858: LIVE From Ellucian Live 2024 - with Rupa Saran⁠, CIO, ⁠Coast Community College Distric⁠t, ⁠Anne Pacionne⁠, CIO, ⁠St. John's University⁠, & ⁠Emily Gordon⁠, Director Customer Success, ⁠Ellucian

Joe Sallustio: Welcome back, everybody. It's your time to up on the EdUp Experience podcast where we make education your business. Still podcasting strong. I've had just a grande double shot of espresso coffee. So my mouth is moving. The record button is on. We've got three amazing guests. I swear I've had three or more guests, I feel like, on every episode, which makes it very interesting and fun. But it makes the intros long. But these intros are particularly important.

Where are we? Well, of course, we're at Ellucian. Thank you for asking. We're at Ellucian Live here in San Antonio, Texas for the third straight year of experience, podcasting with trailblazing leaders in and around higher education. As I said, I have three with me. One returning guest. Let's get her in first. She is Rupa Saran. She is CIO at Coast Community College District. Don't mess that up. How are you, Rupa?

Rupa Saran: I'm doing well.

Joe Sallustio: Back for year two. We didn't get you the first year, but we got year two and now you're three, right?

Rupa Saran: Yes, yes. And things are still going good. So far, eLive is really great. So having a wonderful time.

Joe Sallustio: Good. Good to be here. All right. We're going to talk more. We're going to get our second guest in here, a fellow Italian. Ladies and gentlemen, she is Ann, right? Ann Pacionne, CIO at St. John's University. I couldn't read my own writing. Was it A-N-N-E or A-N-A? We'll get it. Don't do Annie. Ann. Got it. How are you?

Ann Pacionne: I'm good.

Joe Sallustio: And how are things so far?

Ann Pacionne: Good. Happy to join my colleague and friend, Rupa, bringing around the women power here.

Joe Sallustio: There is a lot of women power around me in this moment. So I'm just going to ask one question and get off the microphone. And my third guest. Here she is, ladies and gentlemen, Emily Gordon. She's the director of the Ellucian Collaboration Hub. Emily.

Emily Gordon: Hello. What's up?

Joe Sallustio: Emily jumped in last minute. No prep on the mic. Are you ready? No pressure. One thing I didn't mention to you all, Rupa, you may know this, is that I do use in-episode sound effects. That's a fact. That's a fact. So those will go off in and around you when we start talking.

But let's first just level set for the audience as we're here. Rupa, start us off. Tell us about the community college district. Where are you? What do you do? How do you do it? And then we'll go to St. John's.

Rupa Saran: As you said, I'm with Coast Community College District and we're located in beautiful sunny Southern California. We're comprised of three colleges, Orange Coast College, Golden West College, and Coastline College. We have about, headcount about 50,000 students.

Joe Sallustio: Amazing! It's a lot.

Rupa Saran: Yeah, it is, but it's really great and I love our district. I love what I do for our three colleges and bringing the technology for our students in the classroom is just my passion.

Joe Sallustio: We're going to talk in a minute, but it has been a heck of a year since we last spoke last year. 2023 with AI and I mean, this job of a CIO is rapidly changing. So what a difference a year makes like they say that right. And it's true, isn't it?

Rupa Saran: It is. And there's a lot of talk about AI. Last year, it was more of an "oh my gosh, we don't want to do anything with AI. Yikes!" But now, even our faculty members, they're talking about it, they're taking it into their senate and say, okay, what can we do? Let's learn. The awareness is coming. So I think that's huge progress there.

Joe Sallustio: All right, Ann, tell us about St. John's University for someone that doesn't know where St. John's University is and what you do.

Ann Pacionne: Well, St. John's is in New York City, so the other end. You know, very busy, lively, as you expect. I'm the CIO there and we have 17,000 students. A lot of technology innovation, doing a lot. Like you said, AI just kind of came head on, trying to navigate that and try to see what the faculty want to do, see what our administrators want to do. So yeah, like you said, CIO, good or bad job.

Joe Sallustio: Tell us Emily about the Ellucian Collaboration Hub. What is that crazy business?

Emily Gordon: So I work for Ellucian, well, my title is Ellucian Collaboration Hub, the director of that. And I work specifically for the California Community Colleges, and I help them with their modernization efforts. And so I get to work with Rupa, and I get to work with other EAC members.

Joe Sallustio: And the EAC is?

Emily Gordon: The Executive Advisory Committee to Ellucian.

Joe Sallustio: And both of these ladies are around the EAC advising Ellucian on what best practices, what to see in the future, how our users, is that what it is?

Emily Gordon: Yes, I think all that and more.

Joe Sallustio: We're two coasts here, right? We share like what are you doing in California? What are you doing in New York? You know, what I like about this, the two of you right now, because we always talk about a lack of women in STEM, right? If you go back down to the pipeline in higher ed, there's a lack of women in STEM, a lot of money being invested to bring women up through STEM careers to female CIOs in the craziest time to be a CIO. What's it like to be, first of all, in technology leadership, but secondarily to deal with the problems of today which are evolving literally day by day?

Ann Pacionne: I mean, you just need to be strong, and have courage. Certainly, sometimes you'll be the only woman in the room. Sometimes there's other women around you. I think, you know, talking to the faculty, one of the deans came to me and said, do you understand your position and your importance? And so sometimes beyond what we're doing day to day, we also have to realize that our students are the future. And so how do we become examples for these young females coming up majoring in very technical majors? They may be few and far between, but then they see, hey there's a woman who's leading technology at the university that I go to. So, keeping that in mind and being able to give back in that way, which is different from the day to day job.

Rupa Saran: I mean, for me, being bold and just be you, right? And yes, people talk about women in technology, but for me, it's like when I'm in the room, I don't pay attention to male or female. It's I'm here because I'm competent, my skill sets.

Joe Sallustio: Yeah, you've got knowledge.

Rupa Saran: It doesn't matter. Exactly. But also, we want to promote women in technology. So one of the things actually I'm going to mention, Ellucian, is I in California Community Colleges, have an association called Chief Information Systems Officers Association. I'm the current president there now for our board and we conduct these certification programs for CTO certification programs and there is a scholarship that we're working with Ellucian for a few years now. So even this year we got two scholarships just for women in tech for this.

Joe Sallustio: Yeah, absolutely.

Rupa Saran: So thank you Ellucian. We have two women that are getting that and same thing even in our department. We have kind of, you know, again, leading woman technologists. We brought in a lot more. Ten years ago, what my department looked like and what it's looking like today. We have a lot more females. We got new developers and it's just great to see that and encourage them to just keep moving up and whatever mentorship I can give, I continue to do that.

Ann Pacionne: Yeah, I think it's, once you're capable once you have the courage, you're authentic. It doesn't matter, right? If you're a leader, you're a leader.

Rupa Saran: Exactly.

Ann Pacionne: And you have to have that presence and walk in and say, I'm the expert in the room and you're going to hear what I have to say and change that dialogue.

Emily Gordon: And I just think being around strong women like yourselves, you're aspiring, you don't even realize that you're mentoring me at the same time. And then I pass that down to any young women that are coming in IT as well. And I did that working in higher ed before I came to Ellucian.

Joe Sallustio: Did you work in an institution?

Emily Gordon: I did. I worked in two institutions. I worked at Stanford, and then I worked at University of California, Riverside.

Joe Sallustio: What did you do? Were you in the tech, or were you...

Emily Gordon: I was in the tech. So I oversaw all the customer-facing opportunities, help desk, endpoint, things like that. And so I got to train our students. Our students would come, and I had a student department, and so I utilized them and I mentored them. And fortunately, I was able to hire at least six women in IT to start their careers. So I'm really proud of that.

Rupa Saran: So actually, please, we just got out of the executive session with Sydney from Vanderbilt, just to give a quick shout out. This is we talking about kind of developing, right? A learning culture and learning organization. You start somewhere and you have your goals and aspirations and how do you get there and how do you know, propagate that.

Emily Gordon: Absolutely.

Joe Sallustio: You know, your jobs are not easy, as we said. You're dealing with a lot right now. You know, generative AI is on every, you know what, let me re-ask that, because I start down this path and I ask about the hard parts of the job. We know about those. We know that generative AI is disrupting lots of jobs. You have to put ethical considerations around it. You've got to build things into catalogs and policies and security. But there's also the other stuff that you were doing before that you still have to do. And so somebody goes, well, what do you do with generative AI? And you want to go, well, we're doing some things with that, but we're also doing the normal things like protecting data and making sure the website's not hacked and helping somebody turn on their computer when they can't figure out what's wrong. How do you balance all of the demands right now on your jobs?

Ann Pacionne: It's hard. I think at least for me, I carve it out. There has to be folks within your organization that worry about the new stuff and that there are folks that are worrying about, how do I support this other stuff, right? So someone who's like looking at AI and because AI has two pieces to it, right? It's okay, the scary stuff that everybody's worried about, then it's...

Joe Sallustio: Yikes!

Ann Pacionne: Yeah. But then it's the...

Joe Sallustio: Skynet, right? When you immediately go to Skynet.

Ann Pacionne: But it's not that way yet. If you don't look at what the innovation side is, you're going to be behind. So you have to sort of balance that. So you need to look at organizational layout, which is a huge part of it. How do you have part of your organization focused on the new stuff, the emerging technologies, the strategy, you can't lose sight of that, and then how do you kind of balance that with your operations end of it?

Rupa Saran: Yeah, and for us, the way I have it, the teams are structured. We have a team, a group that is the innovation piece, right? And then we have a sustainment, then we have a cybersecurity, then we have apps. So they all have their own responsibilities, but the innovation group, yes, we're not like, you know, private innovative group like that, but still for colleges, we do need that. So how do we bring in any kind of new apps? Because if you think about it, everything has some kind of AI component already. I mean, yes, it's exploding right now. And it's because we got so much compute power and we could actually do something with generative AI. But we already had this. It's been there, but it's exploding. So it's more of awareness and bringing people into what is happening. And then having that team that's going out and kind of trying to figure out how do we bring that in. That's how I'm balancing, but also attending all these things, talking to our colleagues.

Joe Sallustio: What are you doing? What are you doing? What are you doing? That's the collaboration hub piece, isn't it? Like, what are you doing? What are you doing? What are you doing? And how can we bridge the gap together?

Emily Gordon: Yes, exactly. Because if we can't innovate, if like a higher ed institution can't innovate, then where are you innovating? It's not happening. A corporation has more structure. You have to not lose that structure, although sometimes we feel like we are, but you have to have that because this is the green ground, right? And then you talk about the students coming in. It's a prime way of getting things from AI and solutions and coming up through the students out into the real world.

Joe Sallustio: You know what I find to be really fascinating about AI right now, because anybody who's, you take a general user who is exploring, right? Not building programs or in the beginning, I'm a faculty member, I'm a staff member. And somebody says, have you checked out Bard AI, have you checked out TurboLearn, have you checked out ChatGPT, have you used Claude yet, whatever. And you go, you know what, I'm gonna take this list of student data, I'm gonna stick it in Claude and ask it to summarize the data.

Rupa Saran: No, don't do that, don't do that.

Joe Sallustio: Right, but isn't that just something you lose sleep over, like I'm gonna take my company's 990, the audited financials, and it hasn't been released yet and stick it in a ChatGPT and ask it to summarize it for me.

Rupa Saran: That's where the awareness and the training has to happen, right? You cannot take your data and push it out there. But I think a lot of us are already thinking, rather than OpenAI, how do we build closed AI engines? Like for us, community college system, what can we do? It's only our own data, right? But even then -

Joe Sallustio: An LLM model that's proprietary to you, where you could search your own company's data and ask it, correct.

Rupa Saran: So those are the conversations taking place for us. Even here, yesterday, I think with Ellucian, I think I was talking with Mike Wolfe, I was asking, what do you have in the backend with AI? So every company is bringing some kind of a component with AI and I think unknowingly we're all using it already.

Ann Pacionne: Yeah, I mean this is where the CIO role, I mean let's be clear, we lose sleep over a lot of stuff.

Joe Sallustio: I bet you do. You seem very awake though, so it's coffee, right?

Ann Pacionne: Yeah, lots of coffee, you know, energy drinks, I don't know. But this is where the CIO role is changing, right? We can't be so focused on operations, like you said, we're responsible for it, but we have to be the visionaries, we have to be the strategists, we have to be thinking about that and figuring out how do we promote that in the institution. We have to be the ones to say, no, we need to invest and build this closed model because we want to promote the use of it, but we can't have this risk. So the job is very different. You know, like the CIO name is very old, but we're really these like technology officers, these transformational people.

Joe Sallustio: You make a good point. CIO is a very old term. When I think CIO, I think, okay, I'm stabilizing operations. I'm making data move the right way. You know, in the center on prem you know you're really talking about you know, tech, it's like a CTTO, Chief Technology and Transformation Officer, a CTTO or something.

Ann Pacionne: I like that name.

Rupa Saran: Can we, can we...

Joe Sallustio: We like that. We like that. Let's go with that. I may trademark it and charge you.

Ann Pacionne: I think that'll be okay. Yeah, I'm going to send this to my boss and be like, can I change my title?

Joe Sallustio: Come on now. I mean, but it is, you have to have, you know, if you think about a CIO of the past, it was how do I come in and make everything within my ecosystem work right? You still have to do that, but you have to have eyes on the future. Everybody's eyes have to be on the future.

Ann Pacionne: And it's hard to have your eyes look in different ways all the time. I mean, you have to have great people around you and great teams around you. But you both and all of the others that you work with and Ellucian works with has to support us.

Joe Sallustio: Yeah. And you have to experiment. You have to know what's coming. We have to know what's coming. We have to have the vision. We have to have the strategic plans. We have to make sure it's tied to what the institution is doing.

Rupa Saran: Yeah, just kind of always looking for. It's very much an external facing job as we sit here. It went from internal to external in a lot of ways in the last couple years. And I think this is where even our colleagues, CIOs, CTOs, a lot of us, like we are already on that page, like yeah, vision strategy is not about hands-on anything, but there's still some that have this like, I'm a technologist, I want to be hands-on, but that's not our job. Our job is to know the future, what is coming and how do we get there or how do we protect ourselves from that.

Ann Pacionne: And I think part of that, so Rupa and I are both on this journey, this is where Ellucian comes in, their new offerings going to SaaS. We don't want to be in the data center anymore. We have to take some of those big headaches and trust our vendors and move them there. And there's risk along that way, but that's what we need to do. The greatest risk is not taking the risk.

Joe Sallustio: And convincing other people within the institution to release some level of control that you have of, well, I have this or I know this process or I can't, if you move it over here, it changes this and it changes that and I can't do my job. It's like, well, your job is to serve the students in the first place, so let's get you out of the technology piece, right? We can't advance and move forward and take advantage of doing those things if we're stuck supporting the old legacy platforms.

Rupa Saran: And what's important for our institutions is incremental change, right? And this transformation for us, it has been happening, knowingly or unknowingly, but for me, I knew, it's my strategic plan. But yes, going to SaaS, any applications, forget about Ellucian, anything you get these days, everything is SaaS, subscription-based, and we recently went from data center to the cloud for all our servers in Azure now, right? So it's not just doing, but what is also important is making sure that you are sharing this with your constituent group, bringing their awareness, letting them know, hey, we have started the journey, this is where we're at, so that they're also, they know what is happening, rather than not knowing and making assumptions. So I think that's important for us to share too.

Ann Pacionne: Yeah, and I think like, we in IT are used to change, it's how we live. This is our challenge, particularly at St. John's, is the business units are not necessarily used to this level of change, or this level of difference that's coming at them right now. So...

Joe Sallustio: When you think St. John's, because I'm a Big East guy, I grew up in Syracuse, you think old, Catholic, traditional, probably have people that have been there for 45 years.

Ann Pacionne: 100%.

Joe Sallustio: And you go, okay, it's time to change. I'm not changing. I'm not going to put this in my class. You can't touch my stuff. Somebody had a great line, I'm going to quote them, is they're emotionally attached to their process.

Ann Pacionne: Yes.

Joe Sallustio: Somebody said that, I was like, that is the quote of the day. And with the community college system, it's a little bit different because you have a lot of adjunct faculty, have sometimes different student types, a little bit more agile in some ways, but it's these both types of institutions that need to succeed because I'm tired of hearing about closures in higher ed. We have to continue to change, repackage the value of what we do. And we need everybody to change along with us. We can't have half the people running one way and half wanting to stand still.

Ann Pacionne: It doesn't work. Well, standing still will put you out of business. I think in general, regardless of even the profile of institutions, we thought the brick walls were there. We're impermeable to change. We don't have to change. There's always a need for a brick and mortar classroom. That's how students are going to learn.

Joe Sallustio: Yeah. And that's not true.

Ann Pacionne: And what we have to realize, our students, they are digital natives. And this is their expectation.

Joe Sallustio: Three second swipes.

Ann Pacionne: Exactly. It's what they do in K through 12. They come to our institutions having grown up like that. They already have it. And if we are not providing, they're going to go somewhere else.

Joe Sallustio: Well, I know. I work in an institution myself. And I know some of the freshmen coming in, they have this expectation of AI tool sets. Like, I've got three tools I used in high school. I'm going to keep using them. Do you support these? Like the whole conversation has shifted around student expectations for technology. It's a crazy world that we live in right now. But fun. Maybe for anybody that's not a CIO, it's super fun. CIO, no, it's fun for CIOs too. But you guys have so much stress. What are others saying about the tough parts of the job right now, Emily, in the collaboration hub?

Emily Gordon: Well, I think that what we do is we look at outcomes. What outcomes are you trying to achieve? And then how can I support them to achieve those outcomes? And so maybe how you got there before is not how you're going to get there tomorrow. But we're going to get the same result. And so that's where we come in to really try to support the institutions is, you know, we might have to change, do a little bit of change management, but we're going to get there in the end and we're going to get there and we're going to get there achieving the outcomes that we set out to do.

Rupa Saran: You know, one thing I wanted to add, like Emily and Ann too, they have younger children, right? And they're growing up with this technology. Like you said, Joe, it's like swipe or whatever it is. And so at your household, you're seeing this. And we're in the institution, we must prepare for this.

Joe Sallustio: Now Rupa, when you looked at both the ladies here and you said they have young kids and you looked at me, do I look too old to have young kids? Is that why you didn't include me in that?

Rupa Saran: No, I do not. No, Joseph, I just didn't know.

Joe Sallustio: I just didn't... I have a nine-year-old and a six-year-old. So I'm also right there.

Rupa Saran: My apologies.

Joe Sallustio: We'll chat later about... I used to dye my hair and I don't anymore.

Ann Pacionne: I will say this though, because I'll make you feel better too. I'd say, one thing you talk about, so I have a son, is that's the other piece of it, for him to grow up to see that his mom, as a woman, could be in this position, to see a successful mother as well as a father. But I think that as these kids are growing up, they want to see that both parents can be successful.

Joe Sallustio: I love it. I love it. Anything you want to say about the collaboration hub that hasn't been said, Emily? Any plug?

Emily Gordon: Just that I am here and I'm here to serve our institutions and in any way which way that I can. I'm always looking for opportunities that maybe I haven't thought about. And so I'm always looking for feedback from the institutions. So if you have any, please give me some.

Joe Sallustio: Any last words, Rupa? And anything you want to say about your institution or Ellucian, your time here, what you expect, are you having fun, anything at all?

Rupa Saran: No, I think for our institution students are doing, you know we want more students to join us at Coast District. We really have three colleges with different unique programs. But as far as EAC, we really enjoy EAC because I feel that Ellucian's exec team do listen and then try to make those changes. And they do want, coming from Laura, right? She wants to hear it and she always says, she appreciates all our input. So happy to serve on that.

Joe Sallustio: That's Laura Ipsen, CEO of Ellucian, my buddy. Now this is the most fun part of the conference so far.

Rupa Saran: Yeah.

Joe Sallustio: Here's your 10 bucks and here's your 10 bucks.

Rupa Saran: It was 20.

Joe Sallustio: The price went up. Ladies and gentlemen, this has been another amazing episode here at Ellucian Live 2024 in San Antonio. You know what you have to... Well, I can't out you. I got to out you. I was gonna do my outro but I've got Rupa Saran and I have Emily Gordon with me. If you want to know what they do, you gotta listen to the entire episode so you hear the beginning. You know what you've done? You just ed-upped.