Digital Leadership Must-Haves for 2025: A CDO's Picks
Again, the long-term picture is becoming increasingly more complex. I think budget strategies can no longer be decided in a vacuum without the CIO or CDO at the table.
Grush: It seems like a lot is at stake. What else is on your list?
Sustainable Technology Practices
I think about sustainable technology in two different ways. One is sustainability in a sense that's similar to what I just mentioned about budgets, because I'm asking my team "How do we scale this long term in a cost-effective way?" And that's a particularly big concern right now with AI, given data consumption and operational costs mounting.
But there's also a less obvious aspect of sustainability, which is managed through green IT practices, like energy-efficient data centers, balancing cloud storage and services, and controlling e-waste.
There are a lot of ESG conversations happening around campuses: It's something that I find myself getting more and more excited by, but also struggling to figure out, "Okay, if I do need to scale AI, how do I do that in an environmentally friendly way?"
Grush: I would think that the sooner you get your arms around environmentally sustainable practices, the better — you will be asked about this eventually…
Wozencroft: True! I was actually asked about it at our faculty senate a few weeks ago. We were talking about AI and a faculty member said, "What are we doing to talk about energy?" And I kind of winged my way through it and said, "Well, you know, we have data center partners who are looking at this. And we're talking to the technology vendors who are addressing this in new products."
Grush: Would building your own practices on real institutional data in this context of sustainability be better than relying on vendor products?
Wozencroft: It's hard to predict which tools will be the most helpful. But this is where the CIO/CDO can partner with academia really well: Start with power and see what your own consumption looks like. You can begin to do some studies to identify peak power consumption and move loads so that you're running at cheaper times from a power consumption standpoint. There's a lot of interesting work that can be done there.
Grush: You've now mentioned five “must-haves". Do you have five more?
Data-Driven Decision-Making
Wozencroft: I easily have five more! Let's take data-driven decision making next. It seems pretty obvious, but the big thing here is making sure your data is right. This may become step one before you even get into the AI space. Yes, we're all excited about AI, but what we need to keep in mind is that it's squarely based on the quality of data. So, if you are not in a place where you feel like you're comfortable with your data — which I would say is probably 90 percent of us, if not more — then that's a conversation that you need to be having at the C-suite.
It's data governance, it's data literacy, it's data management… And, it's not an IT issue. It's a campus-wide leadership issue where it can't just be IT saying "Okay, we'll go fix it." The true "fix" needs to be changing the complete behavior or even the culture of the campus to make sure that when we are inputting data into a system, or when we're consuming data, that it is the right data.
Grush: That seems very straightforward, but huge.
Collaboration with Industry and Academia
Wozencroft: Yes! Next up: collaboration. It sounds like a familiar old term, almost worn. But the reality is, it is now more important than ever.
One big area for us is partnerships with companies — like NVIDIA, AWS, Verizon, Dell, or other software partners, to understand the directions they're going with their technology products, and why. And I don't just talk with them about the technology (though they benefit from our feedback). I also talk with them about the workplace. A CIO/CDO can be a great facilitator for building partnerships that help us understand what skill sets students will need for their future employment so that we can deliver more relevant, personalized education that will make our graduates infinitely more job-ready.