My journey from higher ed to government

Working in higher education was certainly rewarding, but it was a constant challenge to meet a modern campus’s needs in the face of ever-shrinking budgets. In the seventeen years I worked in higher education, it was rare to see an increase in my annual budget. Most of the time, we had to “do more with less.”

Do more with less

One thing you need to know about higher education is that budgets are very volatile. In public higher education, the overall budget is usually set based on tuition and total student enrollment, which is affected by the dips and rolls in student enrollment and retention. Some budgets are also based on State contributions. One “off” year can impact budgets for more than just that year, or more than four years. Depending on the size of your campus, an unexpected dip in student numbers could have lasting budget impacts up to ten years later.

As a result, we became very entrepreneurial in delivering solutions, and I learned to leverage new tools that allowed us to deliver value to the campus within limited means.

For example, for many years until 2010, I managed several departments that supported enterprise infrastructure and operations at a large university. We had a respectable budget, but I couldn’t rely on the same numbers every year. To support enterprise applications within a limited overall budget, we considered new options, including open source software systems. We found Linux delivered the same power and flexibility as the “big iron” systems, at a fraction of the price. We were the first to implement “Linux in the enterprise” at the university, and within a few years we began displacing our more expensive Solaris and AIX Unix servers with Linux, reducing our technology spend by a considerable margin. By the time I left the university in 2010, about two-thirds of our enterprise systems ran on low-cost Linux servers.

Across the campus

In 2010, I became the IT Director and campus Chief Information Officer at a small liberal arts campus. Due to our relatively small size of about two thousand students, I inherited a small budget. Again, we looked to new frontiers to support our campus within limited means. We quickly moved many campus applications to the Cloud thus reducing the technology footprint in our local data center and maximizing our Return on Investment. While my campus may not have been the first higher education institution to explore Cloud solutions, we were certainly among the first.

Almost immediately, we migrated our email and calendaring systems to Google Apps for Education, which included Gmail and other Google Apps. Soon afterwards, we moved our home-grown academic alert application to a Cloud system. Other systems, including a database of campus committee meeting minutes, and a hand-coded website with over forty thousand objects, also moved to the Cloud.

Leveraging the Cloud allowed us to lower our costs while expanding our campus services. In off-loading applications to the Cloud, we were able to retire old servers and storage and to reduce our maintenance costs. Support staff were freed to work on more valuable tasks. Our developers shifted from writing applications to providing integration services.

My vision in higher education technology was simple:  if the service had become a commodity, we should outsource it to the Cloud. I wanted my staff to focus on the services where we truly added value. This alignment to “Cloud versus Local” helped us to lower our Total Cost of Ownership while remaining flexible to campus needs. Most importantly, we were able to operate within our means and “do more with less.”

In my last year at the campus, we began to explore new ways to provide technology in classrooms and computer labs. Over the next four years, I expected to reduce our general-purpose computing costs by ten percent or more.

Higher ed to government

I later moved from higher education to local government. As Chief Information Officer, I directed and managed all aspects of Information Services—an organization of more than four thousand full and part-time employees working at more than twenty separate locations. I worked through governance to lead the vision, strategy, and governance for information technology in the county, ensuring alignment with the county’s vision, mission, and goals and industry best practices.

Former colleagues from higher education often asked me how local government differed from education. The two are very alike: local government has the same governance, committees, organizational structure, everything. It’s just labeled differently.

However, one thing was different; in my experience, governments don’t embrace change like we did in higher education.

In local government, the funding model is more reliable. Where higher education budgets are dependent on student retention and tuition, county budgets are largely a factor of the tax levy, so are more stable.

With more predictable budgets, government IT doesn’t face the same pressures to try new things. Government IT departments typically plan to provide the same services and solutions year after year, because the budgets rarely shift. Governments don’t have to look outside the usual way of doing things, and typically aren’t under the same pressure to “do more with less.” As a result, today’s government technology looks about the same as it did ten or fifteen years ago. It’s the same across other local government technology organizations I’ve experienced. The back-office for local government often runs on Microsoft Windows. Most government applications run locally, and many of them are developed in-house. That’s how governments have supported their technology services, and they haven’t had a reason to change.

In my time as a local government CIO, I worked hard to change that. I coordinated with our technology teams and with governance to re-examine technology purchasing decisions. Where we once feared the Cloud, we shifted to a Cloud-first attitude. In many instances, we replaced several on-premises applications with Cloud systems. I expect this Cloud trend to continue after my departure.

Finding a new normal

Today, many governments still use Microsoft Windows on the desktop, but that will change over time, too. As more government technology shifts to the Cloud, delivered via a web browser, the desktop is less important. In the wake of the pandemic, the "desktop" doesn't really matter that much. That is the new change for government IT organizations that have used the same core platform since 1995.

My role as local government CIO was to help my county realize the new modes in technology, and to help shift the organization to the future. This is a cultural change, so I didn’t expect to see immediate results, but I am confident that I moved the county towards a mindset that is open to new experiences and new experiments. This is government IT’s path to “do more with less.”