Peter High
10/11/2016
I first learned of Clara Labs co-founder and CEO Maran Nelson when she was among those noted as a Forbes 30 Under 30 Pioneering Woman:Forbes 30 under 30 Pioneering Woman. When a member of her extended communications team named Justin suggested I meet her, I told him that I would be in San Francisco – where Clara Labs is based – on a certain date. The next email I received was from Clara, herself. The message read,
Hi Justin, Thanks! I’ll get this set up with Peter. Hi Peter, Happy to help get a meeting on the calendar for you and Maran. Can you meet at Stable Cafe (2128 Folsom Street, San Francisco) on Friday (Sep 23) at 10am or Monday (Sep 26) at 11am PDT? Also, what’s the best number for Maran to reach you? I’ll add it to the calendar event description for reference. Best, Clara
Hi Justin, Thanks! I’ll get this set up with Peter.
Hi Peter, Happy to help get a meeting on the calendar for you and Maran.
Can you meet at Stable Cafe (2128 Folsom Street, San Francisco) on Friday (Sep 23) at 10am or Monday (Sep 26) at 11am PDT?
Also, what’s the best number for Maran to reach you? I’ll add it to the calendar event description for reference.
Best,
Clara
Clara Labs was a Y Combinator company that now boasts the likes of Sequoia Capital as investors.
There is a lot written about the paucity of women founders of Silicon Valley companies, for good reason. I was interested in learning more about what drew Nelson to entrepreneurship, why she focused on a digital personal assistant platform, and how she sees the offering evolving. We covered all of that in more in this interview.
Peter High: Maran, I thought we would begin with how the idea for Clara Labs came about. What was the need you saw that was not being met? Also, I am curious as to how much of what exists now was in your vision during the early stages.
Maran Nelson: Clara was conceived of when I first had to interact with email at a high volume. I thought I was going to be great at this professional stuff, and in the vast majority of cases I was. I started out trying to sell my product for a startup I previously had. I went right into Y Combinator right after earning my undergraduate degree. Every time we got on the phone, we were able to sell them our product. I remember looking back at the end of this very stressful, intense summer and thinking, “Where could I have been better? Where was I failing?” My intuition said – and my research confirmed – it was in the number of times I dropped the ball just on forgetting to send a calendar invitation, or did not follow up, or mis-converted a time zone. All of that was a huge cost to me, just over a few months of work. Outside of the time that I spent trying to build this new startup, get this thing off the ground, and invent something, the amount of that time that I spent coordinating was huge as well.
That stuck with me as an initial, deep frustration. Most business people at some point just accept it as part of doing business. That probably would have happened for me as well had it not been for an early introduction into entrepreneurship with that mindset, and my co-founder, who has been my longtime best friend, coming on and encouraging me in my obsession over several months with solving the scheduling problem.
Nelson: My mother named a company right after me when I was born because I pulled her out of the workforce. She called it “Maran Made Me,” because Maran made her stay at home. Both my parents are pretty entrepreneurial. [My co-founder] Michael [Akilian]’s family, though, is especially entrepreneurial. His dad has been building businesses since Michael was little. Michael and I both looked at our parents in this act of self-creation. It is a lot like writing where you get to take this empty space and a lot of you gets imprinted in that space – a lot of values. It was a model that we were lucky to get to watch. In our early relationship at 15 or 16, we were already pitching crappy startup ideas to Michael’s dad, who usually told us that reality did not work the way that we thought it did. But it was definitely core to both of us.
High: Why did you study psychology and neuroscience?
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by Peter High, published on Forbes
3-28-2016
Anne Margulies is the Chief Information Officer of perhaps the best known university on earth, Harvard University. She has been an education technology pioneer for much longer, however. She was the founding Executive Director of MIT OpenCourseWare, the internationally acclaimed initiative to publish the teaching materials for their entire curriculum openly and freely over the Internet. As such, she was involved in some of the earliest precursors of today’s MOOCs.
It should come as no surprise that Marguilies was intricately involved in HarvardX, Harvard’s contribution to edX. For her own team, she has developed what she calls the IT Academy, aggregating training materials to provide common IT skills across her entire department. Therefore, Margulies is a remarkably innovative CIO, especially when it comes to training and education.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please visit this link. To read future articles like this one, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: Anne Margulies, you are the Chief Information Officer of Harvard University, one of the biggest brands in the world. Could you could give a definition of what is within your purview?
Anne Margulies: Harvard is a large, complex, decentralized university. As the University CIO I am responsible for information technology strategies, plans, and policies, as well as all of the University-wide infrastructure and applications that serve all of our schools. In addition, I am directly responsible for end-to-end technology for the central administration and for the faculty of Arts and Sciences, the largest of our schools. It includes our undergraduate, college, as well as our graduate school of Arts and Sciences. It is a large portfolio.
High: You mentioned that strategy is one of those areas that is under your watch. Can you talk about your method of crafting strategic plans and maybe share some of the details of your latest plan?
Margulies: Absolutely. We have an important leadership group here at Harvard called the CIO Council, which I chair. It is comprised of the CIO councils of our professional schools, as well as our Chief Technology Officer and our Chief Information Security Officer. This leadership group is responsible for developing Harvard’s IT strategic plan. The way that we do that is we focus much on those things that make sense and are most important for us to work on together as a university, as opposed to those technologies that should be done separately school by school. Five years ago we developed a strategic plan with key strategic initiatives for the University, and the CIO Council has now also been responsible for overseeing the implementation of the strategic plan. Since then, we have updated and revised the strategic plan because we finished some initiatives and we have added some new ones. It is a process that I think is actually working quite well for Harvard.
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I would like to introduce a new series, which I refer to as “Education Technology Innovation.” It will includes interviews and strategy discussions with some of the leading names in the field:
In the kick-off article to the series, I set the stage for some of the questions that will be explored in the interviews in the series:
“What does the future hold for these innovative companies, and how will it change the way in which our children and their children are educated? Will it serve to lower the costs of education? Will it create pressure on high cost private universities with less prestigious brands, as one can spend much less and learn from the top professors from Ivy Leagues schools?“
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Mike Feerick leads a company that has been credited as being the first ever massive open online course or MOOC. He founded ALISON in 2007. Unlike other prominent MOOCs such as Udacity, Coursera, and edX, ALISON’s content is not drawn from elite US-based universities. Rather, the Galway, Ireland based company focuses on practical workplace skills that can be tested by employers to gauge growing competencies. Since I last spoke with Feerick, the company registered its five millionth user, and much of the growth has been in the developing world. India, for instance, is the company’s fastest growing market. ALISON has thrived on serving traditionally underserved education marketplaces.
As Feerick probed for opportunity to serve additional groups of people that have been underserved, perhaps the most marginalized group of all became a target: the population of formerly incarcerated people. In the US alone, 20 million people are among the formerly incarcerated, and one of the triggers of recidivism is a lack of solid job opportunity. As Feerick describes in this interview, he believes ALISON is perfectly suited to serve this often marginalized population while reducing the rates of recidivism in the process.
Stanford and MIT receive well deserved recognition as hotbeds of entrepreneurship, but neither of those is as singularly influential in the US as the Israel Insitute of Technology, better known as the Technion. Since the university’s founding over one hundred years ago, a quarter of the university’s graduates have started businesses. Since 2004, graduates of the Technion have won four Nobel Prizes, and a remarkable two-thirds of Israeli companies listed on NASDAQ have been founded by graduates of the Technion. Israel is often referred to as “start-up nation”, and the Technion has contributed more than any other institution to that reputation.
Since 2009, Peretz Lavie has served as President of the Technion. During that time, he has hired faculty who are experts across traditional academic silos, encouraged more professors and students to get involved in starting businesses, and in the process has bolstered the university’s reputation as a hot-house for new businesses.
In decades past, companies derived value from deep knowledge and discipline within specific functional areas. They were strong at operations or in finance or in service, etc. Companies were often strong at multiple of those, but the organization structure that owes tremendously to Alfred Sloan and General Motors was almost militaristic in its hierarchy and in its silos. Just as the military has had to think creatively about how breaking down these silos, promoting people who have breadth of experience as well as depth, companies too have derived great value at thinking about value derived at the nexus of disciplines.
Harrah’s Entertainment (now Caesars Entertainment) leap-frogged the competition in the casino gaming industry by virtue of the insights derived by Gary Loveman, a Harvard Business School professor whose specialty was at the intersection of marketing and technology, together with an extremely talented team in his Marketing and IT departments at Harrah’s, the company was an early winner with customer relationship management (CRM).
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Shai Reshef is an Israeli-born entrepreneur who now lives in Pasadena, California. Although his master’s degree is in Chinese politics, he has made his name professionally in private education. He served as chairman and CEO of the Kidum Group, an Israeli test preparation which he sold to Kaplan, Inc. in 2005. He also led KIT eLearning, a subsidiary of Kidum and the eLearning partner of the University of Liverpool. KIT provided MBAs and Master in IT degrees, and was eventually acquired by Laureate Online Education.
In 2009, Reshef founded the University of the People, which in February 2014 received accreditation from the Distance and Education Training Council, a U.S. Department of Education authorized accrediting agency. This made it the world’s first non-profit, tuition-Free, accredited, online university.
This is the tenth article in the Education Technology Innovation series, and it is fair to say that Nic Borg’s background is unlike any of the other entrepreneurs featured in the series. Like others, he comes from academe, but rather than being a former Stanford professor like Sebastian Thrun or Daphne Koller, or an MIT professor like Anant Agarwal, Borg spent seven years at Kaneland High School in Maple Park, Illinois building web-based tools and learning management solutions. The small-scale innovation that he introduced proved to be a pilot for something bigger to come.
Armed with his practical experience at a Kaneland High School, Borg co-founded Edmodo five and a half years ago. Edmodo is the largest K-12 social learning network, which provides teachers and students a safe and easy way to connect and collaborate; it has been called “the Facebook of education.” It is used heavily in the classroom, but also extends that classroom environment. The mission of the organization is to help all learners reach their full potential, and he believes that by connecting them to the resources and concepts they need, they achieve that goal. It has already had profound implications on students, teachers, parents, and content providers, as he explains herein. He was recently honored by this publication as “30 Under 30” winner.
Umar Saif has done a lot in his 35 years. A Pakistani, he earned his PhD in computer science from the University of Cambridge at 22. He began a post doctorate degree at MIT at an age when most of his peers – age wise – had not completed their bachelor’s degrees. He worked at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory where he was part of the core team that developed system technologies for the $50 million Project Oxygen. He collaborated with Anant Agarwal, now the president of edX, among other legendary computer science and artificial intelligence professors. After spending years away from his native Pakistan, he found that he enjoyed the entrepreneurial spirit of MIT and of the US more generally. However, it was a conversation with a colleague about what he wanted to achieve in his life that got him to rethink his plans for the future. He decided that he wanted to help establish a comparable entrepreneurial hot-bed like the one he found at MIT back in Pakistan.
He returned to the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS), where he found that his top students were the equivalent of the top students at MIT, but they did not realize the potential they had. His own story became an inspiration for a series of entrepreneurs, many of whom he has started businesses with. He was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum in 2010, selected as one of top 35 young innovators in the world by MIT Technology Review in 2011 and received a Google faculty research award in 2011.
In late 2010, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administration put out a request for proposal for a new kind of university program. Recognizing the importance of establishing New York City as a technology hub, he hoped to attract a leading university to establish a graduate school in engineering and computer science in Manhattan, and proposed that it be built on Roosevelt Island.
The proposal submitted by Cornell University was the winner, and though the permanent campus will not be ready until 2017, Cornell NYC Tech has set up shop in Google’s Manhattan offices in Chelsea. Daniel Huttenlocher is dean of the program, and he has an ambitious vision that befits an academic who has experience in the business world. He has hired a Chief Entrepreneurial Officer, and the school has already established deep ties with the start-up community in New York. Huttenlocher measures the success of his program on the number of people who start and who join high growth organizations. Establishing a program with ready access to major corporations, start-ups, and even City Hall means that Cornell NYC Tech is in an enviable position, and will likely be a key player in pushing New York to be the tech start-up hub that has longed to be for some time.
MIT Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Professor Anant Agarwal has personified the educator-entrepreneur, as he has had a foot in academe and a foot in new ventures for more than a decade. He has led CSAIL, MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, just as he was a founder of Tilera Corporation, which created the Tile multicore processor. He led the development of Raw, an early tiled multicore processor, Sparcle, an early multi-threaded microprocessor, and Alewife, a scalable multiprocessor. He also led the VirtualWires project at MIT and was the founder of Virtual Machine Works. His start-ups have largely been focused on his areas of research and areas of interest, but he had not focused on the education space itself until late 2011.
It was at that point that Agarwal taught what would become MITX’s first massive open online course (MOOC) on circuits and electronics, which drew 155,000 students from 162 countries. This overwhelming response showed the promise of having his academic and his entrepreneurial pursuits coincide. Agarwal developed a partnership between MIT and nearby Harvard to establish edX. Unlike rivals Coursera and Udacity, edX is a not-for-profit. Therefore, when Agarwal thinks about the competitive landscape among the MOOCs, his perspective is “the more the merrier.” In fact, in June of last year, edX became open sourced, and the source code, OpenedX, has led to interesting collaborations with Google, Stanford University, and even with countries such as France and China.
Much time and attention has been given to the MOOCs started in the US, but as I have mentioned in my interview with Mike Feerick of ALISON, the phenomenon actually first emerged in Europe. Another more recent entry to the MOOC field out of the United Kingdom is FutureLearn. Unlike other prominent MOOCs like Udacity, Coursera, and edX that feature university content, FutureLearn is not led by a former academic. Simon Nelson is a businessman, but he was a logical choice to head FutureLearn given his experience working in a variety of media fields that have been threatened and transformed by technology. As a result, Nelson has been programmed to see opportunity in the chaos.
FutureLearn also has the advantage of a 44 year old pre-cursor to the MOOCs: Open University. The university has many things in common with the MOOCs — it has an open entry policy, and the majority of courses are taken off-campus anywhere in the world. As such, Nelson has been able to work with Open University Vice Chancellor Martin Bean to learn from the decades of experiences and experiments forged, and many of them have translated well to the new format. Therefore, while FutureLearn is a new entrant to this marketplace, it stands to become a formidable one.
I have had the a good fortune of speaking with good number of the leaders in education technology today. Since so many of these players have emerged from academe, the competition between companies is fierce certainly, but there is also a collegial willingness to acknowledge the successes of other companies. In the case of non-profits like edX, CEO Anant Agarawal says, the more companies that enter this space, the merrier. (Stay tuned for my interview with Agarwal on January 20th.) Several of these leaders acknowledge that the most influential person to the MOOC landscape has been Salman Khan. As Agarwal lists the genesis of the MOOCs, he lists Khan and his Khan Academy first among the major players. Sebastian Thrun acknowledged in my interview with him that “I stumbled into this after listening to a gentleman named Sal Khan of Khan Academy. In his speech he noted that he had tens of millions of students in his classes. I was teaching at Stanford at the time and had tens of dozens of students in my classes, and I felt I should try something different and see if we could do what I do and scale it to many people.” In fact, in my podcast interview with Thrun, as he listed those who had been most influential to him over the course of his career, he listed Khan on the short list.
There has been much press for the massive open online courses or MOOCs, including in my series of interviews to date with Sebastian Thrun and Daphne Koller, CEOs of Udacity and Coursera respectively. If one is new to these companies, one might be under the impression that the MOOC phenomenon is less than two years old. That is not the case. The company that many credit as being the first ever MOOC is Advance Learning Interactive Systems ONline, better known as ALISON. Irish-American entrepreneur, Mike Feerick founded that company in 2007, and whereas many other companies in this industry are still trying to determine the business models, Feerick has nearly seven years of testing, experimenting, and succeeding behind him. In this interview, Feerick talks about the genesis of the idea, his rationale for focusing on vocational training, and his vision for the future of the company.
Last week, I kicked off a series on education technology with an interview with Sebastian Thrun, CEO of Udacity. Daphne Koller who co-founded and is the co-CEO of Coursera, by some measures the largest of the for-profit educational technology companies offering massive open online courses or MOOCs with over five million students across most countries, has much in common with Thrun. They both were foreign-born Stanford professors with backgrounds in artificial intelligence when they started the companies they currently lead. Each has also taken a leave of absence from Stanford in order to pursue their current opportunities.
Though their companies compete, they have chosen very different areas of focus. Udacity, like several other companies that provide MOOCs has chosen to focus on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) courses. Coursera has chosen a much broader offering, including many disciplines in the humanities. This breadth of offering has been a strength of the company in building a broad student-base, and it has signed up over 60 universities as partners. That said, it has required particularly creative approaches both process and technology-wise in order to facilitate learning, collaboration, and grading.
There are few entrepreneurs who can compete with Sebastian Thrun in terms of creativity and breadth of innovation. He led the development of Stanley, a robotic vehicle on the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge. He was a founder of the Google X Lab, and parlayed his earlier success with Stanley into the Google driverless car system. He also was among the leaders who developed Google Glass. All the while he was a professor first at Carnegie Mellon and then at Stanford.
In early 2012, based on inspiration from Salman Khan of Khan Academy, he co-founded Udacity, a for-profit education company offering massive open online courses, or MOOCs. Thrun’s Stanford course “CS 373: Programming a Robotic Car” was among the first couple of courses offered through Udacity, and it attracted 160,000 students in 190 countries. The youngest was ten and the oldest was 70. Moreover, none of the top-400 students were Stanford students. He was so excited about what he learned, that he gave up his post at Stanford to focus on Udacity full-time.
Education Technology is in its Infancy, but it is Growing-up FastMuch has been written of late about the need for healthcare reform in our country. Whether one is a fan of the Affordable Care Act or not, the case for change is quite clear. The fact that healthcare makes up such a high proportion of our gross domestic product (north of 17 percent), and has grown at such a fast clip relative to the consumer-price index (one and a half times) underscores the need for change. However, there is an industry the fundamentals of which have not dramatically changed in hundreds of years, and yet its costs have risen at a rate three times as fast as the consumer-price index. That field is education.
The classroom setting with a professor standing at the head of a class talking at a roomful of students is largely the same model that existed when the first universities were established in the United States. It is no wonder that some creative people have stepped forward with truly innovative ideas in the education space to attempt to turn the traditional model upside down.
7-21-2015
As Feerick probed for opportunity to serve additional groups of people that have been underserved, perhaps the most marginalized group of all became a target: the population of formerly incarcerated people. In the US alone, 20 million people are among the formerly incarcerated, and one of the triggers of recidivism is solid job opportunity. As Feerick describes in this interview, he believes ALISON is perfectly suited to serve this often marginalized population while reducing the rates of recidivism in the process.
(This is the 14th article in the Education Technology series. To read past articles with such luminaries as the CEOs of Khan Academy, Udacity, Coursera, and edX, please visit this link. To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: Mike, I was intrigued to hear this announcement about ALISON getting involved with the formerly incarcerated to provide training to make them both more employable and presumably less inclined to recidivism. The data is actually quite stark. There has been a lot written recently on the incarcerated population in the United States. The data indicates that 2.3 million people are currently incarcerated in the United States, there are up to 20 million ex-offenders, and that up to six million people are still under supervision of one kind or another. There certainly is a big population you might serve. Could you talk about the genesis of this idea?
Mike Feerick: I enjoy using new technologies and business systems to organize solutions to address social issues. With ALISON, we are making education more accessible the world over, but some marginalized groups have greater challenges than others in accessing what we provide – incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people among them. The need is huge, not just in the USA, but globally. For instance, there was one article in the Guardian yesterday that said that 92 percent of those being released from UK prisons feel unprepared for the world outside the penitentiary. These people have some of the greatest educational need in society.
The percentage of the US population in prison is just extraordinary. You have 25 percent of the world’s prison population, and yet America has less than 5 percent of the world’s population. Something is seriously wrong. For the 20 million people you mentioned who are already out of prison—if you have a felony, it is hard to get on with life as there are so many roadblocks. The one thing a formerly incarcerated person can do however is educate themselves, and the beauty of ALISON providing a massive number of free courses at many different levels is that the starting point can vary to suit every potential student.
As we have been leading this education revolution, I have had an eye on this social group and I thought, “OK, there are very few education dollars left for these people when they get out, yet it costs $100,000 on average per year to keep prisoners in jail. But when they get out, the government pays very little money to keep them out.”
7-6-2015
Stanford and MIT receive well deserved recognition as hotbeds of entrepreneurship, but neither of those is as singularly influential in the US as the Israel Insitute of Technology, better known as the Technion. Sincet the university’s founding over one hundred years ago, a quarter of the university’s graduates have started businesses. Since 2004, graduates of the Technion have won four Nobel Prizes, and a remarkable two-thirds of Israeli companies listed on NASDAQ have been founded by graduates of the Technion. Israel is often referred to as “start-up nation”, and the Technion has contributed more than any other institution to that reputation.
Since 2008, Peretz Lavie has served as President of the Technion. During that time, he has hired faculty who are experts across traditional academic silos, encouraged more professors and students to get involved in starting businesses, and in the process has bolstered the university’s reputation as a hot-house for new businesses.
(This is the 12th article in the “IT Influencers” series. To read past interviews with executive such as Sal Khan of Khan Academy, Jim Goodnight of SAS, Sebastian Thrun of Udacity, Yves Behar of Fuseproject, former Mexican President Vicente Fox, and Sir James Dyson of Dyson Company, please visit this link. To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: President Lavie, the Technion, for those who may not be as familiar with it, has a really storied place in Israeli entrepreneurial culture. Many people refer to your nation as startup nation, and many rightly believe that your university is at least partially, if not largely, responsible for that boom in entrepreneurship. Amazingly, a full quarter of the graduates of the university have started businesses. How has the university been such a hotbed of entrepreneurship?
Peretz Lavie: Indeed the Technion is the engine behind a startup nation. I have been asked this question many, many times and I have come to the conclusion that a world class university that plays such a major role in the economy of its environment or its state must have three ingredients: excellent students, excellent faculty members, and this is obvious, but it must have also a third ingredient and it is not so clear when you think about universities. This is a statement of mission. A mission statement must be part of the DNA of the university. I’ll give you some examples from the history of the Technion where the mission statement historically changed the Israeli economy. First, the Technion was established in the early 20th century as a mission to allow the Jewish people to get education in engineering. When the decision was made to establish the Technion in 1905, Jews in Europe could not study engineering. So there was a mission for this engineering school to allow engineering education for the Jewish people.
Then, the school was opened in 1924 after the First World War. When the state was established, David Ben Gurion, the legendary prime minister of Israel, made a decision that the Technion would be one of the more important institutes for the future of the newly established state. He picked a site on the top of the Carmen Mountain, and he also made the decision of which faculty to open first: the faculty of aeronautical engineering. Why? Because he realized that this was important for the future of the state even as early as 1954. The same year, the Israeli aircraft industry was established which is now one of the three largest industrial complexes in Israel and every one of the 5,000 engineers was educated at the Technion.
Another example is 1969. The Technion decided to open a micro-electronic institute. At that time, few people knew how to spell micro-electronic. The decision was made to provide the country with badly needed semiconductors that were deprived by an embargo that was imposed on Israel by Charles de Gaulle after the Six Day War. So the university had the mission to serve the country and mankind as part of its DNA.
Students who were educated under such an environment knew that when they graduate from the Technion, they also should serve a mission. Therefore combining excellent students and excellent faculty with the DNA of the university that it serve higher goals: humanity, the country, etc., I think you have an outcome like changing the economy and changing the environment.
03-12-2015
Excerpt from the Article: The State University of New York (SUNY) of Agriculture and Technology at Cobleskill, also known as SUNY Cobleskill, has an emphasis on technology degrees, as the name suggests. Not so surprising, the CIO of SUNY Cobleskill, James Dutcher, not only manages the school’s technology, but he also is involved in thinking about using information to enhance the experience of professors and students alike. In this interview with CIO Insight contributor, Peter High, Dutcher describes his vision as a university CIO, the future of education technology and the topics he likes to cover in his much-read blog.
CIO Insight: Please describe your role at SUNY College of Agriculture and Technology Cobleskill.
James Dutcher: I am the CIO here in SUNY at the Cobleskill campus where my team’s responsibility is both providing and facilitating all IT/business services regardless if these originate on or off campus. Starting with the “T” in IT, this means providing and maintaining the infrastructure of the campus data center, wired/wireless network, phones, computers, tablets, printers, 3D printers, wearable tech and so on. On the “I” (information) side of “IT,” we provide services and support for our portfolio of applications around local and remotely provided services in our Student Information, Course Management, Website(s), Portal, HR, Financials, Email/Collaboration, Storage, systems, and more. Of course, there is also strategy, governance, budget, personnel, vendor, policy & security, and project management details that are important to pay attention to.
CIO Insight: What are your priorities for the foreseeable future?
James Dutcher: The priorities can be summed up in two ways: “being the change” and “leading the change” for my organization. In today’s world the reality is that no organization can achieve success without IT. This means that there is a strong, inseparable union of the organization, IT and our collective strategy, goals and objectives. So my role as CIO and my IT team will continue to emerge and be the digital guides & the co-thought leaders/contributors for the university, partnering across divisions and providing key strategic leadership to drive transformation needed and able achieve the university’s vision, goals and objectives. My obligations have been, and will continue to be, managing highly available IT and its effective/efficient use. More importantly will be managing rapid change as IT is very quickly evolving, impacting the organization, and involving massive cultural changes in the way we think about what we do, how we teach, learn and conduct research, and how we will help our students achieve success. Balancing the ever-present push and pull from early adopters and keeping the maintenance of mission-critical services upon which thousands rely is critically important. As CIO, this also means keeping ITS department staff actively, forward leaning & learning as it is imperative for the ITS dept. to continue to assist communicating, leading, and transforming the university in areas of teaching, learning, and research as these models shift in our continuing flattening world. Key to leading and managing in our flattened world is working across the organization in advancing the strategic vision of the institution by identifying technology implications and opportunities.
To read the remainder of the article, please visit CIO Insight
02-23-2015
Excerpt from the Article:
Laureate International Universities is a leader in international higher education, with an enrollment in excess of 950,000 students, in 80 institutions and across 29 countries. The company states as its mission to seek to make high quality, higher education accessible and believes when students succeed, countries prosper and societies benefit. Karl Salnoske joined Laureate nearly a year ago, and was new to the industry. He had been a CIO at pharma leader Schering-Plough and at integration services provider GXS, but an industry that is both dynamic, and at the heart of so much positive change presented an interesting new challenge for this IT veteran. In this interview, he describes his path to Laureate, the role technology plays in the company and the road ahead.
CIO Insight: Karl, you have been a CEO, a consultant, a CIO and a COO, among other responsibilities across your career. You had worked in a variety of industries, but education was not among them. What attracted you to Laureate?
Karl Salnoske: Although I’ve not worked in the education field before, in many ways coming to Laureate felt like a natural progression. I’ve always been attracted to opportunities to have impact at scale, and am motivated by being part of a company driven by a strong sense of purpose. Laureate offered both of these.
We currently have 70,000 employees in 29 countries, serving almost one million students. The opportunity to lead the implementation of a new IT delivery model that caters to both the current need and future growth was an opportunity I didn’t want to miss.
While Laureate is a thriving international company with an ambitious agenda, at its core is a commitment to making higher education accessible and impactful in communities and countries where it is needed most. I was attracted to the mission, and was immediately impressed by the people I met.
This was one of those rare moments when you see opportunity, talent and purpose converge, and I knew I wanted to be a part of it.
Tom Murphy on bringing his for-profit experience to the non-profit world
University of Pennsylvania Vice President of IT and University Chief Information Officer Tom Murphy has held the CIO role at a number of leading companies, including AmerisourceBergen, Royal Caribbean Cruises, Omni Hotels, and Davita Healthcare Partners. He has been elected to CIOMagazine’s prestigious CIO Hall of Fame in 2010. The move to become a university CIO was unusual, as many CIOs of universities grow up in the university setting. Having been an influential executive at a number of massive corporations, he has needed his skills as an influencer all the more at Penn, where different schools such as the Medical School, the Wharton School of Business, and the Law School each have CIOs with their own imperatives and budgets. Murphy’s background is unusual in that he was an English major as an undergraduate, and has no formal training in engineering or IT disciplines other than what he has learned on the job. As a result, his ability to communicate in written form in addition to his strong oral communications skills have proven to be a recipe for success. Herein, Murphy shares the steps he undertook in the first 100 days of his time at Penn. (This is the 20th article in the CIO’s First 100 Days series. To read interviews with other in the series, including the CIOs of GE, Time Warner, Caterpillar, Intel, and Johnson & Johnson, among many others, please visit: this link . To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.) Peter High: Can you describe your purview in your current role as CIO of the University of Pennsylvania? Tom Murphy: I am the Vice President of Information Technology and University CIO. My responsibility is providing central IT services, so think of all of the utilities that are provided to support the school—the network, the telephony, and the wireless— we also run the primary data centers and administrative systems essential to Penn.
We provide all of the foundational support necessary, then the schools and centers all have their own IT organizations that run very proximate to the faculty and the students. Our local service providers are hyper-vigilant to the needs of the school.
We are a little different here, in that we charge back everything. So we literally sell our services, which requires reliability and consistency as well as us constantly looking for ways to do more with less. There is an expectation that we will continue to develop opportunities that support growth on campus while maintaining the same price—which is not that dissimilar from being the CIO of a Fortune 500. We use a budget model called Responsibility Center Management, which is a model that essentially allows each school to operate as its own business. It is a different model, but it has worked for many years. I just have to get very good at how to use it…
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The $35 Tablet That Is Changing The Education Landscape In India
11-19-2014
As anyone in the US with children of school-age can attest, technology enhanced learning has become a standard. Increasingly, that computing is embedded in the methods that children learn. Moreover, “flipped classrooms” are taking hold. Under this model, lectures and homework in a class are reversed. Short video lectures are viewed by students at home before the class session, while in-class time is devoted to exercises, projects, or discussions. This model has proven to be quite effective. Naturally, the cost of computing has been prohibitively expensive in many developing countries, and as a result the digital divide between the developed and developing world has grown.
For all that we read about India’s rise as a technology powerhouse, the country has relatively poor infrastructure. Less than 20 percent of mobile towers deliver 3G service, and therefore, 3G data services are used by less than 5% of active subscribers. The country also has the slowest internet penetration growth in the Asia Pacific region at only 12.5 percent. Compare that to China’s rate which is over 42% or even Bangladesh’s, which is 21 percent.
It should also be noted that in India, the drop-out rates of school children remain appallingly high. 16 percent of students drop out during grades one through four, 43% drop out during grades five through eight, and 68% drop out between grades nine and 12. As a result, there are roughly 142 million children who should be in school but are not.
A few weeks ago, I spoke at a gathering of IT executives at former Mexican President Vicente Fox’s presidential library, Centro Fox. Another speaker at the conference was Suneet Tuli, an Indian who now lives in Toronto. Tuli is the founder and chief executive officer of DataWind, a Canadian wireless web access products and services developer. Having become familiar with the discouraging data regarding the digital divide, Tuli elected to do something about it. As Tuli explains it, “Although I was born in India, I grew up in Canada, and had access to Canada’s world-class public education system. But in various family trips over the years, I realized that in India the quality of education one received was in direct correlation to one’s economic class. I felt very strongly that access to the internet would level the playing field.” He developed a goal for his company to develop a tablet computer that would be affordable for the masses in India. PCs became ubiquitous in the US once the cost of the PC dropped to below 25 percent of a person’s monthly income. In order for this to work in India, Tuli realized that his tablet would need to cost $35.
Carnegie Mellon’s Integrated Innovation Institute’s Vision To Build Innovators Of Tomorrow
by Peter High, published on Forbes.com
05-27-2014
Likewise, many have attributed Apple’s success to bringing together technology and design in ways that were not the norm, even in Silicon Valley.
It should not be surprising that leading universities are starting to train people in a comparable fashion. A recent example of this is the Integrated Innovation Institute at Carnegie Mellon. Jonathan Cagan, the Co-Director of the Institute is a good representation of this trend. In addition to his co-directorship, he is the Director of Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Carnegie Institute of Technology and Ladd Professor in Engineering, Department of Mechanical Engineering. As he notes in my interview with him, the Integrated Innovation Institute operates at the intersection of business, engineering, and design in the hopes of providing depth and breadth to the next generation of entrepreneurs and business leaders.
(This is the twelfth article in the Education Technology Innovation series. To read the prior eleven, please visit this link.
Peter High: What is the charter of the Integrated Innovation Institute?
Jonathan Cagan: The Integrated Innovation Institute focuses on the intersection of business, engineering and design to advance fundamental knowledge and practice in product and service innovation. The Institute cross-trains students in the three disciplines to become elite innovators, which enhances the effectiveness of thinking and generating results. In addition to Masters level professional degrees, the Institute offers corporate training and pursues research to advance the state of the art.
High: How were the three disciplines that make up the program – engineering, design, and business – chosen?
Cagan: These are the three core disciplines necessary for product and service innovation: business, because the product/service needs to be viable in the marketplace; engineering, because it has to work and provide functional benefit; and design, because it needs to connect to people’s work and lifestyles in an aesthetic, interactive and emotional way. Carnegie Mellon is unique in having top programs in each of these fields and a long history of collaborating across disciplines.
Additional topics covered in the article include:
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