Joel Hartman - CIO at University of Central Florida

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Hello, my friends. Today we are talking to Joel Hartman, the CIO at the University of Central Florida, and we discuss the multiple dimensions of relationships, advice for how to structure your one-on-ones, and maximizing available resources to make informed decisions. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO Podcast.

(Joel Hartman at 00:00:21) Here we go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:22) This is the Modern CTO Podcast.

(Joel Hartman at 00:00:33) Hey, hello?

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:35) This is Joel. Is this Joel?

(Joel Hartman at 00:00:37) It is. How you doing?

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:39) I love your name.

(Joel Hartman at 00:00:42) Yeah. You know, you only have two Joels on the call, right? So we reached our limit.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:47) We have officially met the limit. Yeah. I don't meet other Joels that often. How about you?

(Joel Hartman at 00:00:52) There are more of them around than there used to be, I can say.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:56) People started realizing, like, oh, I know a really pleasant person named Joel. We should name our kids that.

(Joel Hartman at 00:01:02) Well, you'd rather have them say that than I know a few unpleasant people.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:07) I agree with that. So the format of the podcast is we just record the entire time. So there's no big intro. It's just you and I hanging out, talking about technology.

(Joel Hartman at 00:01:17) Alright. Okay. Good. Tell me a little bit about your background, Joel.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:20) A little bit about my background?

(Joel Hartman at 00:01:22) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:23) Oh, this is good. Okay. Cool. I've never been asked that before. This is awesome. Okay. So I started out writing code around age eight. My father is an engineer down here in Sarasota, Florida.

(Joel Hartman at 00:01:37) Alright. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:37) So we're neighbors. And from that, I got really interested in programming. And around age twelve, I ended up getting hit by a car and put into a wheelchair for a year. And so I got to spend a lot more time—I was out of school. Got to spend a lot more time refining my programming skills. Then I sold some applications that I had written around age eighteen, met some venture capital people, started doing due diligence on their investments, code reviews, then sharing my experience growing and becoming a leader of a team of thirty engineers. Turned that into a blog, turned into a book, turned into the podcast, and then now I get to talk with the greatest leaders in the world like you about technology, and it's very exciting.

(Joel Hartman at 00:02:22) Cool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:23) What about your background?

(Joel Hartman at 00:02:25) Well, so I've been around IT for a little longer than you have, as you can probably tell. And I don't know how far back you want to go, but my fascination with technology really began when I was a kid. You know, I'm one of these people who always took things apart and tried to get them back together again. Love science in high school, went on to a major state university, studied electrical engineering. And I diverged past midway in my academic program from electrical engineering to journalism. I'll explain why that was true in a minute. But at about the same time that I split off from engineering as a path, I was working at a higher ed institution in Illinois. And that institution, we're talking several years ago, bought one of their first DEC PDP computers and got a license for the UNIX operating system from Bell Laboratories, rest of their soul. And I managed to find a copy of the UNIX Programmer's Manual. And I read it cover to cover, then I read it again cover to cover, and I got an account on the machine. And it was my first real experience with midframe computing. Laptops and PCs were relatively new back then. That was the era of the dual floppy green screen IBM PC, if you know what I'm talking about.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:44) Oh, I know those. Yeah.

(Joel Hartman at 00:03:45) Yeah. But the UNIX operating system, multitasking operating system, really fascinated me in terms of the kinds of things you could do. Now I never learned a programming language. I've made a few attempts at it, but I became quite proficient with shell scripts and so on and so forth and chaining things together with the UNIX operating system. And it got me into a real fascination with computing that I continue to the current day, of course. And at that institution then where I was working, things began to change over time. They needed a phone system, so I ran the phone system project and ended up running the telephone system. And then the woman who ran the computer center left, and I was asked if I'd run the computer center, so I did that. And then the AV department and then the radio station, and we built a TV station. It was one thing after the other. So these various ventures into technology, I guess, kind of found me instead of I found them. But they all represented really interesting challenges. And another thing to say about that point in time that was interesting is that I'm not sure how many of your listeners really go back this far, but it was the point of time in which there was a transition underway from the world of analog to the world of digital. And once you could see what was about to happen, which was all media turning from their analog formats into the digital format and the development of the Internet, which began as NSFNET then became public, and then the eventual appearance of the World Wide Web—if you looked really hard, you could see how all these things were going to converge. And although you couldn't predict exactly how it would turn out, you could see a much different future where technology would play an increasingly central and significant role. And so I had kind of sorted that out in my own mind. And I was one of the earliest CIOs in higher education at that institution. And it's really been a fun ride ever since. It's, if you think about higher ed, colleges and universities, particularly research universities like the one where I work, are really pure information organizations. We create information through research, we pass on information through teaching, learning, and degree programs. We operate the institution through information. We create new technologies. Let's say Google and the Internet, for example, are ones that spun out of higher education settings. So it's really a place where people who are in information technology—underscore information—can really have a, I wouldn't call it a playground, but certainly a rich experience in the many ways where technology can play a role. And I find it equally as fascinating to the current day.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:24) I want to dive deeper into electrical engineering to journalism because that's a unique one.

(Joel Hartman at 00:06:30) So it had to do more with—I had a reasonable background, I thought. It was more a matter of the way that engineering was taught at that particular institution, which I will not name for obvious reasons. I had one of these experiences where the first couple of days I was there, the president lined all of us up in an auditorium and said, look to the left of you, look to the right of you. You know where that's going to go. Only two of you, maybe only one of you, will be here in two years. And the courses were taught in a relatively brutal way, the goal being to flunk people out as opposed to educate them and so on and so forth. And I think that was more a matter of the time than the place. I mean, people don't generally do that anymore, but it was not a setting that I found comfortable as a person. And so I was looking for something that was a little more on the creative side and switching from electrical engineering to something more creative. Took me a while to sort out. But there are some things I learned in journalism school that have really been very helpful as a CIO later in my career. One of them is you learn to ask questions to get to the, air quotes, truth, and you learn how to tell a story. And those two skills, I think, are very, very apropos for a CIO or any C-level university official in terms of understanding what is and what isn't, and being able to relate that to people in language that they understand. So I spent a lot of time translating techy to English, English to techy, all the time as a way of brokering the capabilities and risks of technology with the needs of the institution. And that's really fascinating.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:08) Writing is becoming more valuable in my life on a daily basis along with storytelling. I actually have here on my desk one of my favorite books on storytelling. Have you come across this, Storynomics?

(Joel Hartman at 00:08:20) No. I've not. I've read some of the nomics books, although not by McKee, but, you know, looking at nomics and so on and so forth.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:26) Do you know who Robert McKee is?

(Joel Hartman at 00:08:28) I do not.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:29) So he's one of the most famous script writers. Like, if you look at his work, it's like you've seen half of his movies or half of the content he's produced. And so he's like the most known person for describing story in film. Like, he was down here at Ringling giving his world tour. It's cool because I saw on his list, it's like Italy, Europe, and like all these, and then it's like Sarasota, Florida at Ringling. I was like, that's so cool. But then he wrote a book about marketing and how to tell better stories. But to your point, when I saw that engineering to journalism, my first thought was what I learned, like, writing my first book. It was super difficult, right? But going through that process with a writer and learning how to articulate what's in my mind out onto a page is something that has been immensely, immensely valuable. And so you found that to be true as well?

(Joel Hartman at 00:09:26) Yeah. If you think about the—you've heard the phrase from the back room to the boardroom regarding IT and the career of IT professionals. And really, what that means is that in the early days of IT and higher education, IT practitioners were back there running those big, loud, hot machines. And every so often popped out to ask for money or something, but basically were not strategic within the framework of the institution's goals and directions other than keeping the lights on, keeping things running. And obviously, that's changed as technology's played a greater role in all aspects of university operation, I would say, American life writ large operation. And so many CIOs then have made the transition over the years from the person who runs all the back room stuff to the person who sits at the president's cabinet or meets with the board of trustees and so on and so forth. And so the skill set has really had to change from technical skills, pure technical skills—programming and operations and things of that kind, which are important, but not necessarily the purview of the CIO anymore. The CIO's job is to understand the needs, goals, trajectory of the institution, the agenda of senior leadership, what the institution is trying to accomplish, and then orchestrate a set of services and resources and a team to run it that can fulfill those goals. So a consultant once told me a bit of important news, which is you don't want to be the IT person at the table who understands higher education. You want to be the higher education person at the table who understands IT and be seen as a professional as opposed to the IT guy, the IT girl, and so on and so forth. And I think there's some truth to that in terms of credibility, impact, and storytelling.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:16) I fully agree with that. And I like that you said that because one of the most common questions we get from the audience and the website is what are the roles and responsibilities of a CIO or a CTO? And my first question is always, give me context. What does your team look like? What industry are you in? Because first and foremost, you need to understand what's happening in that industry with your peers. And so you've been there, you know, you've been in higher education for twenty years. And so one of the things I'm interested in personally, like, between you and me, is were you always a fan of education, or is this something new? Did you learn the value of education and then become a fan?

(Joel Hartman at 00:11:58) Good question. My first job out of college was at a university, and it was kind of an opportunistic thing. I went there to see somebody and see something that the institution had, and it led to a very interesting conversation, which led to a job offer. And I had my resume in my briefcase, and I handed it over. And the next thing I knew, I had a job. And that was a long time ago, but I stayed at that institution twenty-eight years actually before I left. And then came to my current institution where I've been close to twenty-five years here. So my career is a little longer than twenty years.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:35) I apologize. I'm so sorry. Yeah.

(Joel Hartman at 00:12:36) No. However, it wasn't one year twenty-five times. It was twenty-five very different years. I think that's the exciting thing about being both in technology where change is constant and in higher education, where change is maybe not quite so constant, but the applications of technology are ever evolving. And it's one of these things, every day you come to work wondering what problem will occur, what opportunity will occur, where you can make some forward progress and so on and so forth. It's really a fascinating challenge. I would recommend it to anybody who's not in higher education as a potential career opportunity. You're not going to own a condo in South Beach right away from higher ed salaries. But there are many compensations for it. One of which is many institutions offer free or discounted education to the employees and their families. It's a great place to work. You get to be around a lot of very, very intelligent people. I have fascinating conversations with a lot of different people. They're cosmopolitan environments with people from around the globe. And if you think about it, you're participating in educating the generation who's going to take over the world and hopefully make it a better place. And if you think about the human potential of all these students of various ages resuming their degrees, a friend of mine used to say when they would walk into the library, they would look around and say, I wonder if he's going to cure cancer, you know, that kind of thing. It's very fascinating to think about what could happen.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:06) It's a very positive environment. Like, the mental picture I'm building right now in my head as you speak is you're around these people who value education, part of your tribe. They're all there, and it's a very growth-oriented atmosphere. Is that a correct description?

(Joel Hartman at 00:14:25) Yeah. Yeah. We have a phrase here. We refer to it as improving lives and livelihoods.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:32) I'm taking notes. This is good. So you know SCF and New College, right? Because you're in Orlando. You're in Orlando. Correct? Just so I—

(Joel Hartman at 00:14:44) I am in Orlando.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:45) Okay. Oh, and we should probably mention this. And you're the CIO of UCF.

(Joel Hartman at 00:14:49) Great. University of Central Florida. You bet.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:51) We've hired—we have graduates on staff. I married one.

(Joel Hartman at 00:14:56) Oh, when did she graduate?

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:58) Oh, that's a good question. Probably five, six, seven, eight years ago.

(Joel Hartman at 00:15:00) Oh, okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:00) Yeah. Yeah. I should know this. That's a way better fail for me than the other day when someone asked me how long we've been married.

(Joel Hartman at 00:15:13) I don't know.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:14) I was like, oh, don't do this. Oh, no. I was like, we can edit the podcast, Richie.

(Joel Hartman at 00:15:18) Yeah. Well, never forget your anniversary. I will say that to you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:22) And that's—I love technology because I have a recurring event that's set annually that reminds me two weeks before. Thank you, Apple.

(Joel Hartman at 00:15:30) Your alarm will ding and say, don't forget flowers. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:32) I know. And then I just talk to my best friend Alexa, and she gets something real quick to the house. Do you know Florida Funders, by the way? They put on the Synapse Conference. Did you hear about that at all?

(Joel Hartman at 00:15:45) I have, but I haven't participated.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:48) Oh, it's a great conference. The community got together, and usually conferences are like a very specific topic, like health care or AI or something. What they did was it's the Lightning Stadium. You know, Jeff Vinik owns them.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:04) And it's a giant circle, right? And so they put different sections, and it's all the innovation happening across all of Florida. So you'll get all the different types of companies. It's a huge spectrum, and so it's really fascinating and unique to walk through.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:18) So I suggest that you visit next year.

(Joel Hartman at 00:16:22) Thanks for the suggestion.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:24) I'll get you as a speaker there if you want.

(Joel Hartman at 00:16:28) Okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:28) You can wow the entire audience. The Amalie Arena will stand up and clap for Joel.

(Joel Hartman at 00:16:36) No, they'll clap their hands over their ears is what they'll do. I doubt that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:42) So when I brought up Ringling and SCF and New College, it's because I got to be the token young kid on a think tank. So they put together a think tank of all these really well-established people—it's the presidents of the college, and you see all these really well-established people—and it's just like Joel. It's like, really, it's me.

(Joel Hartman at 00:17:02) It's me.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:03) But we're in this think tank, and I want to get your opinion on this topic because I very much respect your opinion on this. They wanted to know what makes for an educated person.

(Joel Hartman at 00:17:15) That's a really good question. I mean, it's like the challenge of measuring learning, right? We all talk about measuring learning. Did somebody learn something? Is a degree worth something? What did you learn in your degree and those kinds of things? And it's challenging to measure learning because generally, by the time you discover what you learn—I mean, you can take tests and so on and so forth. Of course, you can do portfolio projects and demonstrate you can do something. But I think the real question of learning is what happens later as you begin to apply it.

(Joel Hartman at 00:17:45) And my sense is that education is one of the most valuable commodities that's available anywhere because, a, once you've got it, no one can take it away from you. B, you can shape what it is and the direction you take it. And c, it opens all kinds of doors. And the more education you have, the more doors that it opens. And I guess as my own path suggests and many others is that you never really predict where you're going to be, but the more education you have, the more possibilities are open in front of you as you move forward. And one of the things that's scarcest in life are choices, options, opportunities. So I always think of education as an amplifier for opportunity down the road.

(Joel Hartman at 00:18:30) And along with it, I think you learn the ability, particularly with all the information that's online today and the tools available—it facilitates lifelong learning. For example, I was just before our podcast today, I've been spending time on an online course, taking a pilot training course because I want to fly drones.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:50) What? That's awesome. You want to fly drones with me? I've got some drones.

(Joel Hartman at 00:18:55) Yeah. Oh, who do you have?

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:58) I've got some DJI drones.

(Joel Hartman at 00:19:00) Yeah, I just got a Mavic 2. Yeah, I'm going to get my FAA Part 107 and fly it commercially.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:09) Oh, that's beautiful. That's awesome. Yeah. You know what? There's actually—we were talking with, I was talking with the CIO of Sarasota County, and he was telling me, he's like, yeah, all these technologies that you think you'd just be able to deploy in the county, like, you have to follow the regulations. Like, we want to take a picture of the roof. We can't just because we're the county, we can't just do it. Like, we have to have the certifications and, yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:33) So when I saw your career, the first question that I had is the distance. And let's separate because you've got two twenty-plus-year sections of the career. So I think you'd be great for this. So the second section, the most recent one, the one that you're in right now, technology has moved very fast, at least in my opinion, and it's changed a lot of things. But is it moving faster than it did in the first chunk, or is it the same speed?

(Joel Hartman at 00:20:06) So that's an interesting question. And if you think about—I would look at it this way. I just did a presentation for one of our committees here on campus, our governance committees. And there were two pictures, so I can describe orally that kind of tell the story, I think, in partly answering your question. The first was an iceberg. And if you show just a part above the water, it's the part of technology that people see, feel, use, and touch in their daily lives. Could be their mobile phone. It could be their desktop computer. It could be whatever the technology is that they encounter. And then there's a huge chunk under the water that's invisible, which is all of the back-end stuff that's necessary to make the stuff you do use work.

(Joel Hartman at 00:20:52) And in a higher ed setting, it's important to understand that we're responsible for both pieces, not just the top part. The second picture was one of a pyramid where we sliced it from the base up. And the base is what I would call core services. It's the network. It's the back-end computer systems that run the ERP system and the email system and the web servers and so on and so forth that have to exist for anything else to work. Then the layer above that is the technology that people are generally exposed to through applications of various kinds.

(Joel Hartman at 00:21:25) Then above that are the key services that are supported by those technologies, like teaching, learning, or research, or running the university, and so on and so forth. Now at the tippy top, the point is the strategic services, the kinds of things you'd like to be doing, the innovative part. There's a three-part phrase that many of my colleagues use called run, grow, transform. I'm sure you've heard it. And run is basically keeping the lights on. It's the basics of running what you have to have: network, telephones, email, and so on and so forth to run a business. The grow has to do with both growing the technology portfolio and meeting the growth of your institution, which, as fast as our institution here is growing, it's a challenge. Now the transform piece is about the new things. And transformation, at least the dictionary definition, means doing something new or doing something old in a new way, basically changing the pattern of how a particular activity or event is orchestrated.

(Joel Hartman at 00:22:27) And I think the challenge is getting from run to transform. So much of what we do is supporting the basics. And funding is also a challenge that goes along with that, is that very few institutions can afford that thick layer of frosting on the cake where they can really make big investments in transformation, where in many cases a lot of the fun is.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:48) I haven't actually heard that before. So that was—I was taking notes like this is super useful. I like it. It's very clear.

(Joel Hartman at 00:22:56) Yep. But sometimes a picture's worth half a dozen words, you know?

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:01) If not more. So the future of education, right? What does it look like to you? Like, what is the best—if we were to jump ten years, right, because we go too far, it gets really messy. But if we were to go ten years into the future, do you think it's going to be similar, very different? Do you think the classrooms are going to be very different, the way we consume it? What do you see for the future?

(Joel Hartman at 00:23:31) So there are kind of two parts to that. There's what the technology enables and what the people will request or tolerate on the one hand. And in higher ed, there have been, in the areas you mentioned, a bit of tension over the years between what technology will enable and what people have an appetite to do. One example is online learning. Our particular institution here has one of the largest online learning programs in the country, which started many, many years ago.

(Joel Hartman at 00:24:00) But in the very beginning, there were obvious questions about how could you possibly teach online? How could students possibly learn online? How could you teach this or that online? Well, it turns out in the decades that followed, we answered those questions largely. And it turns out that the results for students, the success results for students in the online environment can, in fact, not just equal but exceed their success in comparable face-to-face courses.

(Joel Hartman at 00:24:27) Why might that be? Well, with online, you do faculty development. You have an array of exciting tools. And guess what? Students spend the majority of their lives in an online forum of one kind or another already. Why would they not expect their education to be delivered online and so on down the road? So we've gotten past that. But I've been through that era where what's possible is way ahead of what people have an appetite to do or would trust or want to get involved in. And it takes a long time for that culture to change in a higher ed setting where so much of it is based on past practice. You know, one of the faculty members we work with said when we're talking about an instructional designer helping him design a course and thinking about how to teach different than lecturing, he said, "Well, what I do to my students is what was done to me when I was a student. That's how I learned to teach."

(Joel Hartman at 00:25:19) And so you have to kind of work with people to get them to think through it. And the same is true of any other technology. But the online teaching-learning environment crosscuts many, many areas within a university, not only the business systems, but the way the faculty are evaluated and rewarded and how their loads are generated and how many students they can teach and on and on. And that's one example of a major transformation that I think exemplifies the challenge of technology can, people may not be ready for it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:53) Yeah. It's like the market can withstand 10% innovation. That's something I hear a lot. Have you ever gotten into—because, I mean, you're in Orlando. It's a big place. You're in a very prestigious position. EdTech is huge. Have you advised or experienced any of or helped or discussed any of the EdTech companies locally?

(Joel Hartman at 00:26:17) We have—our relationship with our key vendors, we try to frame as more of a partnership relationship than a customer-vendor relationship. Again, I won't name companies on your podcast, but we have an MOU with a major software company whose name you would immediately recognize, where we're co-investing in some innovative projects like a mixed reality laboratory and a massive amount of research data that's about to go online for researchers to access and device technology and so on and so forth. So limited resources, but a lot of opportunity. We have tended at our institution to focus on a set of core things and try to go deep on those, which includes staff training, staff learning, staff engagement, and then leverage those to the best advantage possible to fulfill the widest spectrum of applications as opposed to have a million different ways of doing something. You have to find a way to support all of that. For example, we have—in most institutions, if they did an inventory, we'd find how many CRM systems do you have? And I know some institutions where it's a double-digit number. Well, that's interesting, but it also indicates that there's a missed opportunity there in terms of getting people together around some common platforms and leverage those platforms and leverage the licensing and so on and so forth to economize. Your question earlier about where's higher ed, where's technology going to go?

(Joel Hartman at 00:27:45) The other one I think that you mentioned, classrooms, actually you can see a path forward with. If you think of a traditional classroom—I mean, the classrooms were probably you and I went to school, their rows of seats or maybe it's curved for an auditorium. There's a person on the front who's a smart person, and then there's the people in the back, which is us, which are the not-so-smart people yet. And then they talk to us for fifty minutes. We take notes, show up and take an exam, and that verifies whether we understood what they said or not. We read the book. We communicate with others. More of a formal transmission of knowledge format. The way that's changing is with active learning. And the idea of active learning is that the classroom has no front. The furniture is not fixed. And that when you walk into such a classroom, it's the students who are working and not the faculty member. That person is coaching, facilitating, explaining, and so on and so forth.

(Joel Hartman at 00:28:34) And by active engagement individually or in groups, the students then not just hear about what they're learning, but experience it, work with it, challenge it, tell about it, and learn through doing as opposed to listening. And we're in the process of converting a number of our classrooms into an active learning format, actually big time. We're recognizing that many faculty either aren't prepared or aren't willing to go from where they've been into that format in one jump. So we're setting the classrooms up so they can be used in the traditional manner, and then they can adapt as they go forward and evolve into a more active learning format as they begin to learn the tools and techniques and see if it works for them and their students.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:34) So I'm curious to know about relationships, right? Because they're very important—relationships with your team, relationships with your peers, important for your career. And I'm curious, like, what are some of the big areas that you've learned or the big things that you've learned around the importance of relationships professionally?

(Joel Hartman at 00:29:54) Yeah. I think it's worth thinking of relationships as having multiple dimensions. The relationships with those who report to you directly and who work under them in your organization. Your relationships with those in the institution who are the same level that you are, who share a common goal of working together to advance the business. Those above you that you report to are accountable to, including governing boards and provosts and presidents and so on and so forth. And then outside parties—higher ed is certainly confronted with accountability all the time in terms of state organizations and auditors and so on who you have to work with. So there are these many dimensions of relationships. And I think it's important to be able to work with all of those in at least as successful a way as possible. Not all of them are obviously successful. And where there are issues or challenges, a relationship issue with a peer or a subordinate or even a boss, to have strategies to deal with that.

(Joel Hartman at 00:30:59) Everybody wants something. Okay? And I think understanding what that is and how that shapes your behavior, pro and con, gives you a way of opening a channel of communication where at the best of times, you're both in the groove, you're both pursuing the same goals, you're both making progress. It's a positive, happy relationship. The opposite being not so positive, not so happy, but at least you recognize that you both have a job to do and can perhaps agree to stay out of each other's way and go forward. Universities are big places with lots of different personality types and so on and so forth, as are other businesses. And it's just over time, you kind of learn how to work with those you can, have a good time with those you can't, and avoid the ones who you possibly can't possibly work with.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:48) That is amazing that you brought that up because this morning, Jake, our producer, and I, we were talking about advice and things to include in our new, in the new book that is coming out. And we had this concept—it was like a plus sign, like a cross, right? And then we had people next generation, your peers, and the people above you. And you essentially just articulated that.

(Joel Hartman at 00:32:08) Yeah. The technology turns out to be the easy part, and the people turn out to be the less easy part because people are very complex individuals, and they're affected by a lot of forces, some of which are technology forces, as it turns out. And you've gotta find a way to get along with people if you're gonna get business done, particularly at a C-level position. And to recognize that we all have a job to do. And sometimes we work collaboratively together, sometimes we don't.

(Joel Hartman at 00:32:43) But by and large, constructive relationships are increasingly important, both for the sake of the organization and for the sake of the IT community within the organization. I'll give you a for instance here. When I came to this institution, there was only a small central IT operation and nothing out in the institution, which was moderately large at that time. It's about three times that big today. But you could see where things were going, the growth in technology, and all these problems ending up in one person's desk was just not going to work.

(Joel Hartman at 00:33:18) So we put in place a distributed IT framework where departments and colleges had IT units. We have the central IT unit. We've worked very hard to collaborate across the campus to keep everybody working together toward common goals and make sure things don't break because somebody goes off the ranch. That worked for many, many years until I began to get requests for new and expanded server rooms multiple times a month. I said, what's going on here?

(Joel Hartman at 00:33:45) And it turned out that the distributed IT workforce collectively across the institution had become larger than my own centralized IT workforce. And the amount of equipment accumulated had turned out to be stupendous and duplicated. So we brought in a consulting firm who looked the whole situation over, over a period of time, and said, on the continuum of too centralized to too decentralized, you're pretty far to the decentralized end of the spectrum and to the tune of perhaps millions being spent duplicatively across the institution on these different operations. So a few years ago, we created an initiative to recenter the IT organization into a new central IT operation. And I talk about human relationships.

(Joel Hartman at 00:34:33) That's an interesting challenge for human relationships because you've gotta convince the IT workforce to, A, give up their server rooms and move their stuff into the central shared services center, and you gotta convince them to come work with the central IT organization, and you gotta convince their bosses to turn over the money and the administration to bless the initiative, and so and so forth. So, given the size of our university, I've treated it as a coalition of the willing operation. We've established the foothold. We have a number of colleges who've come on board. We've transitioned their staff.

(Joel Hartman at 00:35:06) We worked out the issues of serving those individuals into a new culture, delivering services to where they used to reside and work, and are now in the process of soliciting new participants. And it's gonna take years. This is not one of these mandated things—you'll do it tomorrow, and God bless you. More a matter of convincing people of the merits and trying to deliver on the promise.

(Joel Hartman at 00:35:31) And that's where the storytelling comes in useful, I guess.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:36) Absolutely, right? Because you have to spread the message and you have to share the perspective, and the stories are great vehicles for that.

(Joel Hartman at 00:35:44) Yeah. One of the things that I hear as the most frequent requests from all parties is more transparency. Basically, don't hide it. Tell us what's going on. Tell us the good. Tell us the bad, but tell us. We wanna know what's happening. We wanna know how it affects us and so on and so forth. And so we've tried to be as transparent as possible. I'll give a little talk at as many meetings as people will attend.

(Joel Hartman at 00:36:09) We have town hall meetings frequently where people can come in. We have an anonymous email line where people can submit anonymous questions, which I answer. And it's a way of hiding nothing, answering everything, and explaining what's going on and being honest about your challenges and problems. And you gotta fix them, but you just have to be honest if they exist. And I think the other is that the people need to know that this is really in their benefit, not just my benefit or even the institution's benefit.

(Joel Hartman at 00:36:37) And I think if you think about a distributed IT workforce where there's a bunch of people in little departments here and there, they may be large, but they're not huge. You can only rise to a certain level. There are only certain jobs you can do, right, in that kind of a limited organization. Bringing people together in one big organization, in one big institution, means that any job on the planet—any job on our planet—could be yours if you wanted to chart a career path in that direction. We'll support you.

(Joel Hartman at 00:37:05) We'll find out where you wanna go. You may be a programmer. You wanna turn into information security or vice versa. We can tell you how to get there. We can provide you training, job shadowing, put you in a unit where you can see if you like it or not and help you map that transition.

(Joel Hartman at 00:37:20) And the promise I made them was that the career path would be entry-level job to my desk and everything in between. And we're trying to fulfill that promise.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:32) So you mentioned a little bit about we'll always have problems, like problem solving, things like that. That piqued my interest because I'm curious—we were talking about decision making recently. It was a popular topic about how people approach decision making. Do you have any good thoughts on that?

(Joel Hartman at 00:37:53) Yeah. The challenging problems in governance, management, and certainly in technology are more complex than any one person can get their head around by themselves. And you can have an opinion, you can have gut feelings, you can have experience, and so on and so forth, all of which is valuable. But I tend to think that no single person, certainly myself, has the answer to everything. And probably if they think they do, you're gonna be in trouble pretty soon.

(Joel Hartman at 00:38:21) So I'm really fond of what I call smart groups, where you bring together a group of people who include those who don't all agree with each other, and you challenge them to think about the problem, express their opinions, debate back and forth, and maybe not just in one meeting, but maybe multiple meetings depending on the scope of the thing you're talking about. And try to come out with the best decision based on the best information from the best minds you have available, and then make the decision, but make it. Don't let it go on for months and months and months and months and never decide because you probably missed an opportunity. You may make a mistake, but you're gonna learn from it. But getting contributions from as many people as are possible or appropriate, I think, has proved very valuable over the years.

(Joel Hartman at 00:39:08) And with technology, people used to be able to be generalists. I knew this, I knew that. Today, that's increasingly difficult where people have to specialize because each field has gone so deep, so broad. So you need people from various backgrounds to express themselves. And the other is that don't ask only technology people about technology questions.

(Joel Hartman at 00:39:30) Ask the end users. Ask others in the institution. When we do big data projects, ERP projects, we started out involving the people who run the department like HR and finance and the technical staff working together to build this new thing. We very soon learned we missed something, which was the end users, the people who actually use the system and the people who are affected by its use. And we've brought them on board for later projects, and they've gone much, much, much better as a result.

(Joel Hartman at 00:40:00) We're doing a project now where there's even an additional layer that we didn't have before that's important. Two, actually. One is people focusing on change management and people focusing on project management. And so those two elements have been stirred into the mix and have been very, very valuable as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:20) How does your—do you have a team of direct reports? Like, how does that look?

(Joel Hartman at 00:40:25) That has changed over time. A couple of years back, I had library, IT, which includes all of IT and telecommunications, classroom technology, online learning, and then we spun off the classroom and online departments into a new division of digital learning. And I ended up getting space administration, and I brought information security up to a division-level position. So today, I have library, IT, space administration, and information security. Space admin was not something that I had ever prepared for or actually sought.

(Joel Hartman at 00:41:02) It was a matter of a couple people retired, and I was holding the short straw at the time. So I'm doing space administration here, which is an interesting challenge.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:11) Oh, that's like physical administration of the physical space, square footage?

(Joel Hartman at 00:41:15) Yeah. Yeah. People need to find an office or a classroom, and they come to my department and we try to find space.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:21) See, I thought you might be working with SpaceX and Elon Musk.

(Joel Hartman at 00:41:25) No, no, not that. Well, we actually—we have a lot of relationships with the Space Coast. In fact, we have a—we've had some of our equipment on missions and some of our researchers doing NASA projects. Oh, yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:41) So do you have people like—do you have a—is it you and then you have a person that helps with the space administration, library, and IT? Do you have a group of like five, seven people that you mentor and grow?

(Joel Hartman at 00:41:52) Well, yeah, each of the areas that I mentioned has a person in charge, and those are my direct reports. And then we have lots and lots and lots of committees and working groups that I try to socialize with, be part of, tune in on, and so on and so forth, and make myself available to. But they're the ones who run their departments. And you try to pick people who are obviously qualified and competent, to give them the support, the best support you can give them. It all works out.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:22) How do you go about, like, coaching them up? Do you have, like, a monthly one-on-one? Like, what's your philosophy on that?

(Joel Hartman at 00:42:31) So we have—I have a weekly one-on-one with each direct report, and then we have an executive committee where we all get together with some other of our staff, and we talk about division-level goals, tasks, responsibilities, deadlines, or challenges. And then we rotate each unit hosting one of those each month and so on and so forth. They have to bring all the cookies and sodas. And then we do a going around, reporting from each unit, so everybody knows what the others are up to. So that's how we do it.

(Joel Hartman at 00:43:03) And it seems to work pretty well. I mean, you form a tight bond with these people as you have to because your success and reputation depends on how they do their jobs, and their success and reputation depends on how they manage their resources and funds and so on. So it's something where you're always fine-tuning, and so on and so forth, but it's an opportunity to grow collectively together.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:30) Now without a doubt, there's someone listening that just became a leader. It's one of the most common ways people find us. They get promoted into leadership, and then they start looking for resources, and they find and start listening. And this hypothetically, this individual, new leader, is going to start doing their first direct report one-on-ones. What advice would you give to that person about the relationships, the dynamics, and how to structure that one-on-one?

(Joel Hartman at 00:43:56) With those who report to them?

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:58) Yeah.

(Joel Hartman at 00:43:59) Well, I would say it's important to understand what your job is first and what success means to you and to the organization you work in—what it is you need to do and how well you need to do it, when you need to get it done, and what you have to work with to make it happen. And then communicate that to those who report to you so they can translate those same goals, values, limitations, concerns, opportunities to their workforce. And the most important thing is that you understand it correctly, communicate it correctly, and they get it and know what it is they need to do, and you agree on that. You can turn those into then metrics for evaluation. I ask you to do this.

(Joel Hartman at 00:44:43) You said you would do it. It happened, checkbox. Didn't happen? Yeah, let's talk about it. Okay? And so those kinds of things give you an opportunity to have contextual conversations about what is the job, how did the performance go, where can we all improve, did I not make it clear to you, and so on and so forth.

(Joel Hartman at 00:45:01) And it's just a way of building an effective relationship. So much of it is you have to assume you're hiring qualified people. Why would you not? Right? So the trick then is if they're qualified, do you give them what they need to succeed?

(Joel Hartman at 00:45:15) And do you communicate what the path is they need to follow to exercise that? And you find out often a lot of it is, I didn't really make it clear to them, and they did what they thought I said, but that wasn't what I meant, you know. So—

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:30) Communication, right?

(Joel Hartman at 00:45:31) Yeah. Communication. Pretty important.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:33) I like that. I think that's fantastic insight. Now let's—I'm gonna give, as we start to wrap up here, I'm gonna give you another hypothetical situation. Let's say I introduce you to Douglas Terrier, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:44) And you guys end up hanging out, you hit it off, he's touring NASA, and he comes across this one room, and it says top secret. He's like, hey, you wanna check this out? And you're like, sure. So he, you know, does his retina scan, you go through, and he's got a time machine. And this time machine allows you to go back to the beginning of your career, the very first time that you became a leader, and give yourself, you know, one piece of advice. What would that be?

(Joel Hartman at 00:46:12) Yeah. That's an interesting question. And in fact, if I had that opportunity, I would turn the time machine and go the other direction.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:19) I love it.

(Joel Hartman at 00:46:20) And the reason is that the future can't happen fast enough, and I would like to see what's out there ahead of me. But to take your question as you asked it, there's nothing major in my past that I think I would want to change in that it all collectively led to where I am and I'm satisfied with where that is. I mean, I don't have any, gee, I wish I'd done that or wish I'd done that. Yes, I could've, you know, made a different degree program or I could've done this or taken a different job.

(Joel Hartman at 00:46:50) For example, if you chose to go in public service like higher education versus the commercial world, that's a pretty big choice because the two environments are very, very different and the opportunities are very, very different. And I'm glad I made the choice I did, but others would say I would never work in higher ed. I worked for Google or whatever, you know, and earn a million bucks. And good for you. So I guess what I would say is that if you begin to make bad choices, you will soon recognize it.

(Joel Hartman at 00:47:21) And the goal is can you figure out how to make better choices in the future? But I don't believe in going back and tinkering with the past to change things. And if I could, I suppose I might have, but I'm not tempted to do that. I'm really more tempted to say, what's happening in five years? What's happening in ten years?

(Joel Hartman at 00:47:37) And I wanna come back now and do something now that will influence the future as opposed to tinkering with the past.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:43) So then let's serve that question up. Now the question becomes, you get to go one spot into the future, hang out there for ten minutes, and come back. How far do you go? Where do you go?

(Joel Hartman at 00:47:54) Yeah. It's a good question. So there are kinda two choices. You can visit your own future or you can visit somewhere else, somebody else's future, and learn from that. And that's an interesting choice.

(Joel Hartman at 00:48:06) If possible, go both places, of course. But I think it might be interesting to go into your own organization's future and see what happened and then come back to the president and say, "Gosh, I better never do that again," or "Here's an opportunity. Now that I know it, I can seize it, and I'll be a hero or a heroine and make something positive happen."

(Joel Hartman at 00:48:28) You know, there isn't really a single future. There are many, many, many futures out there, and the goal is to, as they say in the movie, choose wisely on the path you take.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:42) How far would you want to go?

(Joel Hartman at 00:48:44) That's a good question. My concern on going too far out is to end up in a not very good place. Yeah, global warming, who knows? You know, asteroid, planet... who knows what will happen? Maybe five, ten years would be about right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:03) Yeah. And that would withstand anything you could learn to implement and make it useful, right?

(Joel Hartman at 00:49:08) And if you think about ten years—I mean, if you think about ten-year intervals in the history of technology—about every ten years, there's a black swan event where something pops out that you would not have anticipated, like the internet, like the iPhone. That kind of thing will pop out and have a major impact on things that you could never predict. But there it is, it happened. And the impact could be huge. You can take that knowledge back and prepare for it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:37) Oh, you've thought about this, man.

(Joel Hartman at 00:49:40) I have thought about it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:41) I like... you know what? That's one of the most unique ones I've ever... you're right. The black swan—you would go forward, find what the black swan event was, and then come back. You could be in that area.

(Joel Hartman at 00:49:53) And you could also invest, right? Could you not do that? You sure could.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:57) Like, if you popped in here and you saw—you were just ten minutes on the corner and you saw the Ubers and Lyfts and all the ride-sharing concept—and then you went back, you would just be like, "Alright, let's go invest a little bit in every ride-sharing company."

(Joel Hartman at 00:50:09) I don't think I would have done that, quite. I have others in mind, however.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:12) Which ones? Share.

(Joel Hartman at 00:50:13) Well, I would do the Microsofts, the Googles, the Apples.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:18) Okay.

(Joel Hartman at 00:50:19) Those kinds of blue chips.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:21) What about Bitcoin?

(Joel Hartman at 00:50:23) No, no, no, no, no.

(Joel Hartman at 00:50:24) No, no, no, no, no.

(Joel Hartman at 00:50:25) I mean, look. How many of the Bitcoin exchanges have been raided, you know, pilfered—I guess is the word I was looking for—money disappearing? I mean, people dying knowing the only password. I mean, it's a pretty rocky story so far.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:47) But if you knew where that one bubble was, you just look at the stock...

(Joel Hartman at 00:50:50) Well, if you knew what the bubble was, you bet.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:52) Yeah, yeah, yeah.

(Joel Hartman at 00:50:53) Something goes up and down that fast—if you hit it when it's down and bail out when it's up, you're in good shape. Oh, man. I tell you, though, the thing that I think comes out of that that is worth thinking about for the future is blockchain. I think blockchain is going to be big, but it's going to take a lot of shaping and developing. But we're already seeing people talking about college transcripts done on blockchain, that kind of stuff. So it's happening.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:16) Yeah. I actually have heard of that. That's actually... when I was looking and reading into it, I said, "Oh, this is actually a really interesting concept"—credentialing on the chain.

(Joel Hartman at 00:51:26) Yeah. If you think of today's resume versus tomorrow's blockchain of learning opportunities, I mean, lots of different things that could influence.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:34) Oh, I like it. I'm looking forward to that. Alright, well, thank you so much, Joel.

(Joel Hartman at 00:51:38) Okay. Thanks very much, Joel. Nice talk with you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:43) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email: [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.