863: LIVE From Ellucian Live 2024 - with Keith Fowlkes⁠, Executive Director, ⁠HESS ⁠Consortium, & ⁠Ezra Krumhansl⁠, COO, ⁠Spalding University⁠

Joe Sallustio: Welcome back, everybody. It's your time to Ed Up on the EdUp Experience podcast where we make education your business. Day three, podcast one here at Ellucian Live 2024. We've been talking to so many people in and around higher education. I think we've done, Elvin, 10 episodes so far in the first two days. We've got 10 more scheduled today or some insane amount. We'll be talking to people all day long. I'll be sitting right here from now until the end of the evening.

Hopefully, I get to use the restroom and get some coffee at some point. But not if we have great people in front of us. And that's what we have right now. We have great people in front of us that are going to tell us all about what's happening with the future of higher education, how the conference is going here at Ellucian, and what we need to know about in the future as we talk technology. Let's bring in one at a time. First, we have Ezra Krumhansl. He is the COO at Spalding University. Ezra, what is up? How are you?

Ezra Krumhansl: I'm good. How are you doing?

Joe Sallustio: I'm doing well. We got to interview you last year, so you're back again.

Ezra Krumhansl: Yes, second time guest. Couldn't get enough.

Joe Sallustio: You just couldn't stay away, could you?

Ezra Krumhansl: That's right.

Joe Sallustio: And our second guest here with us, he's Keith Fowlkes. He is the executive director at HESS, the Higher Education Systems and Services Consortium. Hey, you got it right. That's awesome. What's up, Keith? How are you?

Keith Fowlkes: I'm good. I'm good. Glad to be with you.

Joe Sallustio: I'm glad to have you guys here. Let's level set for the audience. Remember last year we had some HESS folks on, but Keith, this is kind of like part of your brainchild, right? Like you were one of the founding or the founding member of HESS. What is HESS? Why is it important? How did it start? Tell the story.

Keith Fowlkes: So I was a CIO for years, probably 30 years before I started doing what we do today. I was at Centre College in Kentucky as CIO and about 10 years ago, thought, hey, let's get some CIOs together and let's try and find some savings to work together and also kind of build a collective voice for only private, non-profit colleges and universities in technology. Our membership is really all CIOs, CTOs and other IT professionals. We have a growing number of CFOs that are a part of it also, as Ezra knows very well. 

HESS is primarily a community of practice. So our community of practice learns from each other. CIOs to CIOs, we have a number of ways we communicate between each other, over listservs and we have what I call the HESS online leadership community. It's kind of like Facebook on steroids. People, CIOs and other technology professionals will ask a question and get a ton of answers back from other experienced folks. And we also partner with another organization called the Coalition for College Cost Savings, which is a GPO, a group purchasing organization. And we create, we co-brand and cross-promote basically contracts with business partners and affiliates and we're a great aggregation point for those private schools.

Joe Sallustio: One of the big benefits is cost control here, isn't it? Right. So what are you guys doing? Could we get into something together, reduce the overall cost to both of us, have a contract come through HESS maybe, and then offer it to members. Is that a big piece of this is cost control?

Keith Fowlkes: It is. It is. ERP is where we've kind of broken out from that more but ERP is a major, major area of cost for our private institutions. So a good example is Ellucian has what's called the HESS Success Program, which is a way that makes it a lot cheaper and less expensive to go from on-prem systems to in the cloud systems. Which I think was what Ellucian and many CIOs want to do, is move from on-prem to the cloud.

Joe Sallustio: A lot of change involved in something like that though. A lot of mind changing, if you will, right?

Keith Fowlkes: Yeah, absolutely.

Joe Sallustio: So CIOs are in the business of change management. Ezra, over to you because you're CIO and CFO. If you just couldn't, you didn't have enough stress, you decided to take on a second job. Those are two very unique roles to be doing together. How do you do it?

Ezra Krumhansl: I don't know. I guess I just have a superpower for that. I'm able to turn off my brain on the finance side and jump into something IT and then turn off the IT side and jump into finance. But that comes up, I'll be looking at financial statements one minute and then somebody interrupts me because they're having an issue in a classroom or something with a projector and I'll run over and help with that. That's a typical day.

Joe Sallustio: Plug in your computer. So as you work through balancing those dual roles of CFO and CIO, obviously cost control is important. Having an organization behind you like HESS, what is the draw for you to be a part of HESS? What is it doing for you in your role or roles at Spalding?

Ezra Krumhansl: It's really helpful to learn what the actual applications of technologies are so that shared practice of learning what other colleges are doing, if they found a solution that is more efficient and adds value, might not be less expensive, but in the long run that is less expensive for an organization. And then grouping together to reduce costs, actually bringing the power of numbers with vendors has been really helpful. In the early days, you know, we had 20 schools, 30 schools, it started to grow and the snowball effect of getting over 100 schools, and then we saw where there's really savings. We've added a number of solutions with Ellucian at a lower cost than what we just had if we just went alone and negotiated those. It's been really beneficial in that way too.

Joe Sallustio: That's good. So in networking, right? I mean that's a big part of this. How important is it for you all to be here representing HESS, talking with HESS membership, seeing what their challenges are, right? You're seeing it from two ends, right? You're seeing it from here's what CIOs are dealing with, and then you have to look at it from here's how we could help these CIOs. You know, because there's an interesting balance and perspective that you have to have here. What are you looking for out of this conference? What do you come here to do as the executive director?

Keith Fowlkes: One of the things is bringing our institutions together and to talk about the challenges and also to share those challenges with Ellucian leadership. We have cohorts for every ERP under the sun.

Joe Sallustio: Nailed it.

Keith Fowlkes: So we go to those folks that are in Workday. It's in HESS. We've met with us on a couple of different regions. Tracy Williams, an amazing advocate and shout out to Tracy. So we go directly to the source when we have challenges and also when we have successes. You know, we've got some new, in my opinion, really great offers to our Ellucian members across the country. It's the largest cohorts that we have, over 200, well over 200 schools are a part of the Ellucian cohort within HESS. And so we get the good, the bad, and the ugly, and I talk with our institutions every day about challenges, issues, as do our cohort leaders. Our cohort leaders Ezra and Troy and Anne and now Tom Cruise are just incredible folks and they really are great liaisons back to Ellucian.

Joe Sallustio: So you're represented by the people for the people essentially.

Keith Fowlkes: By the people for the people, absolutely.

Joe Sallustio: What's the HESS Success Program? Go into a little bit more about that. Why it's important? What is it? Why is it important? It's relatively new.

Ezra Krumhansl: Yeah, I can speak to it a little bit. For schools that are moving from on-prem to software as a service or SaaS, there's abatement on some of the subscription pricing during that transition and then discounting on some of the services for that. And then there's the opportunity for schools to go through some of those processes as a cohort, whether it's implementing self-service. We've had a few colleges group together, five colleges in Banner, five colleges in Colleague do those kind of things together. So there's the opportunity to have those meetings at the same time, kind of follow the whole progression on an implementation together and reduce cost.

Joe Sallustio: What's the trepidation of moving from on-prem to cloud? Is it just change? I mean, what is it?

Ezra Krumhansl: Well, if you run a system on premise, you have a lot more control, for one thing. And then you might also have a lot more customization than the software as a service would allow. So those are the biggest things to deal with when moving. De-customizing so going to more of a vanilla version of it, the same thing everybody else is going to be using, whereas if your school's been on Ellucian Colleague or Banner for 20, 30, 40 years, you might have changed a lot of things from the standard. I have my one process that has been configured to the exact way I want to do it.

It gets tailored. It's like a house, you know, like you might go into development and then over 20 years, everybody's kind of rearranged your house, has done some remodeling, made a bathroom bigger here or split a bedroom. That's kind of what's happened with on-prem, whereas going to the SaaS model is more like a hotel. You get a queen bed, queen bed, queen bed rooms. That's how it is. So making that transition is difficult and cost is another issue. So there's implementation. You're paying for one version on premise at the same time you're paying for the other. That's where the abatement of cost comes in. There's some incentive to switching.

Joe Sallustio: Yeah, you know, it's interesting. We have to be thankful that higher-ed companies aren't like Apple or something where they just stop servicing the iPhone 10 and you better get your iPhone 15 or else you're just not going to have something that's serviced, right?

Keith Fowlkes: That's happened with some other companies also. Some other ERP companies have just closed out one of their products and said, okay, everybody move up to the other product. And it causes some real issues.

Joe Sallustio: Yeah, it really does. So what are you guys here to do? What's going to make a successful conference for you? We'll start with you, Ezra. When you go home at the end of the week, you know what? This conference was amazing because what?

Ezra Krumhansl: Well, I'm here to learn a lot about AI, actually. I'm teaching a class on AI in the fall, so I've been going to a lot of those sessions.

Joe Sallustio: You have all the secrets?

Ezra Krumhansl: Well, trying to get out there, get all those secrets on artificial intelligence. But also just getting to see people like Keith and Tom and other members of our HESS cohort, meet members of the cohort that I haven't met in person. I've met a lot of people that I've only seen on Zoom calls. Just a chance to network and get to see people face to face has been great.

Joe Sallustio: Keith, what's successful for you at the end of this conference? And have you had a good conference so far?

Keith Fowlkes: I have. It's been great. It's interesting. I talk with private colleges of all types literally every day. So I do a lot of recommendations and give input. So I'm here to learn the new features and functionality and new plans for the future for both Colleague and Banner. And we do have a number of Power Campus schools. So I'm just here to soak up as much as I can to make good recommendations or give people good insight.

Joe Sallustio: Yeah. It's interesting that the time that we're in, the time of AI and technology advancement, makes a group like HESS really important because I find it's fascinating to me the job of a CIO now. And I was talking to the CIOs from St. John's University and Rupa Saran from Coast Community College District yesterday and I said, you know, it used to be that a CIO was so tactical like, let everything settle, we're gonna control these things. And all of a sudden now you have to be futurists. Not that you weren't before, but really have to be a futurist at the same time. You still have to exercise some level of control. Right. And it's like the general user goes, I'm taking my financials and I'm sticking them in a ChatGPT. And you don't know that now everybody has access to this public information that you've read. So you have to control and look for the future. This is a hard balance. It's interesting that you, as a CFO and CIO, because you have this data, it'd be great to be able to use AI to summarize it, but you don't want to stick it into an LLM that's public.

Ezra Krumhansl: There are ways to do that safely and securely. But you know that. I don't know that everybody knows that. But that is part of educating users on it. We've begun to do that with our faculty and students as well. That's the reason we're introducing a class on it for students is because when they go in the workplace, we don't want them to make those kind of big mistakes that could...

Joe Sallustio: Well, and the employees too, they stick in like a write-up or a PIP in there, you know what I mean? Just to summarize. And it's crazy what people will just do now because it seems easy, but you don't read the fine print. There's a lot of fine print on AI these days. It's how do you balance? I mean, this is just a tough balance for you. What do you do to stay fresh and looking forward?

Ezra Krumhansl: Well, you got to devote time every day or every week to look at new things to learn. I read a lot. I read a lot online, Twitter, places like that and get news feeds and new information constantly. And come to conferences like this or do webinars. So just try and stay fresh. If we had the budgets, we used to have a little bit more budget to just devote to let's try something new. But that's where we need to be a little bit better futurists where we guess like, OK, we're going to buy this and use it for the long haul. Whereas before, we could buy things and try them for little while and then throw them away because we had a little bit more resources to do trial and piloting of things.

Keith Fowlkes: We actually just did a research, a white paper with one of our business partners, Doctom. They're a consulting company. And basically it was from data from our HESS institutions talking about what are the threats of AI and what are the useful ways that it can be used with specifically private colleges. Large institutions have all the money, or a lot of the money that they need. Private colleges need to do it on the cheap to some degree. So this white paper really was very good.

Joe Sallustio: Well, you have so much expertise in a membership group. I'd be looking in membership groups to say, what is everybody doing? What are these policies? Is there one that HESS can put out that helps me create my own internal policy around ethical AI? So I think it's about community. Right. We cannot do this alone in higher ed these days. You have to have a great community. And that's what I know HESS... I've had the honor of meeting multiple people now that are members of HESS and everybody's amazing. And they all speak so highly of HESS and what it does to serve their institutions and for the CIOs of the future. Right. I mean, because the up-and-comers have to have somewhere to go to find out what the heck is going on these days.

Ezra Krumhansl: Yeah, we're starting a training process. And I'll just say, yeah, we can share a lot of information because most of what we do isn't the competitive advantage of our institutions. You know, IT support, billing, those kinds of things. Everybody does them, so finding efficiency, sharing ideas, not reinventing the wheel is helpful, and that's a benefit of these types of organizations.

Joe Sallustio: If you don't listen to what Ezra is saying, you'll be... You were banned from the server. So that's why it's very important to make sure that you follow policy with technology. Go ahead, Keith. Were you going to say something?

Keith Fowlkes: We're doing a... we don't know what we're going to call it yet, but kind of an academy at the request of many of our members who either are new CIOs or they're aspiring CIOs or they're CIOs who have come from industry into higher ed and this is their first job in higher ed. And this training process or this kind of an academy will help our institutions' CIOs be better at what they do, basically from listening to CIOs that have been in that position for 30 years. Then some newer, we've got some of our business partners coming in to talk about things that are coming down the road, trends, those types of things. So, yeah.

Joe Sallustio: Given back, a little bit of given back and preparation for the up-and-comers. Ezra, what else do you want to say about your role at Spalding University as CFO slash CIO? And whether that's sane or not, no, you don't have to go into that. But what else do you want to say about your role about Spalding University or HESS?

Ezra Krumhansl: Just about Spalding, you know, it's a great place to work and I'm very happy. I've been there almost 20 years. So I'm looking forward to that. We get great awards. I'll get a bowl like a ceramic bowl with 20 years on it next year.

Joe Sallustio: Excellent. Put it right next to your Ed-Up mug now.

Ezra Krumhansl: But I think CIO to CFO path is something there probably should be more of, you know, understanding the institution the way a CIO does is all the data, how everything connects, the importance of an ERP or a learning management system to student success and student outcomes. And IT deals with students a lot more than somebody in finance. So moving over to finance has been an easy transition because I understand the organization so well. Finance has become very tech heavy. We're not doing things by hand. We're not calculating things mentally or anything like that. It's technology and computer driven. So it's easy to pick up the finance side.

Joe Sallustio: Awesome. What else do you want to say about HESS and your time here at Ellucian, the conference? Anything at all? Open mic.

Keith Fowlkes: Yeah, absolutely. I think that the HESS Consortium is really a good tool to help CIOs and hopefully in the bigger picture, institutions understand that many of our private institutions, if they don't start looking at technology as a strategic advantage for the institution, they may not be open for the coming year. All you have to do is read a few articles and you'll find that to be true. Absolutely. And it's concerning. We've had a number of our institutions, especially private schools, see technology people as plumbers and a plumber is important to keep the pipes open and keep everything running. But if you don't look at technology as a strategic advantage, not only in having labs and computers and those types of things but also using business analytics reporting, data lakes. If you don't look at that and you don't start diving into it deeply, I think that those institutions that do not look at that will be in trouble over the next few years. So HESS has a mission to help with that.

Joe Sallustio: If you're in technology and higher education and you have not checked out HESS, I have because last year I interviewed a group of five people from HESS and then I did a bunch of research. This is an incredible membership organization to support the trailblazers in higher education technology. I urge you to check it out. There's nothing better than community and being able to go to people and help. No one is alone these days in higher education. So Keith, we'll know to find you if we need you in higher ed to help us out with HESS. Where do we go? What's the website?

Keith Fowlkes: Yeah, go to www.hessconsortium.org. And you can go there and find out just about everything you need to know about HESS. But if you need to get in touch with me, just send an email to keith, K-E-I-T-H, at HESSconsortium.org.

Joe Sallustio: Well there you have it everybody, and remember... Be excellent to each other. You've just Ed-Upped!