>> Hi, everybody, and welcome to Tech Happy Hour. My name is Mike Hofherr. I'm the Chief Information Officer and Vice President at the Ohio State University. Today, I am joined by Diane Dagefoerde, Deputy CIO. And we are gonna talk a little bit about the university IT strategy, so, Diane, welcome.


>> Thanks, glad to be here.
>> We're glad to have you, and I have no idea what we're drinking. So for the first time, it's all on you.
>> It's a mystery beverage.
>> It's a mystery beverage. So as we always do, we're gonna get up and go over to the bar, and we're gonna mix a drink.

And you could tell us a little bit about it.
>> Sounds great.
>> Awesome.
>> So there's a lot of things here, glasses, mixer, water, blender, ice. But you're on. Take us through it.
>> All right, today we're gonna make a frappe. So if you've traveled to Greece or elsewhere in the Mediterrean, you might have cooled off with a nice refreshing iced coffee frappe.


>> Awesome.
>> And since it's the middle of Winter, but today is 77 degrees, it feels like Summer, I thought we'd have a nice Summer drink.
>> I like it, let's get to it. Can I help?
>> Sure, you can help. So basically, what you do is you start with a little bit of Nescafe Cafe coffee.

Mixed with a little bit of water, and some sugar, how ever much sugar you like.
>> Okay.
>> And then you boat motor it.
>> It looks good.
>> And you basically turn it into a nice frothy thing.
>> Okay.
>> And then you pour that over ice into a glass.

You add milk to it, and there you go. That's your frappe.
>> Awesome.
>> That's how it works, all right?
>> I like it, so why did you choose this drink?
>> I chose this drink because I have the opportunity to enjoy it every Summer when I visit my husband's family in Cyprus.


>> Nice.
>> So I've got in here some water, some sugar, and some coffee. And now we're blending it into a nice, smooth frothy foam.
>> It looks really good. This is definitely the most involved. It's like whipped cream.
>> Yeah, that's the beauty of it. Pour that in and then you pour the milk kinda down the side.

Do not flatten the cream.
>> Okay.
>> All right, and straw is key.
>> Okay
>> And there you go, there's your frappe.
>> Wow, that's serious.
>> All right, cheers.
>> Cheers.
>> You gotta kinda mix it up and down, get the sugar in there.
>> It's like a coffee milkshake but lighter.

So we're here to talk about IT strategy, right? And we've talked a lot in the past about how difficult it is to create an IT strategy because of the changing nature of IT. When we started down this path, you and I had a lot of conversations about our last strategic plan and how many iterations it took and what was included in that.

And we decided that's not gonna work for the future. We need to create sort of the way you describe it is a flag on the horizon. Can you just start by giving us an overview of what that sort of university IT strategy now looks like, and what those flags are, and what that contains?


>> Sure, flag on the horizon is the best way to talk about the strategy. The difference between a strategy and a strategic plan, so a strategy is really about a direction. And the point of it being a flag on the horizon is, when IT staff, when leaders across the university have an IT investment decision that they need to make, they can go one of two directions, usually.

And the point of the IT strategy is to plant a direction, so that when you make the decision, you can tell, I'm going closer to the flag or I'm going away from the flag. That's the point of a strategy. So this strategy has three main components. The foundation is an improved technology experience for end users.

That's the whole point of doing this. How do we make technology at Ohio State a more seamless experience for the faculty staff, students and the university community when they come here? Around that foundation is the environment in which we operate. We have a graphic that represents the university IT strategy.

So in the middle is a circle that says improve technology experience. And then there's a ring of arrows around the outside that represent that environment in which we operate. Because there's always pressure to generate new revenue. There 's always pressure to decrease costs. There's always pressure and a need to demonstrate value, to make sure that every penny we invest in IT delivers some kind of demonstrable value to the university.

And culture of collaboration is extremely important here at Ohio State, with our hybrid central distributed IT environment. So that's the environment in which we work, and then there are seven investment areas. And those investment areas include mobile first, analytics, empowering teaching innovation, advanced reasearch, lean IT, effective risk management, and develop talent.

And the point of those seven investment areas, when we talk about central IT investments versus local IT investments, unit IT investments, what are the kinds of things that we should be bringing our pennies together to produce great results across the university? What are those things that we should be focusing on?

These are the areas that came to the surface through the strategic plan process.
>> It makes a lot of sense. And we've actually heard from some folks that have initiatives that align to those either seven areas or the bigger directional items. So you talked a little bit about the environment that we work in.

And I don't think it's at all unique to Ohio State, this distributed or hybrid IT model. And that's continuing to evolve. But can you talk a little bit about the collaborative effort among IT professionals and what got this process started and how we got to the final strategy?

I know there was many iterations of this. I saw many iterations of this. But in reality, not as many as I think we would've had if we would've written a strategic plan.
>> Right.
>> I think the last time we wrote a strategic plan, we had somewhere of 100 plus versions.


>> This one, we had five or six ideas that led us to this final picture. So just talk us through what that process was like.
>> And this process, as you remember, got started, if we rewind back to 2014. And we talked about how we're gonna do the strategic plan.

And we both agreed, no, no, no. We're not gonna kill ourselves and do that again. We took the existing group, IT Partnership Council at Ohio State, and we convene the sub group of that IT Partnership Council to focus on developing this common strategy that we could all agree to.

So we selected CIOs and IT directors across the university who represented the largest IT units. Brought everyone together, brought in a Gartner consultant who guided us through, basically, a strategic planning process. And then, fast forward it a little bit further, we talked about our service portfolios. What do we do that's in common with each other?

What are some things that units need to be able to do on their own? What are some things that really ought to be central? And we came up with this idea of core, common and unique. Sort of three buckets of ways to organize IT services, which has been really helpful as a way of thinking about IT.

And then from there, if you remember the pain gain days, we actually drew up the pain gain quadrant. It was the pain verticle axis and the gain horizontal axis.
>> Yep.
>> And the upper-right quadrant was high pain but high gain. So we took our portfoilos of different services, we mapped into that quadrant.

And we kind of stepped back and we said, all right, we've identified some real things that we wanna start working on together as an IT team.
>> High gain, low pain.
>> Right.
>> That's what we were striving for.
>> High gain, low pain. And then we had this moment where we all, as a group, said, but why are we doing this?

Are we doing this just to save money or are we doing this to make things better? Ideally you do both, but you don't have cost-cutting as your primary driver. And that's when we pivoted into this whole, let's put the user experience in the middle And let's talk about how these 7 investment areas that all match to the pain game quadrant.

Let's put out focus there because I think we'll make the biggest bank.
>> And I think, trying to describe this process in a few minutes on a podcast is difficult. I think it was a pretty robust process across the university, across IT leadership. And coming up with these seven investment areas weren't easy.

Why seven? I don't have a really good answer. I don't think you do either.
>> It was just seven that sort of bubbled up and we all sort of agreed on. Could there be eight, could there be nine? Sure, could there be five? Yeah it would've been a little tougher.

There's no magic dust there it's really just sort of I think when we were looking at that low-paying high-gain, what made the most sense. And I think the challenge with that is, is that we're gonna accomplish a lot of those low-paying high-gain things, and that means we have to move to another quadrant, which is higher-pain and lower-gain or high-pain and high-gain.

So we're heard a lot about the university IT strategic plan, time and change I firmly believe that our IT road map supports the university's strategic plan. Can you talk through sort of your view on how it does that or if it does that and, if so, what do you think that looks like?


>> So there are five pillars to the time and change plan, and I see strong ties between the university IT strategy and the five pillars of the university strategic plan. So if we take a look at teaching and learning, the first pillar, Ohio State being an exemplar of the best teaching and demonstrating leadership with innovative at-scale approaches to teaching and learning.

Well, the minute you put innovative and at-scale together with teaching and learning, technology is in play. And so if you go back to the seven investment areas, we have two that map to this first goal. One is empowering teaching innovation. And the other one is analytics. So if we think about this teaching and learning.

We have to constantly refine how we deliver education and understand how different populations of students learn and what kinds of help they need or what kinds of structure of materials they need to be able to learn and be able to demonstrate that learning. Learning outcomes. This is the whole assessment world, right?

Not only do we need technology to put together teaching materials that are dynamic, and I'm thinking of Jim Fowler's calculus.
>> Calculus course. Yeah.
>> Right. His Mooculus.
>> Yeah.
>> I love that software, but we're talking adaptive learning.
>> Mm-hm.
>> That provides progressively more difficult exercises based on how well the student is doing in the exercises.

So this is a really gray area where technology improves the learning experience and can demonstrate outcomes, improved outcomes in learning and comprehension. So in teaching and learning mapping to empower, teaching innovation, there's a really strong tie there. Access affordability and excellence, I think the strongest tie there is in analytics.

So how do we define student success if we're talking about time to degree? Or we're talking about students who are at risk and being able to understand, are they doing okay? Are we alerted that there's a problem? Having a strong analytics practice and a strong environment, tools that we can work with, to support those initiatives, I think that's a critical, direct link.


>> And we've had a conversation on this podcast with Steve Fisher and the analytics work that he's doing so we're pretty in depth into that conversation before. But I think it continues to grow, right?
>> It does.
>> We have consortium of schools across the country called Unizun, which is sort of driving that.

Learning technology is piece of that work. But as we continue to look at the role of data stewards across the university, Steve's role has sort of the data strategist for IT across the university. That's a big part of the portfolio that is new and emerging that we haven't had.

I don't think we've had the best strategy until recently, so.
>> Yeah, it's exciting. The third pillar, research and creative expression, we have on the university strategy advance research as one of the investment areas. And the point there is, if we go back to that idea of core common and unique.

Core is any kind of technology that any industry would need, like connectivity, server storage, end point support, you get it. Unique, this is all about what you need for research. And oftentimes, we leave the researchers just kind of fending for themselves and having to fight through all of this world of regulatory requirements and so forth.

Advancing research is really about making the IT environment at Ohio State friendly, not only friendly to researchers, but attractive. I hope we get to the point that the IT environment at Ohio State becomes a critical factor in new faculty and new grad students deciding to come to Ohio State.

Because they know that they can get the research done here.
>> I think it's to the general public. The big mystery of what goes on at a university. They know we have a football and basketball team. They know we teach a huge set of undergraduates, 65,000 plus, here at the Columbus and our regional campuses.

And then you talk about research, and they sort of say, yeah, we hear that once in a while. But it's at the core of what we do. The core of a University is the creation of knowledge. And without that, we wouldn't be here. Our faculty all of the time, see that as their primary goal.

Maybe in competition with that teaching goal of where they spend their time and dollars, so this world of research is ever changing to one that we need the capability just in one area, like in large computational computing. How are we going to do that? And how are we going to provide pathways?

So the research front I think will continue to grow and expand in a service portfolio that we, as OCIO and ODEE, really haven't been involved in the past. But need to if we're going to service the university in the coming years through much more collaborative approaches to research.


>> So collaboration is a good segue into the next one. So academic healthcare is the fourth pillar of the university's strategic plan and that's where this culture of collaboration and lean IT and developing talent and effective risk management, those kind of all map there. And our partnership with the Western Medical Center and their IT organization.

How we co-invest in behind the scenes tools, like Duo's been a really great win for our two organizations working together. But there are other emerging partnerships, like we were just talking with a group of researchers today about using electronic signatures on informed consents. And we're partnering together with folks in biomedical informatics, folks across the university who work with Qualtrics, folks who work with Red Cap, and the product we use Docusign.

How do we make these tools work together and make it easier for researchers who are doing their IRB protocols to leverage technology, get off of paper, and streamline the consent process. So academic healthcare, lots of collaborations there. And then the fifth pillar, operational excellence and research stewardship, are lean IT investment area.

And of course the whole environment, generating new revenue, reducing cost, and of course the center, improve technology experience, all of that maps well to this fifth pillar. One of the things that jumped out at me about this fifth pillar was this requirement to streamline turnaround time, improve our SLAs for administrative kinds of requests.

Improved technology experience is all about turn around time, making things happen quickly, smoothly, and so forth. So there's a lot of ties to that fifth pillar. Across the investment areas, across the environment and with the foundation.
>> I couldn't agree more, and I think we're called out in that fifth pillar, too.


>> I know.
>> And what we have to do there, so. When talking about our strategy, it sometimes can feel abstract or distant. It's one of the reasons we talked about roadmap and not IT strategic plan two. Strategic plan sits on the shelf and you dust it off once in awhile.

And even in the time and change plan, the president has talked about, no, this is living and breathing document that's gonna drive us forward. And I think we feel the same way about our roadmap and our strategy. So can you talk about how that sort of abstractness or distance of the strategic plan, or our strategic roadmap, is turning into some successes already?


>> Sure, the way we've decided to activate or operationalize plans out of the IT strategy, going into the planning process for fiscal '18, we said all right, here are the four key initiatives that we are going to fund and launch that tie back to that university IT strategy.

So each year we'll see how we're doing on those initiatives, and at the end of the three or four year period, however long it lasts, we'll pause, we'll take a step back, look at the seven investment areas, where are we, and then decide, okay, for the next three to five years, what will the next set of initiatives be?

So some successes that we've already had, I think, we've come a long way in mobile first. Our key investment area to help folks basically disconnect from your desk and use a mobile device as your primary way of connecting with each other, and resources around the university. So modernizing the campus environment, mobile first.

We've got initiatives this year that have already seen success in wireless projection in meeting rooms and classrooms. Wireless printing in many areas around the university. I'm sure you've had Cory on to talk about Digital Flagship. When we get 11,000 iPads across campus, how are we gonna print from them?

Making sure we've got an environment in place that can support what we're gonna do with Digital Flagship. We're moving forward with continued WiFi investments, arts and sciences, and EHE, Education in Human Ecology, have been great partners in building out the wireless network in their spaces where their students are.

So we've had a lot of successful in that mobile first area. The second key initiative is helping IT staff obtain Cloud certifications. Cloud's here to stay. We've got folks who are pursuing certifications in Amazon, in Microsoft, and in Google. And it's great having our IT staff with this knowledge so that they can help faculty, especially in those unique research kinds of needs that these Cloud environments, Cloud tools are really designed for.

The third one if phasing local server rooms and data centers. That's tied to our-
>> Which is really operational, right?
>> Totally operational. And that's moving forward, we've had a lot of success there. We've managed to reduce the server room footprint on the university by about seven server rooms in the last year, just through this effort.

We're consolidating in our data center, which we do in partnership with the state of Ohio. The Ohio State University got out of the server room business several years ago, back in 2015, when we moved everything to the SOC, the State of Ohio Computing Center. And this initiative is all about helping the distributed units-


>> Get there as well.
>> Be able to take advantage of that. Yeah, get there. And then, the fourth thing is getting governance in place to govern the IT strategy. We've had a lot of success in defining metrics, and one of those metrics is how do we define IT spend?

We've made a lot of progress over the past year in working with distributed units on what is IT spend, and how do we tell if IT spend is delivering value? Where are there opportunities for efficiency? I mean, these are things that you deal with on a daily basis, and I think we've made a lot of progress there.

Things that we'll continue to work on is how we make investment decisions together going forward, and how we prioritize big things that we do at the enterprise level.
>> Sounds amazing, and I think we could talk for hours about the strategy and some of the successes and what it's been able to do for us.

Diane, what are the next steps for the strategy? Continued evolution? More challenges? What do you see on the horizon?
>> On the horizon for the strategy, what I hope we can do is have a conversation at the higher levels of the University about the mapping. How does this strategy support the University's strategy?

I think it's important to make those connections more visible, so I hope to see that going forward. And then, I think the culture of collaboration that we've managed to establish with putting this strategy together. I've seen a level of collaboration that I've never seen before in my 20 years of work here.

I wanna keep continuing that moving forward, and really engage in those local central partnerships. Because there's a need for both. We're out of the world of everybody and his brother has a local area network.
>> We all realize, okay, that's a model from the 1990s. We're done. But there is still that need to have a really good reliable suite of core services that can take advantage of economies of scale.

And at the same time, have folks that are closer to the research community, closer to the teaching community, who are experts in assessment and supporting teaching innovation, and who are experts in supporting research and so forth. And I feel like with some of the things that we've got going, like developing the IT talent and getting local staff certified in Cloud, that we're moving in the right direction.


>> So, Diane, we usually end with something fun. You've been here at Ohio State for 20 plus years, and are a second generation Ohio State employee. Your father was in the college of-
>> Dentistry.
>> Dentistry, for many years.
>> Many years.
>> You've seen a lot of change over the course of your time here.


>> What are you most excited about in terms of where we are as a culture, given that a lot of your whole life has been here in Ohio state?
>> Well, I'm most excited about the momentum that I see in innovation and in big thinking. I have seen more changes in the past five years than I think I have seen in the previous 15.


>> The first, right.
>> And those changes that we've seen in the past five years have come from bigger thinking, bigger challenges, more courage to go after them as a community, less finger pointing, more collaboration, and just deciding to go for it. And that's what gets me really excited.


>> Those are all great things. I see them a lot and I'd second them. So thanks, Diane, for joining me today. I'm Mike Hoffer, Vice-President and Chief Information Officer. And thanks for having a drink and talking tech today.
>> Thanks, cheers!
>> Cheers!