853: LIVE From Ellucian Live 2024 - with Gary Moser, CIO, Kern Community College District

Joe Sallustio: Welcome back, everybody. It's your time to up on the EdUp Experience podcast where we make education your business. And you might be asking where it is we're making education your business. And that is here in San Antonio at Ellucian Live for the third straight year. Shout out to Laura Ibsen, Greg John Grande and crew for bringing us back for a third time as we continue to have conversations with some of the most innovative folks in and around higher education today.

I would say that we're getting people very early. This is the very first recording of the next three days. And I think they've got like 15 or 16, maybe 20 recordings for me. Before I get to my guest, I want to tell you guys that Ellucian is doing some very innovative things in higher education today. And one thing I will say about the company is they very much care about their customers. You can see it with this event - I would call it like a spectacle almost. There's so many people here. It's going to be almost 6,000 folks coming here to this conference to talk about best practices in higher ed. That's what this is. It's a higher education conference, not a celebrity conference. We're going to actually do real work here and learn from each other. 

And I'm going to learn from somebody right now. I'm going to make sure I get his title right, because I had to write it down to make sure I get it all in. Ladies and gentlemen, he is Gary Moser, he's the Vice Chancellor of IT and CIO at Kern Community College. I nailed it, Gary, how are you?

Gary Moser: You did, you nailed it great. I'm fine, thank you for asking.

Joe Sallustio: Gary, welcome to Ellucian Live. How's it going?

Gary Moser: It's going great. I'm really excited for this week.

Joe Sallustio: You know, there's a lot of people kind of starting to feel things out, find out where they're going to go, where they need to go. What are you looking for over the next three days? Why are you here? What are you hoping to take away? What was the purpose? Give me the whole skinny.

Gary Moser: Yeah, that's great. Thank you for the question. What do I hope to get out of this? Well, obviously take away that I can take back to my district and apply the knowledge to benefit our students. That's why we're here. That's what we do. I'm really excited about it because of the innovation that's shared. We deal with it within sessions. We also hear from the stage. And of course, the networking aspect of this is huge. It comes across so well. Working with my colleagues, working with other vendors. The amount of information that floods you at these conferences just overwhelms. And being able to take that back and apply it is just something we look forward to every year.

Joe Sallustio: Tell it like it is. I love it, Gary. I love your passion. Now you're an EAC. I have it right. You're an EAC?

Gary Moser: That's correct. You got it.

Joe Sallustio: What is the EAC and why is it important?

Gary Moser: Yeah, Executive Advisory Council. And what this unit does, it was put together obviously by Ellucian for many years. And what this does is it takes leadership from, in my case, North America, and brings it together so Ellucian can work with these leaders. And there's a group of about 20 or 25. And what we do is we share information with Ellucian, provide feedback on products, services, direction, those types of things that hopefully get incorporated into their roadmaps for the future. And this is really a great opportunity for us to have these EAC events. We have a retreat on site, usually in the summer back at their headquarters in Reston and then we do quarterly meetings via Zoom or whatever the case might be.

Joe Sallustio: Amazing! Yeah, I would agree with you. It is absolutely amazing. Well, it's important, right? Feedback loops are really critical and when you're dealing with Ellucian and the systems, it's about students, it's about financial aid, it's about the dollars moving the right way, it's about classes being scheduled, it's about security, it's about AI. So many things that you have to deal with as a CIO these days. I mean, the CIO is a sort of long forgotten, you know, it's students, it's higher ed, it's information, but there is so much protection that has to go around that. And you have to have the feedback loop back to the company who's providing the service so they know they're getting it right. That's the purpose, right? To say, you guys are getting it right, or give us something more, improve this or improve that.

Gary Moser: Yeah, it really is. And I'm going to say, I'm going to shoot for the last comment you made, improve this and improve that, because I think it's a never-ending cycle. I think our students change, our environments change, the technology obviously changes tremendously. So to just say, what do we get right? That's almost past tense in my opinion. What we need to do is make sure that what we have, we can feed back so adjustments can be made to benefit our students. It's really that simple. If our students aren't getting educated, why are we here? That has got to be the force. That is where we're at.

Joe Sallustio: The job of a CIO is hard in higher ed. I always say, I tease like one of those areas that nobody comes to your office and knocks on your door and goes, "Gary, I got to tell you something, all the systems are working so well today. I just really appreciate it. Just, you know what? It's a great day." I mean, typically it's "Gary, you know, my computer's not working" or "Gary, the system is doing this" or "Gary, the system is doing that." And then, you know, you have to say, "Did you plug your computer in?" No, but it's not that simple. But there's so many things that you have to watch, right? And we know that higher ed is just weak on security as an industry. We know that there's been hacks, it's shut down schools. There's lots to think about, protecting data, preventing people from coming in on the inside, the stakeholders, somebody getting batteries for their mouse even. So it's a spectrum of things that you have to watch. How do you keep it all straight?

Gary Moser: Well, you covered it and there is a spectrum. It goes from security, as you said, to desktop, to the systems applications, to AI, to new technology. It covers a wide gamut of what we're expected to at least address. The goal obviously is keeping that straight is what the priorities be as your organization. And those are discussed and we have priorities within our organization where we want to go to. So for example, at Kern, we're in the process of moving to a SaaS environment, which we're very excited about. We're hoping to get there soon.

The challenge is behind that where it's always, we're always short of manpower, like you said. We don't get the resources of a four-year university at a community college. It's just not even close. Funding. Funding is a key. And then using new technology to benefit our students. So we're also working on AI projects right now to help with doing that. And so these types of things have to enable us to move forward. And it's very, very difficult. As you pointed out, funding is challenging. And especially in California, there's a significant budget balance deficit.

We're waiting to see kind of how that plays out. It's going to be hard. And the only way we can do this effectively is we use the newest technology, we automate, and we utilize the best efficiencies possible to serve our students the best we can.

Joe Sallustio: Tell us about Kern Community College. You said California. Where are you? What city? Who do you serve? Who's the institution serving?

Gary Moser: Great. No, thank you. That's a great question. So to start off, we serve about 45,000 to 50,000 students. We cover 25,000 square miles. We're the largest geographic district in the state. If you know California, we run from the I-5 to the Nevada border. Kern County is our main one, but we serve four other counties as well too in our environment. And the challenge we have is so spread out. We have three colleges in our district. One is an hour north of us. One is two hours east of us. And that's how we try to maintain and work and provide services and education to our students. That's where we're at.

Joe Sallustio: Inconceivable! It's a lot of geography in there. It's a lot of coverage and the student types are going to be different, right? Their socioeconomic backgrounds are going to be different because you've got such a long span of land.

Gary Moser: Yeah, we do. And Bakersfield itself, which is our largest college, we have a very diverse student group there already. And then we have our two other colleges, Porterville up north and then Cerro Coso to the east of us. And very spread out, very different demographic markets that we utilize in order to serve our population.

Joe Sallustio: Talk about some of your challenges as a CIO, as a vice chancellor of IT. What are you dealing with right now? What are the, I don't know, the issues of our time right now for CIO?

Gary Moser: Yeah, it's utilizing technology to benefit the students. I know I've said that already a couple of times, but being able to delve in and provide the benefits to our functional teams that work directly with the students, the instruction side of the house that teaches in the classroom. There's a piece of that that we support and want to work forward towards.

We've got to provide whatever system we have, and Ellucian obviously is the core of that, we run our Banner system, but we've got to have these capabilities functioning all the time. I don't have 24-7 support staff, you know what? We're expected to work 24-7. And by the way, have the security concerns all the time. And one of the things that I feel better about is, well, now that we have managed cloud, which is where we have our system, Ellucian's managed cloud and going to SaaS, security, we get great assistance from Ellucian with their security program and how they look oversee the systems that we have from the Ellucian side of the house. I don't know how we would manage. Security is a challenge for everybody and in our resource-limited environment it's even worse.

Joe Sallustio: That's a fact. That's a fact. You have to have good partners in higher ed. You need good technology partners. It's hard to go it alone. You have to have the right people around you. They have to listen. The partners have to listen. Why is your relationship so good with Ellucian?

Gary Moser: Yeah, you do have to have great partners. There's no doubt about it. We couldn't do this on our own. We're always trying to make up for shortages and resources, primarily staffing. I can't staff like a four-year college can. I just can't do it. And in our managed cloud environment, we've had a very stable platform. I've been very pleased with the work that's been done to provide us that environment for our students to get those resources, get access to the systems that they need in order to further their education. So we obviously have third parties that work very well with Ellucian Systems. Several of them we have in play. We run over 68 integrations for our district and all of these have to talk to Ellucian. And because Banner is their system of record. That's where we submit our payroll registration, information to the state for apportionment, all those types of things.

Joe Sallustio: Bullseye. You said integrations. This is such an important word and little understood. Right? I think the expectation for the general user is Gary, I got to get my data. I need to bring in Google data. I've got to bring in data from, I don't know, I need my SIS data. I need marketing data. I need my funnel data for my enrollment system, whatever CRM I'm using. Maybe my fundraising team is using Razor's Edge or some other. You've got to integrate everything. That is not easy work because we know someone says, I don't know who it was, but a friend of mine, and I think it's kind of been said before, but garbage in, garbage out. If you put in bad data, you're going to be stuck, and you're going to be, I mean, so there's such an important part of your job as cleaning data, or making for clean data for these integrations.

Gary Moser: Yeah, that's absolutely true. To your garbage in, garbage out is a solution, or I wouldn't say a solution, a pain point that's been around for decades. Way back when I first started, it was very, very common. We have to be able to provide reliable systems that not only provide access, but provide data integrity, which is, as you point out, huge. That's how we know how many students we have. That's how we know they're going to transfer their credits to a four-year if they choose to do so. That's how they're going to get their certificates. That's how we run payroll. That's how the students get their financial aid. All these things are important to our students. Most of the students in our community college district are underserved, socioeconomically disadvantaged students. They need this. It's not a want, it's a need.

Joe Sallustio: And it's hard to think about your education when you can't put food on the table. You know, always, the community college students, so many are a fender bender away from quitting. Right? $300 bill, something like that, that's totally unexpected. And they say to themselves, you know what? I don't know if I can do this anymore. I can't afford it. And there's every reason to quit. So it's so hard to give them a reason to stay. And that's why America's community colleges are so important, because it's hard work to retain students in general. And part of retaining students is having working systems. And what happens, Gary, the scenario? Gary, we don't like X system. We need a new system. We'd like to bring in something else. Is this what you say? I don't think so. How does this work?

Gary Moser: In fairness, we do an analysis. As I pointed out at the top of the podcast, that technology changes. So what may be a good solution yesterday may not be the right solution tomorrow. So when somebody says, you know, I want this or I want that, we have to take it into consideration and look because the functionals may have found something that is very valuable or my staff, by the way, I'll put it, my staff is amazing, by the way. You can love on your staff all you want.

Joe Sallustio: Oh my gosh, it's just amazing what they do with the amount of people I have and the work that gets done. I could spend the next hour on that.

Gary Moser: But we need to make sure that we can apply and make sure that we talk about. You know, is this a good solution? Does this fit? What are the criteria? What are the objectives and deliverables that we need to move forward? Does it meet our need or did we look at it, listen to a salesman and not quite the full story because everybody's a little different. Not that I'm disparaging salesmen, but they have a goal, but we need to make sure what they are offering fits what we need to do and can afford.

Joe Sallustio: 100% Well said. What is a successful conference look like when you walk away on Wednesday or Thursday? Yeah, Thursday morning, somewhere around there. That's right. You walk away going, you know what, this was amazing because...

Gary Moser: Yeah, that's a great question, because that is really important. Not only the sessions that take place during these conferences, which are very informative. And I will share to you one of the key things that I come for is the networking aspect of it. It might sound cliche, but it's very difficult during the normal work week to break away and talk to one of my colleagues, even if they're in the state. But here I get nationwide, worldwide. And it gives different perspectives because a lot of people develop and find things that I'm not aware of. You can't know everything about technology. It's impossible. It changes too fast. It's like we're developing our AI solution for our student guided pathways project. We're very excited about that. So that's how we move forward.

The networking aspect of this, find out really what works. I mean, you can listen to a vendor and they tell you this and you go, okay, great. But if one of my colleagues is actually using it, then I get the entire story. It's like, let me just tell you how our experience was. It was amazing. Or it was, you better watch out for X, Y, and Z. That's what you get from networking. Like, here's the way we've done it. Here's the way you guys should consider it if you don't want to make the same mistakes that we did.

Joe Sallustio: It prepares you, right? And if we don't network, then we're on an island.

Gary Moser: Yeah, that's exactly right. That's exactly right. And it's not so much we made a mistake, but maybe we didn't learn or ask the right questions during the assessment process to say, you know, this is the problem we have. This doesn't really solve that problem. Maybe we need to look at something else. So it's clarification. And that networking piece comes into play quite a bit. It's very helpful.

Joe Sallustio: What else do you want to say about Kern Community College, your time here at Ellucian Live, your very early time here at Ellucian Live. What else do you want to say about anything? You get the open mic.

Gary Moser: OK, well, I talked for a while, but I won't do that to you.

Joe Sallustio: You know what? It's recording and we got a lot of time.

Gary Moser: OK, fair enough. So first I want to say about Kern Community College District. I'm very fortunate to work with the team I have. I can't say that enough. I think they do amazing work. We have so many talented people. I just wish I could hire more of them, but that's not likely going to happen. I'll put a little plug in since you give me an open mic here. We're working on an AI solution for our students' guided pathways. Surprise.

Joe Sallustio: Yeah, there you go.

Gary Moser: And what that does is it really will determine if a student's off their optimal path to their degree. Meaning if they've sidetracked on courses they may not need for that program or that degree, we can identify that, get very proactive in front, let their counselor or advisor know and reach out so they don't keep going down that road or use up badly needed financial aid resources. We can steer them back on track or they can say, you know, I don't want that program anymore. I want this program. Then we can guide them down that path too. But we save them a lot of time and financial aid funding when we get in front of this. So I'm really excited about what our AI project is doing at Kern.

Joe Sallustio: What do you see for the future of higher ed, Gary? Give us a, give us a two-minute Swami moment here.

Gary Moser: Two-minute Swami moment. You know, I see higher ed utilizing AI technology for the betterment of our students and because I don't know about nationwide, but I know in our system, the staff to student ratio is not conducive to the best environment. We're just overwhelmed.

Joe Sallustio: You gotta have tech.

Gary Moser: Gotta have tech, but you gotta have the functional support. So I've got to give them the tools so they can provide what they need to do so they're not so overwhelmed. So I see that constant improving with the new technology that's coming forward. So I see that in the three to five year window.

Joe Sallustio: Well, there you have it, ladies and gentlemen, the first completed episode here at E-Live 2024 San Antonio, Texas with none other than Gary Moser. He is the vice chancellor of IT and CIO at Kern Community College. Gary, we hope you have a great conference. We hope you had fun on EdUp and that you remember this on Thursday when you go home.

Gary Moser: Oh, yeah, this will be fantastic. I'm looking forward to hearing it.

Joe Sallustio: All right. It'll be out tomorrow morning. We'll have it out.

Gary Moser: All right. Sounds good. Thanks a lot.

Joe Sallustio: Take it easy. Bye bye.