I N S I D E T H E M I N D S

Improving IT
Performance
Leading CTOs and CIOs on Balancing Maintenance
and Innovation, Identifying Cost Reductions,
and Exploring New Solutions
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 Leading and Aligning
IT Innovations in
Higher Education

Thomas Skill
Associate Provost and Chief Information Officer
University of Dayton
 Inside the Minds – Published by Aspatore Books

Introduction and Background

I am the associate provost for learning innovations and technology and

chief information officer at the University of Dayton. Because I came from
the academic side of things, I am part of a new breed of CIO: I am not the
guy with the management information systems (MIS) degree—I am the guy
with the social science degree. My Ph.D. is in mass communication.

As CIO, I think the strength of my perspective is a key focus on how users

within the core mission of the institution need IT to respond. However, I
did come into this position as a seasoned worker in IT. I have been
associated with IT for my entire professional life, not so much as an IT
person, but as a graduate student, a faculty member, and as a strategist for
the university’s IT initiatives.

When I came on board at Dayton and looked at what we had to do, I

recognized that we had to take a very mature IT organization and put it on
the table, reorganize it, and get it aligned—not around the way that IT
people organize the world, but around the way that the institution of higher
education needs IT to operate.

IT at the University

In discussing IT, it is very important that we distinguish its role in higher

education because as I look at our peers in other industries, higher
education has emerged as a different kind of animal—we are typically wide-
open enterprises. What we are also seeing now at the university is intense
demand for robust availability of core IT services, twenty-four hours a day,
seven days a week, in support of teaching and scholarship. The basis of that
shift is that most universities have come to view the role of students and
faculty as working anytime, anywhere, around the world. With that kind of
an expectation, and also with an increasing dependence on IT resources to
achieve the teaching, research, and service missions that are typical of most
institutions, the IT availability question has become incredibly central as a
performance indicator.

Two other major factors that have emerged along with robust availability
are security and disaster readiness. Because there have been so many
 Leading and Aligning IT Innovations in Higher Education – by Thomas Skill

instances where institutions of higher education have been subject to

various kinds of data breaches and both natural and manmade disasters, the
availability question has become more critical. How you secure your IT
assets and how you ensure business continuity in the event of some kind of
disaster have become key requirements.

The big challenge is that I do not believe that the resources have yet been
identified to fully address a robust security and disaster readiness system
across the board. Obviously, those institutions that have experienced major
data breaches or a major disaster of some type have been shocked into
providing those resources; however, from the perspective of a CIO at an
institution that has had neither, I know that we are working very, very
vigorously on those issues, but we have not as yet been able to identify the
full range of resources necessary to achieve those objectives.

Improving IT Performance: Reorganization and Realignment

Improving performance has pretty much been the focus of my tenure in the
IT leadership role. My first goal was to look at a mature IT organization
that had been in place with similar roles and responsibilities for probably
fifteen or twenty years. Our management team began with a full-scale
reorganization, which was difficult and painful in many ways because it
involved tearing apart an established organization, rebuilding it from the
ground up, and moving many things around in the process.

We also merged the core of IT—the administrative systems, networking

folks, and telecom people—with all the academic IT people—everyone
from developers of online courses to facilitators of technology used in the
classrooms to the people who actually work with and support students in
their use of their own technology. In other words, we brought together a
young organization, which was academic IT, and merged it with a mature
organization, which was traditional IT, and then we realigned the entire
organization so that it was much more responsive. Our critical success
factor was to align our IT systems, processes, and people with the core
mission of the university.

Along with the reorganization came a realignment of budgets and a

realignment of the way that we allocated both authority and responsibility
 Inside the Minds – Published by Aspatore Books

for various functions. If I had to identify the one thing that has happened in
the past five years that has improved our performance, it was our
organizational realignment.

As we reorganized and refocused ourselves, we began to evolve a strategic

vision where IT was connected to the mission of the institution: it was no
longer just about IT being the telephone guys and the cable guys and the
storage guys. Then we ultimately put into play a whole set of accountability
factors for the way our university customers were going to look at us. The
final piece—and I believe this has been our most successful—is that over
the last five years we got the right leadership into the right roles in the
organization, and those people have begun to redevelop and coach current
staff, as well as bring in new staff, and build the organization outward with
a customer-centric view of the world.

Top Performance Challenges

Among our top five performance challenges, number one is security,

meaning securing our information assets from external threats as well as
internal problems. This is a difficult challenge because of the openness that
characterizes higher education. We must constantly balance security with
flexibility.

The second challenging area is in the renewal and replacement cost of

infrastructure. The question we face is how do we sustain and improve a
multimillion dollar infrastructure that we have built over many years? While
many technologies have dropped in price, our experience has been that the
cost to renew and replace key network and data center hardware does not
get cheaper. It is difficult because you are not always necessarily spending
money on making something behave differently; you are mostly sustaining
an existing service, and it is hard to fully base-fund the appropriate level of
resources for those needs.

The third top challenge is the desire to add productive enhancements to our
IT systems. For example, many institutions are struggling with how they
can fund a robust wireless infrastructure. Everybody is going wireless now,
but the problem is that as you get to a certain point of what might be
considered the saturation of wireless, you then have the same trouble you
 Leading and Aligning IT Innovations in Higher Education – by Thomas Skill

have with any kind of system: you have to be able to manage it effectively
and optimize that system while controlling your costs, and how do you
grow and add enhancements in a budget environment that is always limited?

The fourth performance challenge is disaster readiness and preparedness

and business continuity. The cost of building and investing in something
that we may never need is substantial, and it is hard to say that I am going
to take dollars that I need for something right now, something that is
current and that people could really see the benefit of, and put those dollars
into a disaster readiness investment that I may never use. However, the one
time you use that system, it will have paid for itself many times over.

The fifth and final issue is aging facilities. We have a data center that was
built in the mid-1970s, and it is well past its best days. We are now in the
process of planning to build a brand new data center that would allow us to
have uptime during the most difficult circumstances of power loss and
other kinds of disasters. The cost of actually building and moving to a new
data center is phenomenally expensive if you want to have one that is
second- or third-tier in terms of its sustainable capacity.

Those are five of the biggest challenges to IT performance, and if I were to

add a number six, it would be finding and keeping the best talent; that is
obviously a challenge that everybody has on this list.

Strategies for Dealing with Challenges

In terms of security challenges, we are trying to wrap everything around a

vision of how we can leverage our current resources to get us disaster
preparedness and robust security, and tie that into existing resources. We
have been able to leverage a good part of that.

For example, we are in the process of implementing a new enterprise

resource planning (ERP) system; we are implementing the SunGard Banner
system, which will allow us to consolidate four different systems that we
currently use to support administrative computing: our student system,
human resources/payroll, our financial system, and even our research
contracts and grants, as well as our data warehouses that support all those
systems. When we decided to build the ERP system and allocated resources
 Inside the Minds – Published by Aspatore Books

to do it, we planned at the same time to put into play a disaster recovery
strategy around those systems. When we began the budgeting, we said that
we would not buy just one new computer system to host—we would buy
two and locate them in different places so that we could have one back the
other up, so if we have a disaster, we can move to the other system. In
some ways, then, we are trying to leverage existing priorities and back into
things like disaster preparedness and security.

The other issue in security is that as we bring up this new ERP system, we
are placing a major emphasis on making sure we have all the change
management and security protocols and policies in place so that we do not
have to go back and put that in later at a cost to us. We are trying to wrap
those costs together.

What we are trying to do with our renewal and replacement (R&R) budget
is explore other revenue streams that might help us fund some of the things
we cannot get from traditional university funding sources. We are looking at
what kinds of enhancements we can offer as attractive options that students
might like to consider. Would they consider an attractive cell phone offer if
we were to provide it and if we could pair that cell phone with special kinds
of university services like emergency notification? For instance, if as a
student I could set my cell phone while I am walking home at night alone,
so that if I do not check in at a certain point, it will ring back and notify
campus security—would that be valuable to me? Those kinds of
enhancements might make that cell phone worth buying through us, and we
would make some money on it.

Also, since we have so many residential students, our cable television

infrastructure might allow us to offer premium channels and other kinds of
services. We are looking at whether there would be a market that would not
only pay for the system but also serve as a revenue stream. Those are some
of the ways we are trying to find additional revenue to help us meet some
of our performance challenges.

The Influence of Users on Performance

Our users are our customers, and in many ways, the feedback we get from
them is precious and most important. Our reputation as a high-performing
 Leading and Aligning IT Innovations in Higher Education – by Thomas Skill

organization is built on the words they share both publicly and privately
about us. So we try to stay in constant conversation with our users.

We frequently try to help them understand how our systems can support
and enhance their work. We also frequently help them resolve problems
that are either self-imposed or externally imposed on them.

Customer service surveys are a standard method of data capture—and the

ability to quantify our performance based on these surveys is very effective.
However, we probably get our most valuable insight from customer e-mails—
both good and bad—where the details of their experiences are well articulated.

Relationship with Other Business Units

Most organizations typically experience this: you will get a business unit that
will come to you and say that because you did not do this or because you
did do this, you have negatively affected the work of my business unit.
Obviously, we are hypersensitive about the extent to which our operations
touch every other operation on campus.

What we try to do in that regard is minimize down time. One of the things
we have to do is plan for most of our major system upgrades and changes
to occur during off hours. That is one way of optimizing the university’s
business, but it makes it difficult for us because it puts an extra burden on
our IT staff to work weekends and holidays and other kinds of odd hours
to keep our systems current and running. We are sensitive to the fact that
our role at this institution is to enable others to do their work as efficiently
and as productively as possible. We are sensitive to the fact that we really
need to be bending to them, and we do that in a way that hopefully does
not overextend our costs.

This is another piece that is a big difference between higher education and
other businesses. We are looked upon as providing services and support so
that we can further enhance the work of others, and we have to spend a
tremendous amount of time setting limits on that because we could spend a
good deal of money providing all kinds of enhancements to the point of
putting the university into the red. We produce a positive budget every year,
but at the same time, we try to channel our resources in a way that
 Inside the Minds – Published by Aspatore Books

optimizes other people’s work, which is an interesting balance because it is

not as though we are trying to return money to the central coffers.

Our goal is to use everything we have to maximize the performance of

others on campus so they can meet their mission. I don’t think that most
other businesses have quite the same model: they are much more driven by
a revenue model and a cost-containment model. They are not about adding
many more customer services unless there is a revenue element to it. We
add services for our students and faculty as a strategy to strengthen the
university’s reputation.

Best Practices for New IT Solutions: Communication and Collaboration

As a higher education organization, I think we all view ourselves as constant

learners, and that means paying attention to the literature in IT, particularly
in terms of the new innovations, and literature from across the Internet, as
well as within the disciplines of the various academic programs. We also
believe it means participating actively in regional and national organizations
that bring together people with common interests, common challenges, and
the shared desire to explore innovation.

EDUCAUSE is the higher education organization that is most focused on

supporting the initiatives in IT, and they sponsor an array of conferences,
including an annual national conference that covers all areas of IT, a
conference that focuses on learning innovations, and other conferences that
focus on almost every other aspect of IT. Pushing our people and
rewarding them is important for us to be able to stay connected. Also, we
participate regularly in what we consider to be constituent groups—
listservs, blogs, and things of that nature—that help us stay abreast of what
is going on. We associate closely with many of our suppliers, vendors, and
manufacturers. We try to tap them regularly about what is happening in
their industries and what innovations are on the horizon.

Having our people collaborate with institutions that have similar

characteristics is great, and I believe that is one of the big differences
between higher education and other industries: we can easily collaborate
with people who are very likely our competitors in certain ways, and we do
it easily, without that sense of breaking the code of confidentiality for the
 Leading and Aligning IT Innovations in Higher Education – by Thomas Skill

organization. At times we are careful—when we think we are working on a

new innovation and we do not have it ready to release yet, we do not want
to spill the beans—but in many cases we are really open once we have done
something or are in the process of doing something that we do not consider
a market differentiator.

Higher education people tell everything. We even share our internal

documents with other IT organizations. For example, there are about forty
independent higher education institutions in Ohio of which Dayton is the
largest. As a CIO, I am in frequent contact with these other schools. I get
information from them all the time; I am always pushing them information,
and they are pushing me things in return. That they are smaller than I am
does not mean they do not have better ideas. In fact, in many ways I take
advantage of their smallness and their ability to move a bit more quickly in
some areas. They may not have the same level of resources that we have,
but that also means that it takes me a little longer to turn our ship around.

There are some real advantages to collaboration, but the key is that our best
practices for new innovation come both from paying attention to what is
out there on the horizon and also from recognizing what best fits with our
organization’s mission and culture. Innovation tied to the realization that it
matches the institution’s culture and capacity for change is a key piece that
my directors and I are always balancing.

Innovations at Dayton

We have been doing a number of innovative things at our university. For

example, we are predominantly a residential campus of about 10,000
students, but we own about 400 houses surrounding our campus in the city
of Dayton, so we have about twenty blocks of houses. In 1999 and 2000,
we wired all those houses with fiber optics, and we were able to provide
them with Internet, cable TV, and telephone services, just as if those
students were in an on-campus building. It was something that was unheard
of back then, and it set the tone that we were serious about making sure our
students were connected.

At the same time, we had a requirement that all our students had to have a
notebook computer, and as we moved into the 2003-2005 era, we made
 Inside the Minds – Published by Aspatore Books

substantial investments in deploying wireless networks so that students could

connect essentially anywhere, anytime. With wireless, your network is never
perfect, but ours was in more places than most people had, and we went
from being ranked by Yahoo as a “most wired” campus to being ranked by
Intel as one of the most unwired campuses for having wireless deployment.

Then, tied to that, we had many initiatives that focused on our institutional
mission, which is basically about integrating learning and living within a
community setting. In that sense, technology has to be not just around the
core campus; it has to support what you are doing in all your student living
areas. Our assumption in installing wireless in our student housing was that
learning is equally important away from the classroom as in the classroom.
If you are able to support learning anywhere, it will take place, and we
consider that success. It helped us in how we were externally viewed by our
peers and by others who saw what we were doing, and it helped us on-
campus as well, because our reputation as a forward-thinking IT operation
began to develop and helped us become an even better organization.

The Role of the CIO

As CIO, I would call myself a boundary spanner. I am the person who is in

the intersections of all the conversations. I am there with the highly
technical people who deal with the day-to-day problems; I am there with
the senior leadership who are grappling with vision, mission, and budget;
and I am also there with the key people who actually deliver on the mission:
the faculty who teach and the deans who lead the faculty.

My role is to try to understand what everybody is saying about their needs

and desires, and to then reinterpret that going both ways. I need to explain
to the technical people the way that vision and mission and budget all
intersect at what IT needs to do, and I also need to take the complex IT
verbiage and put it into terms that make sense to our leadership, and to the
deans and faculty. Frequently what I end up doing is trying to translate for
both sides while at the same time trying to inject some kind of
understanding or context so that everyone will see that we are all on the
same side, and we are trying to achieve similar kinds of goals. IT may have
some good strategies to accomplish what the other side needs, and,
likewise, the faculty and the deans and others have some good ideas about
 Leading and Aligning IT Innovations in Higher Education – by Thomas Skill

what they would like to see IT produce. I am, as I said, the boundary
spanner. I need to be able to walk and talk in all those different contexts
and help everybody understand so that we do not end up in unnecessary
misunderstandings or disagreements.

Factors in Success

The reorganization of our IT operation was an enormous message to the

campus community about how serious we were about becoming a good and
productive organization. It was symbolic as well as real, and the rest of our
colleagues, seeing us take this significant change action, helped us set the
tone for where we were going. Then we tied to that the fact that we had to
show performance. At the same time we were focusing on the key things
we had to get at, which had much to do with the performance of our
overall network, the performance of our storage and server infrastructure,
and the performance of our technology support staff, help desk, and other
technical resources.

Finally, the last factor in our success was our ability to connect with
students in ways that allowed them to recognize that we were a responsive
organization and that we saw them as customers as much as we saw the
faculty as customers.

Measuring Success

We were able to measure our success in connecting with students and

faculty; some of the measures were soft and ad hoc—we looked at the
reduced level of complaints and things like that—but we also took the pulse
of the campus through several surveys and got some feedback as to how we
were doing, where we were strong, and where we needed to improve.
Those measures definitely helped us show our changes were substantial.

The other way we measured success was in the extent to which our
colleagues outside the university saw the work we were doing as innovative
and important. Our participation at conferences—where we presented
competitive papers and panels on the ways we have developed new
technologies and new innovations, as well as the way that we reorganized
ourselves—became a major focus for us.
 Inside the Minds – Published by Aspatore Books

We also focused on certain things that were measured and rated. At one
point, Yahoo Magazine ranked institutions of higher education based on
which were the most wired, a ranking that was not based purely on the
number of wired outlets, but had much to do with services and other IT
elements. We managed to become recognized nationally; we were in the top
twenty-five “most wired” universities for several years, and those rankings
helped us.

Room for Improvement

There is absolutely room for improvement in our operation. Oddly enough,

we need to improve the documentation around our IT policies and
procedures. We need to be better about articulating those policies and
getting them reviewed and having folks participate and actually help us
meet our policies.

Right now, we are in that good-to-great conundrum. We are good, and it is

hard to get to great because we do not have a crisis to motivate us. Going
to great means we have to be more consistent in the quality of what we do,
and to get there, we have to be better about developing and implementing
policies, procedures, and documentation so that we can ensure greater
levels of quality.

We are looking closely at the Information Technology Infrastructure

Library (ITIL) approach to developing improvements and quality assurance,
but building that in is a difficult thing to do. It hard to implement processes
like ITIL when you have a culture of people you have trained around the
“customer first, customer first” mantra, where they want to race to bring
solutions to the table and don’t always consider a disciplined policy or
procedure-driven approach to things. We are trying to balance speed and
customer service against getting to a quality control point where we know
we will be able to sustain quality. Those are the two areas that I think we are
struggling with the most.

The other issues are always financial. We always need more money for R&R
and things of that nature, but the elements that we have more control over
are policies, procedures, documentation, and staff development.
 Leading and Aligning IT Innovations in Higher Education – by Thomas Skill

Upcoming Performance Goals

In the next year, we will hit the midpoint of our ERP implementation,
which is a thirty-six month project. If everything continues to go the way it
is currently, in another two-and-a-half years we will celebrate a successful
implementation. We are investing $7 million in the system, which is our
largest single IT investment since 2000, so it is obviously a major risk factor
for us. What I am spending my time doing right now is going around the
university to the various units and explaining to them what we are doing in
replacing all of our major IT systems with a single central core system. Part
of my goal is to explain to them both the struggles we will face and the
benefits we hope to achieve—what we gain with this new system and how
it will provide them with greater services. Once they get accustomed to the
new system, they will be more productive and more efficient. It will give
them information in the ways that they need it and on their terms, which
they historically have not had.

I think that anytime you move to an ERP system, the opportunity to talk
to and point to performance is always there. The risk is the horror stories
you hear, about other institutions that have not been successful in
implementing an ERP system in a timely way. I face those questions
constantly because we have many people who came to our university
from other places where they had an implementation that did not go so
well, and I spend time reassuring them that we believe we have done all
the right things in terms of planning and support of the people involved.
One of my biggest messages is that this is not an IT project. This is a
university project that is being led by the business unit people, and IT is
the enabler for those people. We are not making all of the decisions; the
decisions on how the system goes forward are being made by the business
units and the faculty.

Thomas Skill is associate provost and chief information officer at the University of
Dayton. He joined the provost’s office in 1997. His role in the provost’s office has been to
develop and lead the strategy for integrating technology-enhanced learning across the
university. This strategic initiative strives to enrich teaching and learning within and
beyond the classroom through innovative applications of technology.
 Inside the Minds – Published by Aspatore Books

Mr. Skill has more than twenty-five years of computing and communications technology
experience in higher education. He has been on the faculty at the University of Dayton
since 1984 and currently holds the rank of professor in the department of communication.

Prior to his current position, Mr. Skill served three years as associate provost for
educational innovation and technology, three years as assistant provost for academic
technology, and four years as chair of the department of communication, the largest
undergraduate academic program at the university.

Mr. Skill also has served as director of graduate studies in communication for seven years,
interim dean of the graduate school for two years, and lead researcher in the School of
Business Administration’s Information Systems Laboratory from 1986 to 1993.

Mr. Skill earned a Ph.D. at the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1984.

Dedication: To the UD IT Directors Council: Much of what I share in this chapter I

have learned from our conversations, and I am grateful for your support.
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