these other technologies going on around us. So you have to balance this inward focus to make things work and the outward focus strategically with foresight to go, okay, we've got to be ready for what's coming. It didn't used to be like, maybe it was always like that, but not at the speed at which it's moving now. How do you balance? I mean, the balance is such an important part of what you do.

Anna Vakulick: So I always say, and my team gets tired of me saying this, you know, never have I ever heard a student say, "You know, I think I'm going to pick my school and the university that I want to go to – man, you should see their data center. They do some awesome business continuity disaster recovery and their audit plan. Amazing data lake. I can't swim in it, but it looks great." Right? No one says that. So we're never going to hit rankings. We're never going to be known for how well we run this data center. We've got to get out of that business. So that's where partnering with companies like Ellucian, partnering with AWS, companies like that, that we can get out of that type of business, stop focusing on internally, right? And be able to reposition those people externally and build services that actually add value to the university rather than running servers.

Joe Sallustio: What about artificial intelligence?

Anna Vakulick: What about it?

Joe Sallustio: Right. We want to get to it. Like who has time for that right now?

Anna Vakulick: We're keeping servers warm.

Joe Sallustio: Keeping them warm. Trying to keep them cool. This is the thing, like your average users, like "I'm going to take this sensitive data and stick it in an LLM." And IT departments are going, "No!"

Anna Vakulick: Right. I mean, we really are trying to focus on data. We really think the center of everything that we do is about data. It's our data lake, building out a data lake. Our ERPs, great, that needs to happen. That's the transactions. But what's the data behind that? How can we do analytics against it? And then you start talking about AI, you got to have good data for it. We heard that this morning, bias happens not because of the system, but it's the data. Garbage in, garbage out, right? So we're really trying to build out a data team to focus on that. We've got a strong analytics team, but getting into data governance, making sure that the organization knows that they're responsible for the data and where it goes and understanding that once you let that out of the organization, you can't get it back. It's not yours anymore, right? It's everyone's.

Joe Sallustio: Nailed it. What's keeping you up at night right now? Security, cybersecurity? I mean, I will tell you, we talk about this a lot, but higher ed has a lot of holes, right? It's really weak infrastructure from an infrastructure perspective. Schools are getting shut down because they're getting hacked and stuff. Is that something? Is it the AI piece and how you integrate it? Is it the, you know, what's the thing that you're like on your mind when you're going to sleep at night?

Anna Vakulick: Yeah, I think we've definitely been in a situation where, again, I want to clean up the infrastructure. I want to clean up our inward focus. So I think that's what keeps me up at night, because that would free us and unlock the potential to talk about the AI and the next things that are coming. So yes, cybersecurity, I think, is something that's really important that we need to do better with. But to me, I think about how we're going to do that, right? Because we don't have as many resources as we'd all like to have, but partnerships. And so finding partners that can work with us, meet us where we are. Sometimes that's meeting us where our budget is. That's absolutely a big part of it, not sometimes – all the time. And growing, right? And being able to talk risk to the organization, to the leadership team. But that's where we've seen success is when we talk about enterprise risk, that's where the funding can happen.

Joe Sallustio: Tell them like it is. What's the future look like for higher ed? I mean, you see schools closing. Your institution's probably not one of those. You guys are pretty successful. But enrollment is still an issue, right? We want to get to 30,000 or 32,000 and grow enrollment. You guys have a storied history. You have great programs, great outcomes. Institutions can get stuck in this loop where you're just kind of doing the same thing over and over. What's change look like for the organization? What do you see going forward?

Anna Vakulick: Right. So the other exciting thing is that we're in a beta program with Ellucian on their Journey. So I don't know if you saw that here.

Joe Sallustio: I have seen it. I saw it. I saw it a while back actually, because I had the privilege of knowing some of the secret. Don't tell anyone, but I got to see it like six months ago. It was really cool.

Anna Vakulick: You did too. Okay, well, I won't tell you. Super, super cool. Right. I mean, so the opportunity for non-degree, non-credit programs and – but specifically for me, I mean, we've done non-credit, we do non-credit, right? Or non-degree. But the exciting part is that skill mapping piece. So being able to map skills to what you're coming out with a degree on and being able to see where there's adjacent skills. Boy, you just extended your degree with a couple extra classes or your job opportunities just expand, right?

I think about it, I came out of college and I felt really great and I graduated. I had a big four accounting firm recruiting me. I'm set, right? And they said, "Hey, that's nice. We're gonna send you to training for three months." I'm like, "I just did four years of, you know, what do you need to train me in?" There were skills. I mean, there were specific skills that they wanted to know that I had. I didn't have them coming out of college.

And so I think that skill mapping piece is really important. So I think, you know, whether it's stackable credentials or just extending our reach to people who wouldn't normally come to GW, because maybe a four-year degree is too daunting. Right? You know, I know I have friends with kids that have chosen for right now, college isn't for me. Right? But maybe they don't have a degree or just because I'm not sure what path I want to take. I'm 18 years old. You know, maybe I have ADHD. Maybe, you know, maybe just I'm done with COVID. Right? Three years later, they start, they go to go back to school.

Joe Sallustio: Successful.

Anna Vakulick: Right. So why do we have to push them maybe right at 18? But there might be some skills that they can learn that lead them into a path. I think for GW, it opens up opportunities for students that wouldn't normally look at us. It opens up opportunities for our current students to be able to make themselves more marketable in a super competitive environment. Right? Add to those skills. You come out with a degree with School of Nursing. What if you add analytics to it now? You're talking healthcare administration, bed utilization dashboarding, you know, those kind of things, but you know nursing. Right? So I think those opportunities are good and then of course connections to alumni. Right? So they came, they had an undergraduate experience. They loved it. Maybe they want to come back for whether it's a graduate degree or even just some credentials that they want to get from GW and they trust GW.

Joe Sallustio: I like the three, what you're saying, you maybe three years that you're going to go get a bunch of skills and then three years later you go, okay, you know what, I'm ready, I'm more ready mentally to go back and get my degree, maybe even financially because I've gotten out and I've used those skills to get a job. I haven't just gone in and created a ton of debt for myself. The worst thing in the world is a directionless student who just incurs more classes. And you hear these students that have 146 credits on a 120 credit degree. And it's like, what happened? The amount of debt you put yourself in, that direction is important. And the only way to provide that direction is to map it.

Anna Vakulick: Yeah.

Joe Sallustio: Right. And that's what Journey does is that maps it. So visually, I remember seeing a visual. I still could picture in my mind going, oh, that's cool. It lights up, tells me my pathway. And then I'm able to communicate those skills to an employer because it's all about jobs in the end.

Anna Vakulick: Right. Because I think, you know, I think that they come out of college and they've graduated and they can say, "I have a bachelor's in X," but what skills translate? And so I think some of them they don't realize they're getting through some of the classes. So I think having, again, kind of an AI platform that backs that industry relevancy. I mean, some of these skills are going to spin up. They're not gonna be there in five years, right? I mean, my kids are gonna go to college and they're gonna be looking at careers that didn't exist when I went to college, right? So things are gonna spin up quickly, we have to be agile for that. I think the skill mapping is a piece of that. It also will allow us to see where maybe we don't have programs where we should. We have a strength, but maybe there's some adjacent skills that, if we could build out those programs, it would continue our reputation as an expert in that field.

Joe Sallustio: Well, I wanna thank you for coming over today and making time for me and the EdUp Experience podcast audience to say a little bit about what you do. I know that was kind of impromptu through our mutual connection, Cheryl over at Lead Squared, who was like, you gotta get on there. I'm like, yes, I wanna get her on there. And then you came on. How did you feel? Have a good time?

Anna Vakulick: This is fun. So fun. Yeah, I loved it.

Joe Sallustio: This is great. We loved having you here. Let me get you the outro that you deserve. Her name is Anna Vakulick. She is Deputy CIO at George Washington University. And there is no job harder than a CIO these days to keep their eyes on all the stuff that are affecting our institutions and the things that will affect us in the future. We appreciate the hard work that you're doing to serve students, and it's been a pleasure to get to know you.

Anna Vakulick: Thanks, Joe. I really appreciate it.

Joe Sallustio: All right, you know everybody, remember. Be excellent to each other. You've just ed-upped.