798: LIVE from Jenzabar's Annual Meeting (JAM)⁠⁠ 2023 - with Mike Copening, CTO at Reformed Theological Seminary

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen, it's your time to up on the EdUp Experience podcast where we make education your business. We're making it your business here at Jenzabar's JAM 2023 in beautiful Orlando, Florida at the Gaylord Palms Resort - big hotel, big business, big higher ed topics to talk about. We have great guests and we've had incredible conversations. Elvin, by the way, co-founder of the EdUp Experience, Elvin Freitas is on the mic. Hello, how are you today?

Elvin Freitas: [Makes a sound]

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Can that be my sound? No, I want that to be my- I'm now muting Elvin Freitas. That's all you get. That's right. You can stand out. 

We're going to have a conversation about change management today. It's important - boy, don't we all go through it? "Don't change me. Don't make me change. Don't make me change my processes. Don't make me change my technology." That's what people say in their minds, right? Because they get ingrained into doing something and then they worry about how that change is going to affect them and their position in their job, not necessarily whether that change is positive for the institution, although that is one consideration. But there are so many layers to that change. 

And we've brought somebody to the microphone today to tell us all about how it works. Here he is, ladies and gentlemen. He's Mike Copening. He's Chief Technology Officer at the Reformed Theological Seminary. Mike, what is happening? Good afternoon.

Mike Copening: Glad to be here.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Are you ready for this?

Mike Copening: Sure.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Are you sure?

Mike Copening: Why not?

Dr. Joe Sallustio: That's funny. Talk to us about the Reformed Theological Seminary a little bit, level set for us. Where are you located? Who do you serve?

Mike Copening: Sure, we serve the broader evangelical community, preparing men and women for various roles in ministry with theological education, all graduate, post-graduate. So folks typically come to us with a bachelor's degree and they're looking for some advancement and some calling in ministry - pastors, missionaries, educators, and so forth.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: And where are you located? Tell me about the campus structure.

Mike Copening: Sure. We are a multi-campus institution. We began out of Jackson, Mississippi in the 1960s and have expanded to other markets: Orlando, Florida; Charlotte, North Carolina; Washington, D.C.; Atlanta, Georgia; Houston and Dallas in Texas. And we've got another spot in New York as well as global online education, 100% master of arts level studies.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: All right. Well, that was impressive. There's a lot to keep track of. And that's a lot to get out when we put you on a microphone right away. You got to remember all those. Talk to us about change management a little bit. So you're here because you're in the middle of an implementation right now and you're moving to Jenzabar. How do you move this mountain of change? Can you talk about how this happens? So you have a system, you're evaluating for a new vendor, what's the evaluation process look like? How do you even get to the point of a new implementation? And we'll go from there.

Mike Copening: Sure. The first part for us was really identifying time issues and problems with current systems or limitations. We're a very different institution in maybe higher education. We're not in the pantheon of school sizes - we're not very large in the general sense. In seminary space, we're a little bit larger than a lot of the other seminaries out there. And with having multiple campuses, it just presents unique challenges for us. 

Some of the software systems that we adopted back 15, 20 years ago, they had certain limitations. We jury-rigged systems to make them work as best as we could. But as things have modernized, we've really just kind of identified, you know, we've had these challenges for a long time. What's on the market? We've been in this current paradigm for quite a while. What's out there? Is there a way to do things better? And that's kind of where the conversation begins. 

For us, it's kind of the ideal way of going about the project, establishing a team. Because we've got multiple campuses and we've got duplication of roles across campuses, we can't have all like eight registrars involved in every project or all eight admissions directors. So we kind of make an authoritative team take a step back, say, all right, gather the information. What's working, what's not, what are our pain points? And then kind of just going out into the marketplace and saying, well, what's out there, what's available, what can address our greatest needs and challenges? 

And a lot of that for us is dealing with the multiple campus scenario. There's a view that there's one true main campus and all these other campuses are kind of underneath that. We're really a system of campuses where there's a level of kind of autonomy and choice that exists within that while also still being one RTS. That's actually a thing with our strategic plan we launched a couple of years back. It speaks very much to kind of the need of the change we're going through of trying to make things more integrated and seamless between all our campuses and make things more consistent, cohesive, and all around just flowing better as one entity as opposed to the temptation to have everyone splinter off and do things eight different ways. So bringing everything back together and being very cohesive is really the objective on a lot of this.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: You get to the point where you choose J1 and SaaS and you're going to move to Jenzabar and your chancellor comes to you and says, are you sure? There's a lot of pressure. There's a lot of pressure on these choices as a CTO. How do you minimize that risk in choosing a new vendor? Why did you decide on moving to J1?

Mike Copening: Sure. You know, first, I like to say it's always a team effort. I'm not an ultimate individual making a decision in isolation, and I never want to operate in that way. I very much believe in having the team and having the input from all the key stakeholders, whether it's the registrar or admissions or finance. It's all just very critical that everyone's buying into it.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Yeah, they all got to use it, right?

Mike Copening: Yeah, so having that group come together and then go forth and say, "Hey, this looks like a good direction to go." A lot of the things with the Jenzabar platform, a lot of our project actually was born out of a need to upgrade our admissions system we'd built and programmed our own homegrown one. Didn't put a lot of time and investment into it over the course of a decade. So what we developed originally was very good for the time. There weren't a lot of things on the market that were available.

The tools in Salesforce, like we adopted the JRM solution for admissions and recruiting. And a lot of the tools that exist in there just weren't really there from what we could see 10, 15 years ago. So that's kind of where the initial thing came up. But we also had other just issues with student information system and other areas where how do we solve multi-campus? How do we solve non-traditional registration models? We have a lot of things where traditional brick and mortar campus - we just don't have the same challenges. 

We've been doing - not like the COVID had a lot of shift in how courses are delivered, you know, the flexibility necessary. But we've been in that space for years of working through non-traditional registration models. And really that was - we didn't see it as something that was going to slow down. So really finding something that can be flexible for multiple campuses and deal with non-traditional registration and modalities was really critical in the decision making of why we would pick J1 given the opportunities that it had for us.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: You want Jenzabar One, you're moving to it, you're in the middle of the implementation. What is the response? Okay, so you announce this internally, right? You go to stakeholders and say, "We're changing. Everybody, congratulations, you're part of the change." People go, "No, you can't change my job, you can't change my tools." That's a natural response. System agnostic - you know, change is just - you could change my shirt and then I wouldn't like it. You know, some people are adverse to it. Some people are early adopters, right? They're getting right in. They're going to take over. How do you move people to where you need them to be? Moving to a new system.

Mike Copening: Sure. I think for a lot of folks, they were cognizant of the challenges they had. So there was a lot of buy-in to looking at new opportunities and new ways to improve things. Not to say that the old way isn't tried and true. There's enough experience and familiarity where it works. Why change it? And I think for most folks, just seeing the benefit of addressing some of the core challenges that we've had, just being kind of a very different institution - it's kind of innately had a lot of buy-in from folks. 

And most folks in our institution are very enthusiastic about being a part of the process, having a seat at the table to be the implementer of a system and the extra knowledge and expertise that they'll have. You know, going through the implementation, they're going to be that much better prepared when we go live, as opposed to some of the other end users. Maybe they weren't on the project team or doing things, but I think for those folks, there's just an abrupt interest and desire to jump right in. 

But the managing of the change, probably the hardest part, I think, with any project that we've done historically in the past and otherwise is getting folks to pay attention sooner rather than later.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: That is such a good point. The tendency is, it's not live yet, so why do I really need to look at it?

Mike Copening: And the danger becomes well, if you don't look at it now, you're gonna have a very rough go-live experience.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Later they're gonna go, "Why isn't it doing this?" Well, we actually - it does do that. And we talked about it, you know, a long time ago, and you weren't listening. I mean, that is pretty common.

Mike Copening: Yeah, with these. Yeah, it's odd and everyone's busy. We're a smaller institution, a lot of hats are being worn by different people.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Mike, when you get to go to the homegrown system and do this power off, is that going to feel good when you finally can move to something that's got eyes on the future?

Mike Copening: Yeah, I think so. There's a, you know, security - none of us that build our own things, I think can stand back and say we're experts in security and all these types of things. So it's good to be able to offload some of the expertise on some of those aspects of a system where, you know, who knows how the hacker is going to try and hit you or attack you. And it's good to have a team that has developed a tool and be able to stand behind it and have that level of expertise that maybe your internal team doesn't have.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: I want you to talk about balance for me a little bit. First of all, this is a massive implementation for any university to take on college or university. That's one. Okay, now you brought up another - I got to manage my cybersecurity attacks. I've got to protect all the student data. I've got GLBA. I've got GDPR. I've got state cybersecurity regulations. I've got AI. I mean, your job is getting harder, not easier. How do you balance?

Mike Copening: Yeah, that's a good question. You know, I was hoping you can give me a direct answer. Yeah, we're still figuring all that stuff out because we're only expert in certain areas that we're expert in. And that's where I think assembling a good team - I've got good guys on my IT staff that contribute a lot and different expertises and perspectives. And we just kind of all lean on each other to fill the gaps in the areas where we're not as expert, but they are. So I look very much at our IT department as a collaborative. It's a team effort. No one's an expert in everything. It's impossible to be an expert in everything. So having and valuing everyone's contributions is core to that. But it is also great to have vendors help stand behind you and be on top of things and point things out where otherwise you might have a blind spot and miss it.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: So that's a fact. That's a fact. When we can push some of the responsibility under the vendor, especially as a technology company does take a little bit of the pressure off you because you have partners. And you can talk to those partners and say, is the system doing this? All right, I needed the system to do that. Jenzabar One and I know the customer service here is at a high level because I've interacted with so many of the Jenzabar folks and they're just on it with their clients. What are some of the successes you've seen so far as you go through this process and how much time do you spend iterating with Jenzabar employees to get to where you want to go?

Mike Copening: Sure. I mean, since we're still in the middle of implementation, we've implemented the admissions component. So we've had some tech support back and forth assistance on that front. But in general, just with the implementation team, it's great to have attentive project managers. It's great to have consultants who are very expert in their areas that you can go to and run through all your questions and scenarios. And we have a ton of unique caveats and other things that we get to try and figure out that I don't know if we've hit Jenzabar with anything that's truly unique that they have never seen before, but knowing just kind of our small size, but complex structure and some of the things we do - I wouldn't be surprised if we get something new that Jenzabar hasn't seen. And we're just very thankful that there's that attentiveness and that quick response and the level of expertise that's involved in the implementation process that helps us not go astray. So far, anything we've been able to throw at Jenzabar, we haven't tripped them up yet.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Nailed it. So hopefully that will continue to be the case.

Mike Copening: That's right. And we're thankful for - you know, sometimes it's not bad to trip up.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: It wouldn't be bad to trip up Jenzabar because then they're fixing you, but for all the other universities that they work with - that's how the product iterates. That's how the product gets better. I think for Jenzabar, I think they want to be tripped up a little bit. They want the complexity of systems and your users. I'm sure with multi-campuses, you have people that go well, our campus we need this and then the other one's going. So those complexities, I think add to the fluidness of the system to be able to serve multiple universities and multiple colleges. 

But I want to ask you because it's funny, we had a CTO on our last episode, and he was talking about how the role of a CTO is changing from one of, "I've identified technology, and we're going to ram it in and, you know, we're going to code and the matrix is happening all around us" to "I'm almost like a politician now. I've got to collaborate with multiple departments. I've got to bring people along, tell the story of technology." And you go tell the story of technology - what we are in that world now, how is technology going to help me do my job better? How is Jenzabar One going to help me do my job better? Is that true? Are you spending a lot of your time politicking, for lack of a better way to say it?

Mike Copening: Yeah, I'm newer in my title, but I've been with the seminary for a long time, so I've kind of been in the trenches as well as now transitioning to "hey, how do we make the decisions that need to take place" and there is definitely a lot more explanation necessary and trying to explain how this thing's going to improve the life of all the end users and the leadership in this place. So it is definitely more and more of a - I see it transitioning from a pure implementation, pure in the trenches type of spot to, how do we convince everyone to get on board with these new initiatives and these new processes and implement the new systems.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: How do you convince everybody to get on? No, I won't ask you that one. It's a secret. You know, because everybody's different. This is what makes change management so fascinating, is you have to pull people along, you have to open up their minds. Some people are technology-averse. We're living in a world with artificial intelligence right now dominating our lives and some people are going "what's artificial intelligence? How do I even use it?" Wait a minute - use Google Maps? You just used it the other day. How is AI affecting your world right now?

Mike Copening: You know, I don't know if I can speak a ton to AI. But I know there are concerns obviously in the academic sense of, you know, are people gonna plagiarize papers or generate content that's not truly their own? How are you gonna be able to distinguish that stuff? It's more than just the plagiarism check sites where you upload the PDF and see has this been written before. And where it's - I'm sure the AI will - it's going to be an interesting battle to see how we can get ahead of the AI and spot the triggers and the flags that say yes, this is AI, not human content. How we do that as a society, I have no idea, but it's got to be figured out soon. It's gonna be a challenge for higher ed for sure.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: What's next for you? So you're in the middle of the implementation process for Jenzabar One. What's coming next? What's the timeline look like for you to get to where you - where is it that you want to end up?

Mike Copening: Sure, there's just lots of tech that has kind of become stale, need to reevaluate and refresh it. You look at like unified communications with phone systems and stuff - going into the pandemic, we thankfully had gotten to a full VoIP over the internet, you know, anywhere you are type of phone system. That, you know, reduced the strain of someone being stuck on a campus in the midst of a pandemic. They could field calls anywhere and everywhere. But even now we see more and more people, instant messaging being widely adopted and other, just the Zoom meeting experience, so to speak. So how does unified communications with your traditional phones fit into all that? That's probably the next immediate step coming up for us at least.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Well, I love this conversation because change management, implementations, you're talking about hard work. You're talking about changing the trajectory of the institution. And we know enrollment is a challenge. Enrollment is a challenge. Retention is a challenge. For higher education, there's a question about value of degrees, specifically for niche programs. You know, enrollment is that main challenge. Is that something always on your mind and the minds of everybody that's working at your institution and say, okay, we - where are the students coming from? How do we personalize this for them?

Mike Copening: Yeah. And we have students from all over the world. I think in one of our reports we were just doing in a test environment in our Jenzabar implementation, I think we had 48 states represented in our student body for that given term.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Amazing.

Mike Copening: It's not uncommon for us to have people all over the world coming to us for theological education. So trying to figure out how to meet and greet and be attractive to those students, given our kind of unique space within theological education on the reformed theological side. That's, you know, we're more than just, you know, one market, we're trying to be kind of everywhere and attract everyone. So yeah, that's definitely at the forefront of our admissions folks. And I know they weigh, you know, what conferences do we go to? What schools do we go to? You know, what are the best ways to bring people in? How important is our website in attracting the students and getting them the information they need? So we definitely have a very wide range to reach students for us.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Anything else you want to say about Reformed Theological Seminary today? Open mic.

Mike Copening: You know, I just think God's blessed us. We've had great enrollment numbers. I know some schools have had struggles through the pandemic and coming out of the pandemic. Our credits have been kind of record high, our enrollments have been record high. You know, it's God's blessing and provision on us that we've come through the pandemic in a very healthy state. And I know it's a lot of great people on our team to help do that. And we have a lot of great students and faculty who are believing in our mission. And we're continuing to welcome those who would come to us and seek their theological degree so they can follow their callings in ministry.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: I love it. Well, you need a good CTO to continue to grow. That's what I know. Did I just rhyme all of that? Ladies and gentlemen, my guest today - here he is. He's Mike Copening. He is CTO at Reformed Theological Seminary. Mike, did you have a good time on the podcast today?

Mike Copening: Very good. New experience for me.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: There you go. Ladies and gentlemen, with that you've just had EdUp.