Educational Technology On A Global Scale, with Bryna Dash, VP of Government and Corporate Sales at Anthology

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:03) Hello, my friends. Today we're talking to Bryna, Vice President of Government and Corporate Sales at Anthology, formerly Blackboard. And we discuss the misconceptions of government as an industry, how educational technology is being utilized in unlikely spaces, and how some of our most important life obstacles are self-created. All of this right here, right now, on the Modern CTO Podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:33) Here we go. This is the Modern CTO Podcast. I was hoping you could share your story from the beginning of time to how you got here today.

(Bryna at 00:00:49) Well, I too started as a software developer at a college. I worked for Pricewaterhouse before it was even PricewaterhouseCoopers, which I don't think even exists anymore now. But they trained me to be a developer at a college, and I did that for quite some time. And then I did system analysis work, system design work, some more of the front end of the project. From there, I went to a startup company, and I did product management.

(Bryna at 00:01:15) I went back to school during the bust when it was difficult to get jobs in startups. And I went to MIT Sloan, got my MBA. And coming out of Sloan, I had a lot of career conversations with a ton of people just trying to decide what I wanted to do. I did want to go back to startup, but there wasn't a lot at that time. And I decided to take a job working for IBM in the federal government.

(Bryna at 00:01:43) And the deciding factor for me was somebody who is infinitely wiser said that the government always has needs, always has requirements, and industry can always help. And there's just so much you can do. And I live in Maryland, so it made a lot of sense for me to work with federal government. That's what I did for fifteen years. When I left IBM, I was leading their federal cloud division and came to Blackboard, which is now Anthology.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:10) When you were at IBM working with the federal government, was that education-related technology or just general technology?

(Bryna at 00:02:17) No, it was all software technology, services, hardware. I actually started out, one of the first things I ever did to support the government was after Hurricane Katrina. I helped FEMA distribute laptops out into the field into multiple states in the South. So they used IBM laptops, and that was one of the first things I did with IBM. But, obviously, fifteen years, a lot changes in technology. And by the end, I was working on the security credentials of our government cloud environment and all of the applications that we ran inside that cloud.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:51) And so why the transition to education?

(Bryna at 00:02:54) Well, it's more of Blackboard's interest to leverage my skills with cloud technology and working with the government. So Blackboard already had a government business, and they had moved all of their products to SaaS-based offerings. And so having somebody who had a lot of experience with a lot of government agencies working through that process was something that they really wanted.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:13) Yeah. And it's quite the process. People have told me as well. They said, you know, the government always has needs, and they always have money. Right? To work with the government, though, there is a learning curve. So one of the products we had, somebody suggested that I sell it to the government. They knew somebody. There was all these hoops and contract vehicles and all of these things that you have to do in order to where you'll see that the companies that do this, they'll have dedicated divisions to it or dedicated salespeople just to the government-specific deals because it's so unique. It's not like normal B2B transactions.

(Bryna at 00:03:44) Sure. So we have a specialized team that I lead inside of the company that works with not just federal government, but state and local agencies as well. And it's not just the procurement, I think, is what you were talking about. It's very specialized within the government space. That's true. But also the products, the process. And when I say the products, it's not just functional, it's nonfunctional requirements as well that are unique. So working on behalf of our clients, and not just our clients but our clients' mission they're trying to accomplish, and being able to bring that back to the company and ensure that our offerings continue to support these massive mission sets. If you think about the government, most of what they do is training. It might not be training their employees. It could be training stakeholders outside of the government or training citizens. It's just a huge endeavor, and it's something that I know my team's really passionate about supporting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:39) Do they have really strict controls regarding security?

(Bryna at 00:04:44) Sure. The company invests very heavily in the security of our offerings, especially in the cloud where some control is transferred from the government agency to our company. And so we have to show that we know how to ensure those controls, especially in the cloud, especially in a follow-the-sun support environment and making sure that the proper access controls are in place, but also that we can still keep the environment up and running 24/7.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:15) Now I'm in my mid-thirties, and most people, when I told them, hey, I'm talking to Blackboard, they're like, oh, the college software. Blackboard just merged with another company, correct?

(Bryna at 00:05:29) That's right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:29) And what company was that?

(Bryna at 00:05:31) We merged with Anthology, and our company name is Anthology now. However, the product name still persists, especially for the federal government in the DC area where the Blackboard company was founded. The brand is very strong and trusted. And so we do keep that name on the products, although our corporate name has changed to Anthology. It was a great merger, perfect merger, in fact, because Blackboard was squarely focused on learning management technology, whereas Anthology was focused on a broad set of technologies for an entire learning campus.

(Bryna at 00:06:08) You think that campus might be a university or college. That's easy to think about a campus, but it could also be a government campus, right, where they have lots of different features and functions that they're trying to accomplish. So Anthology had a very broad set of tooling for those environments, and we were very deep and focused on learning. And so it was a perfect combination because they didn't have the learning component in their portfolio. So now combined, we can offer a complete technology suite to campuses.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:36) Product-wise, it makes sense. What's the culture transition been like?

(Bryna at 00:06:40) Culture transition has been maybe nonexistent for my team. Anthology didn't have a government team. So we get to offer more to the government clients that we already have and bring more forward to government agencies that don't yet know us. So for us, it's been pretty smooth and all upside, really, for the team and for our clients.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:02) Well, that's exciting. What type of problems are you solving today?

(Bryna at 00:07:06) Oh, wow. So it's really interesting. You know, you talked about your familiarity working with the government. People think the government is one industry when actually the government is an industry of industries. It's very complex, and the missions we're supporting are quite different. Even within the context of the Department of Defense, the missions we support are different. And certainly on the civilian side, the missions are quite different. So if you think about just the activity of inspections that the government has to accomplish, we support inspections of everything from produce to railroads to pipelines. All of that learning, training, and then actual doing in the field is on Blackboard technology. So it's pretty amazing.

(Bryna at 00:07:55) Another area besides inspections that you might not necessarily think of when you think of Blackboard is law enforcement. So all of the training that goes into firing range, you wouldn't think that that would be on Blackboard, but it most certainly can be. You can take Blackboard out into the field, and you can assess learners on accuracy, competency, skill sets, and have all of that data available to you alongside standardized test data type of thing as well. So we have customers who do training for officers, like preparing them to go to court to testify. Right? So these are things that traditionally have been physical classroom-based courses that are now able to be online courses, and a lot of agencies are benefiting from it in so many ways, but supporting just a huge range of missions and functions.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:54) I have a range on my property. I've got five acres out in Tennessee. And my neighbor and I, we built a range on the border between our properties, so we both use it. But to think about Blackboard being something that you would take to the range and do training on, that's actually a really cool use case. And you're right. I hadn't thought about any of that, inspections and all of those different use cases. I'm curious to know, do you have to ever build out custom code specific to the training situation?

(Bryna at 00:09:22) So the course content, the reason why we're such a good fit for the government is because the course content is created by the government in most cases. They're the subject matter experts. It's not course content that you can buy off the shelf. It's not Chem 101 even. Not that all Chem 101 classes are the same either, but it's not like buying a leadership course or your annual security and privacy training. If that's what you're trying to accomplish, we're overkill. We're really good for mission training. We're really great at supporting customized subject matter expert-based training. We're excellent at blended learning. So where some of your learning is in front of a computer on purpose, there are certain skills you're learning that you benefit from doing repetitively, and so we support that.

(Bryna at 00:10:14) There are certain pretests that you take to ensure that the time you spend in the field is time best spent. So really trying to leverage blended learning to make sure that the field time, the expensive time, the high-touch time is most beneficial and not wasteful. Blended learning is our forte, and that's why it's such a great fit for government. And you're talking about firing range. One of the things that came to my mind recently, we had the Department of Defense Fire Academy speak about how they're using the platform, and they have the largest fire pad in the world where they train firefighters.

(Bryna at 00:10:51) So, obviously, they are not using Blackboard for all of their training, but it is a hugely important part of what they do to prepare for the pad, to make the best use of the pad, to make their training as efficient and effective as possible. They have a really critical mission, and those servicemen go out to all branches and support in theater. So what they're doing is incredibly important, and we are really proud to be a part of their mission.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:21) So I have a brother-in-law who's a firefighter. And one of the things that we were talking about was, I forget the name of it, but it's a device, it's got a screen on it, maybe three to five inches, and you point it at the wall and you can see temperatures, you can see through the walls, so you can help navigate in a burning building, right? And it's like a thermal camera type deal. And it's complex. He showed it to me and everything. It's not a simple device. There's a lot to it. And so what I was trying to get at is, have you ever built an integration into maybe a device like that so you could run it simulated and have the person actually using the device but somehow interacting with your system for training? Or do you sort of cut it off as, like, here's the information, here's the video, here's video content, textual content, some sort of interactive type content, or have you ever interfaced with a third-party device?

(Bryna at 00:12:13) So I have a couple different answers to that. Specifically around the fire academy, what they do is they have their own tooling to create virtual tools like that so that the firefighter can get used to where everything is on a fire truck before they're actually in front of an actual fire truck. Right? So they have tools like that that are available through our platform. So they're integrated into the platform.

(Bryna at 00:12:44) So if you're taking a course and that course is on all the different aspects of a fire truck, then that's part of the course. You're doing all of that before you get in front of the actual fire truck, and you're better prepared when you do. So certainly that's the case. In terms of integration with what I'll call industry-specific tooling, I mean, it's also the same thing in health care where you want to have integration with a CPR dummy, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:10) Mhmm.

(Bryna at 00:13:10) So our hope is that when those things are being created, the CPR dummy or the heat-sensing tool that you described, that they're created with open standards in mind, learning open standards. Because when those tools have open standards, then, sure, we can easily hook into them, grab the data from them, and have that data in the learning system as well. At the end of the day, really, what you want to be able to, why you want to have that data, isn't just to grade the student, the learner, but also so you can improve your program over time. So you can see anomalies.

(Bryna at 00:13:51) So you can see maybe some students are failing with that device while others are persisting and doing better and be able to improve your program overall. So the data is really important, not just to send completions. I think a lot of people focus on that, but that's not really where we're focused. Where we're focused on is what is the engagement of the learner with the course, with the external device that's connected to the course, how are they learning, and then how can we improve that process over time, and then also identifying anomalies so that we can help students in trouble. Right?

(Bryna at 00:14:27) One of the examples we use a lot is that you need to be able to accommodate learning styles. So our platform allows you to see anomalies and students to be able to pick up on that so that perhaps you have a lot of written content in your course. But that particular learner is better with audio content. So they can self-select in our platform to grab that content in an audio format, and then the instructor and the program overall can see that and know that that's important for their audience, for their learners, for their students.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:07) So I've got some questions. I'll call it digital twin. I think that's the popular buzzword that you were referring to when you said there's going to be a digital version of the fire truck interface or the device interface. Is that something that the fire department would come to you and say, hey, we need this made, or is that something that they're going to another party to have made?

(Bryna at 00:15:28) They can do it either way. They can come to us, and we'll marry them up and show them options, or they can go research them and find that on their own. And we'll help them by saying, you want to make sure it has these open standards. You put this in your requirements so that it fits and flows back into your learning ecosystem. You don't want to create any of this in silos. Right? It's just going to create more manual work, and you're not going to get to reap the ultimate benefits of improving your program over time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:55) So what you're talking about is if I'm making the digital twin or a physical device, as the vendor, I need, they're making sure that they have output of whatever occurs in that device, diagnostics or learning or whatever happens, into some standard learning format that you can then digest into your system?

(Bryna at 00:16:13) Correct.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:14) Yeah. There's a lot going on here. I'm learning.

(Bryna at 00:16:19) And there's lots of standards bodies watching the space too, and we certainly work with them pretty heavily and make sure our technology conforms to that because there's never going to be just one technology in learning. It is called an ecosystem for a reason. Right? A learning ecosystem. And a lot of these use cases are very, very different from agency to agency, from customer to customer, and we have to be able to be flexible to be able to accommodate that.

(Bryna at 00:16:48) And also not just from that perspective, but agencies have invested heavily in the tooling they already have. And so we don't want them to have to throw everything away. Right? We have to be able to interoperate with what they have, what they have today, and what they envision for the future.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:06) I want to talk a little bit more about you as a professional and person, human being. When you were going on this journey, obviously now you're the leader at a very large company and you have a role that requires a lot of discipline and experience. But as you were coming up through your career, what type of obstacles did you have to overcome to get to where you are today?

(Bryna at 00:17:30) Wow, what a great question. I think sometimes our obstacles are self-created, where we're trying to figure out what we want to do next and then how to get there. And that takes some discipline because for me, I always want to do well for my team, for my group, for my clients, really ultimately for the mission and make a difference. And so that can get in the way of you thinking about or preparing for or taking time aside for what you can do next.

(Bryna at 00:18:05) And you have to be very purposeful in that because it takes time to assess what you liked, what you didn't like, what you want to do, what you haven't done yet, what you think you'll be good at, and also not just you yourself, but talking to other people. So you have to set aside time to go talk to people that you see doing interesting things or have been successful and interest you in that way so that you can gather more information than you currently have on your own. And all that has to be really purposeful. So I think the biggest obstacle is self-inflicted, of not making the time and space to go do that work for yourself so that you can figure out and find your passion and your path.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:47) Yeah, and I was actually having this conversation yesterday with a friend of mine who's also a podcaster, and he had made a post online about, "Here are the steps to do it." And he basically put everything into a four-step process that was one sentence each. And I talked to him about it and I said, you know what's funny is the information on how to do it, how to grow in your career or how to get ahead, it's relatively simple and it's not hidden. You can go buy a book.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:15) Most books will have some good information and insight. The hard part, and I find as I'm getting older and have kids and everything and getting more life experience, seems to be the hard part with everything, and that's the discipline to be consistent with it. And as you said, to sit down and make the time. So as you were growing in your career, did you put an hour a week recurring event? How did you actually manage your ability to stay consistent?

(Bryna at 00:19:42) Oh, it hasn't been consistent.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:44) Okay.

(Bryna at 00:19:45) I'm not going to lie. No, it's very inconsistent. It has to do with the ebbs and flows of the business, the ebbs and flows of people coming in and out of your work environment. But, you know, you know when it's time to start thinking about these things, and you just then at that time have to make the time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:05) What it sounds like is you have a lot of self-awareness, which is a trait of people who tend to go farther. And as you were describing it, I was like, yeah, you're right. What I heard when you were describing it is we all have seasons in our life. We have seasons where we want to grow at work. We have seasons when, you know, I have my third child arriving within the next twelve days. So—

(Bryna at 00:20:19) Congrats.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:19) I know, I know. So there's different times I'm focused on different things. So for, you know, for the next three or four weeks, I'm going to be focused on basically playing defense for my wife with the other two kids so that we can get into our routines and everything like that.

(Bryna at 00:20:40) Get ready for zone. Yeah, zone defense.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:43) Yes, yes. Get this. You're going to think I'm crazy. So we're walking through Home Depot two weeks ago buying blinds. I get a call from my wife and she's over in the lighting department. And she says, "Hey, come over here real quick and bring, you know, our daughter." I was like, man, she sounds way too excited for being in the lighting department at Home Depot. Why is she so excited?

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:04) And so we walk over there and there's a puppy, right? And she's like, "Hey, they're actually selling this puppy. They're a breeder and they're just getting her out, and I think we should get this puppy." And I was like, "Well, we have a baby coming in a month." So ultimately, we decided, you know, we had the dog over to play and whatnot, and we're like, okay, this is definitely the next dog that we want. So I bought it with the contingency that they hold it until a week after she's given birth.

(Bryna at 00:21:31) All right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:32) Yeah. And so the reason why I tell this is because kids are really tough, especially new kids and when you already have kids. But to do a new kid and a new puppy in the same month, I guess I'm pushing myself on a personal growth thing. That might be crazy.

(Bryna at 00:21:50) Well, it says a lot, right? Because we get opportunities sometimes and we pause instead of jumping in. And that's not always a good thing either. Sometimes you've got to just get to the uncomfortable, and that's how we grow.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:05) Well, that's one of the cycles, right? Uncomfortable growth is actually one of the seasons that we go through in life.

(Bryna at 00:22:10) Sure. So you'll have to let me know how that goes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:13) Oh, I will. Now you said something interesting. So you started out as developer technology and you transitioned into sales. Tell me about what that was like. Were you able to apply some of your dev type skills in becoming well-versed at sales, or what did you learn making that transition?

(Bryna at 00:22:31) I think it's hugely important. Still today, we do statement of work level of efforts all the time. So to have a technical background is just a huge advantage, I think. Also, with roadmap conversations with our product team, they tell me something's not going to be done for a year. So being able to push on that and then the next question to ask to get under why that is and what else we can do differently in different approaches, just really, really valuable.

(Bryna at 00:23:01) So I definitely still use my technical skills a lot. I certainly use my writing skills a lot, RFP responses and just even emails with clients. I mean, writing skills is probably the number one thing I would say is most important. Math skills, business acumen skills, working on pricing and pulling together multi-year contracts for clients—all of those things. But the technical skills, they persist, really, really valuable.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:33) Is the department that you oversee, does it operate as sort of its own thing? Because it sounds like you have a lot of different areas that you work in.

(Bryna at 00:23:42) I mean, we have hooks into everything because we're considered a market within the company. So the corporate and government market. We're not the biggest market in the company. That would be higher education, as you'd expect. So a lot of the products were originally designed, developed, built for the higher education space as the majority of our clients.

(Bryna at 00:24:04) However, the government market has grown so dramatically that that's increasingly become also very important. And so being able to work with all of the different parts of the company so that they understand the market, the requirements of the market, is a big task because that hasn't been and may not be their background.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:28) Now I was told you guys are doing something with a security offering that we want to get awareness for and talk about. Can you share with me about that?

(Bryna at 00:24:38) Sure. So Blackboard Learn is our marquee offering. That's our learning management system. And several years ago, we actually pushed forward and got FedRAMP. FedRAMP is a program run by GSA and the federal government which assures for any cloud offering that it meets a level of security standards.

(Bryna at 00:24:59) In our case, we have federal moderate authorization, which requires us to uphold 325 security controls. Those controls are monitored monthly. We have to provide monthly—well, they're monitored constantly, but we provide monthly reports on the status of those controls. And every year, they are audited by a third party external to our company so that the government can be assured that our offering is secure. It's a huge investment for us, but really, really important and very, very valuable for our clients.

(Bryna at 00:25:34) Right now, we're, since we already accomplished that, we're working on what's called Impact Level 4. Impact Level 4 is a Department of Defense standard that goes above and beyond FedRAMP Moderate, and it is on Department of Defense specific security requirements that we will uphold with our offerings. So we're doing that in concert with one of our clients who's supporting us through that process. We'll have even greater security stature when that's complete.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:05) So do you have security training as well?

(Bryna at 00:26:08) As a company? Of course. So for our employees, sure. We have to do simulations for events that could occur and prove out that our processes are in place and sound and that they work. So it's not just about training your people to get a checkbox. We actually are audited to make sure that we can follow through on all of these processes. I mean, this requires us to notify the government within a certain amount of time if there should be a breach. We haven't had to do that, but we're required. So it's a heavy lift. It's a heavy lift for any vendor to go through this process.

(Bryna at 00:26:48) And if you go to the FedRAMP.gov website, you can go to their marketplace and you can see the companies that have gone through this. A lot of the companies that first went through this were infrastructure as a service or platform as a service. There still today are not that many software as a service companies that have been successfully through this process and continue. I'm really proud of our organization for doing this. And it not only proves that our offering is secure, but it also really sets a precedent across our entire portfolio of how we build products, how we support products, how we work with our clients on security, that there's mutual security responsibilities, and we address those with new clients in a mutual fashion.

(Bryna at 00:27:37) And we're very, very knowledgeable around this area, which is so important. I mean, everything that's happened in the world, even this past year with the war and security vulnerabilities. And it's pervasive and it's really a critical area. And I'm really proud of our organization and how we put it first and foremost, not just for this market, for the benefit of all of our clients.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:02) When the merger took place, how did you deal with, you know, you had the security clearances as Blackboard. How did you transition to Anthology?

(Bryna at 00:28:13) So that's still in process. We just merged. So I'm not going to say that all of those products have all of these security controls in them yet, but that's the plan, right? Because it's one development team working on everything as a platform. That's the goal.

(Bryna at 00:28:29) And in fact, it's become more and more important. So if you're familiar with TexRamp, the state of Texas now requires these similar sets of security controls for their government to purchase and operate. So this is not something that's going away. It's only going to increase over time and become more and more embedded in everything that we do. After all, I know we say, you know, we work with intelligence customers and Department of Defense and their data really needs to be kept secure, but so does student data at a university.

(Bryna at 00:29:05) Their grades, these are things that we take really seriously, and so we see that more and more states are coming online with these requirements, and we're more than ready for that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:17) It's funny when you say that. You contrast training FBI agents. I don't know, I just think it's a funny comparison.

(Bryna at 00:29:24) Well, it can be one and the same. Where are your Air Force officers taking courses?

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:31) Yeah.

(Bryna at 00:29:32) Are they taking courses in a university system that's secure? Who's checking that? Do we care about that being infiltrated?

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:41) I just want to get in the Blackboard and start taking the FBI training and just have some fun with it. So we're getting close to time and I just want to make sure that we touched on everything that you wanted to touch on. So if there's anything that we didn't get, you remember off the top of your head, that we didn't touch on yet.

(Bryna at 00:30:00) I mean, one of the—we've talked a lot about government, and I even talked about Texas, but I guess an extension of that would also be regulated industries where all of this is really important to. So the energy industry, the auto industry, federal contractors. These things are not just important to the FBI, to your example. They should be important to a lot of industries and a lot of organizations that are running learning programs, not just check the box annual security privacy training, but their leadership programs for their top employees, their most valuable asset. So I think there's applicability well beyond what we've talked about.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:47) Yeah, I mean, education touches essentially every category of life, right?

(Bryna at 00:30:53) Right. And in defense, we call that readiness. So if we're not at war, we are preparing for it. So there's always training going on. That's what the government does.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:04) Yeah, the hurry up and wait concept. It's true with the government, with military, with babies, everything. That's right. We got the go bag.

(Bryna at 00:31:14) That's right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:16) As we wrap up, what is one piece of advice that you'd like to pass on to the next generation that's coming up in their career right now?

(Bryna at 00:31:25) Coming up in their career. Wow. It's cliche, I guess, at this point, but your network's really important. Staying in touch with people is really important. Getting different perspectives from outside your organization, your team, your immediate work environment is really important.

(Bryna at 00:31:45) So I guess it kind of goes back to what we were talking about earlier, which is making the time and space for that. And then the other thing is, don't wait till you're later in your career to enjoy your work. Find ways—that doesn't mean follow your passion if it pays $5. That's not what I mean by that. What I mean by that is the profession you choose, work with people you like, have fun with what you're doing, find pleasure in your day to day. I think that's really important also.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:23) 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.