Digital Leadership Must-Haves for 2025: A CDO's Picks
If your campus doesn't have an AI committee, you need to start one. This doesn't necessarily mean creating policies to say what people can't do. It's merely offering ethical guidelines. That's something we pretty much all missed, initially, with social media — whereas here, we have the opportunity to get it right at the outset.
Grush: That's a great point!
Workforce Development
Wozencroft: The next one is workforce development, or more precisely, workforce development through automation and augmentation. The prime example of this gets into the security side of the house, where we are increasingly facing cyberattacks. There's a lot of chatter out there, with CIOs and CISOs starting to think harder about how they'll be able to automate defenses: "How can I make better use of my logs?" and "We don't have nearly enough of the workforce focusing on cybersecurity." AI and ML can help us trim the noise, but you still need the human touch.
This is where NJIT's play for a student-powered security operations center, similar to the Louisiana State University's SOC, can leverage one of the best assets we have on a higher education campus: our own students.
It's a double win, as we can serve students better by getting them an experiential learning component and hands-on training at a lower price point, while offering significant relief for overburdened IT organizations.
Grush: I'm guessing you have personal experience with, or maybe in, the student workforce…
Wozencroft: Yes, that's both how I got started in IT as a student, and professionally how I've been able to "pay it forward" by offering a similar advantage to our students.
What was incredibly meaningful for me as a student was that I felt very confident entering the workforce because I had something tangible on my resume. It wasn't just, "Oh, I did a project," or "I learned something theoretical." I knew how to take what I learned and apply it immediately.
Grush: That's great! What's your next pick?
Long-Term Budget Strategies
Wozencroft: The next one I have is budget and building long-term strategies. This plays a bit into the idea of the digital team getting to sit at the table for strategic decision making. But it also means starting to understand that for a lot of colleges and universities, IT is considered a cost center. That makes some sense; We're not big revenue generators. But IT is too often falling shy to other big cost centers like, let's say, facilities or overall personnel and overhead. Not to say that none of that's important, but it's so much more critical now to have the CIO's perspective at the table for those budget discussions — because it's becoming a much more complex world, with digital technology at the heart of it.
For things like AI, things like data science, and other areas that we're trying to exploit and to make better, I'm finding that industry wide, there's not a lot of understanding or shared perspectives. So, in the office of the CFO and other business units, key budget decisions have too often been made solely on how "costly" these investments are.
Grush: It sounds like the CIO-level needs to be present for those high-level conversations about budget, but it's not about the IT department scrambling to get all the funding available to it; the CIO/CDO instead should be included in making intelligent funding choices… not just reacting to them. It's not a simple case of "everything I can get for IT".
Wozencroft: You're right. And if you actually add it all up, a university can very quickly sink itself if it just says "all digital for everything". So being a member of that planning committee means sharing perspectives on how we balance tuition, academic delivery, faculty lines, staff lines, new buildings or renovations, and so forth, and still keep digital priorities.