And I think the challenge that we have as any CIO in any industry right now is how do you set the guardrails Yep. For what your employees should do, while at the same time giving them enough freedom to learn what AI can do for them and their role that they have. Welcome back to another episode of Unraveling IT: Expert Tech Talks. I'm your host, Garrett Wiesenberg, and today, we're taking you behind the scenes of a world that most people never think about, the technology backbone of a modern university. When you picture a college campus, you might think of lecture halls, dorm rooms, and football games. But behind all of that is an IT operation that rivals many Fortune 500 companies. We're talking about the networks, security, and systems that keep thousands of students, faculty, and staff connected and productive, whether they're in a classroom, in a dorm, or halfway across the country logging in for remote class. My guest today knows the world better than anyone. Jeff Leichty is the vice president and chief information officer at Indiana Tech, where he spent more than two decades building and leading the IT strategy that supports both traditional students and a massive remote adult learning program. Jeff's role is part strategist and problem solver, part futurist, and today, we're talking through his CIO playbook. We'll talk about what makes higher ed different from corporate IT, the unique challenges of supporting such a diverse student population, and how innovation like AI and advanced analytics are shaping the future of learning. So let's jump in. Jeff, thank you for for joining me today. And so, you know, for our audience and and listeners who may not be familiar, why don't you describe your role as CIO at at Indiana Tech? So, yeah, I was when I was originally hired to be 23 years ago now They wanted somebody to take a leadership role on the technology side. And over those twenty three years, I've learned how to work with a lot of people, learned to work with staff, learned to work with faculty, learned to work with parents of students. Yeah. And I've learned to work with students. But I'm I'm in charge of anything that basically connects to our network at Indiana Tech. Okay. That could be copiers, it could be printers, all the computers, wireless networks, residence halls And a lot of the audio and video in all the classrooms and space as well. In charge of that tangentially, let's put it that way. Yeah. We'll make up words for you. Ultimately falls up to you. Ultimately, if if it's connected to the network, falls up to me. Yeah. And sometimes it has that the challenges. And and along with all those technology things, it's the data. When you look underneath the hood of all those things that I just mentioned, there's data going back and forth and being stored and being transmitted. And I'm also responsible to make sure that data is safe To make sure it's stored safely, to make sure that people are using it as safely as possible. Are you also responsible for, like, the online, like, enrollment applications and some of those, like, more managerial type applications? I'm responsible to make sure the applications are working. People can connect to them, log in to them, can enter the data in them, and to make sure that all those applications are chatting with each other from the admissions process that our admissions counselors have all the way through something happening in the alumni office at some point in time. Wow. So you said you've been here for twenty three years Yes. Right, give or take? How has technology changed in the past twenty three years? Because I'm imagining pretty substantially. Yeah. I'm trying to figure out how it hasn't changed. I think over those years, I think right now, it feels like the treadmill is spinning faster than it ever has, to tell you the truth. Yeah. It has always been at a pretty good clip, and it I felt like you could keep up a little bit, but anymore, it just feels like somebody has put it on run. And I'm on this treadmill trying to keep up with everything that's happening, you know, AI thing and the speed at which it's just going everywhere. Yeah. Applications are using it, people are using it, individuals, and then the organization wants to use it too to its advantage. So Yep. We've got all those things happening all at the same time. And sometimes people wanna do it on their own, some people sometimes it's like, well, what are gonna do as an organization that's trying to find that delicate balance between giving them the freedom to experiment, to figure out what we can do with that, and then we also have, when you think about it, we're a university, we have students. Yep. And we have to make sure that as those students are going through the program to use AI along that path as well, so that when they graduate, their employers are going to have some expectations of them that they're gonna use some of the newest things as well. That's an interesting take because you are a technical college, right? I mean, essentially, right? Like, you Yeah. That's part of it. Mean, we also have sports management programs. We have arts and sciences and things like that too. But, yeah, our background is we started as an engineering school, and we have a college of engineering and computer sciences, and they do a lot of things over there that they're trying to train students and things that we don't necessarily use as an organization. But we wanna be sure that our students are equipped and well prepared for their careers. And that's a good point. I mean, I I think for most organizations, they're not usually at the bleeding edge of of technology. They're usually slower to adopt, but, you know, you being a university, you're trying to teach your students the newest technologies as they're they're coming out. So you've always gotta kinda be at that bleeding edge to to be effective. Right. And especially when you look at it from the the faculty members that are teaching those classes. And what I think the tough part for us sometimes is most organizations, you wanna tighten things up, and you wanna control all these things. And I think early on, I grew into this thing of, man, I can't control everything. This is a university. We've just gotta experiment and play with things and see what happens. What happens if we use this? And it's that's not necessarily on the organization side. It's more on the academic side. But trying to equip the faculty, the deans, whoever whoever's trying to engage our students to do something that's a little more on that bleeding edge. Yeah. Trying to find what kind of tools we can put in place to allow them to do some of that experimentation. Yeah. Even to the extent, I mean, when you're you're talking about a student that's pursuing a cybersecurity degree, they have to understand how to play around with networks. I just don't want it to be on my network. I want it to be on their network. Yep. So I think you've got some of those gives and takes that happen with within the university when you're working in a role such as mine. Would you say that your role is really more about putting up the the guardrails and giving people the freedom to kind of work within, you know, a a set framework, so to speak. I think I put up the guardrails within the the organization perspective. Yep. I think when I'm looking at it a little more from the academic perspective, those guardrails come down a little bit so that those students can actually do the experiments they wanna do. So I wanna be sure they're not using university data and those kind of things, but if a student a student could write a program on their server that they have in the school of computer sciences Yep. And they would may wanna install it on one of the PC that they have over there and things like that. I'm not going to necessarily stop them from doing that. I just don't want those PCs to interrupt the business of the university. Yeah. That's a good point. So what would you say is the the biggest difference between maybe university IT or, you know, being responsible for that versus, you know, a corporation of some kind? Well, I I had mentioned a little bit earlier. As as an organization, if you're in a regular enterprise, you're trying to lock everything down and make sure that you're controlling information very strictly. I have that. In addition, I have students that are living in residence halls that wanna use BitTorrent, that want to Pirate Bay. Yeah. They wanna do Bitcoin mining. They want to do all these things, and they care if their TV doesn't work, if they can't stream this, if they can't play their games. I Yeah. It's it's a hotel. Yeah. And they have to have those hotel hotel kind of experiences. So we've kind of segmented our network in such a way where they the students can have those experiences while I'm still trying to keep things locked down on my side. So I think that's one of the differences. I think the second thing that really kinda slapped me alongside the face when I first got to Indiana Tech in an enterprise, there's this very strict reporting structure. And I have to make the person above me happy. I think at an institution where I'm at, you've got yeah. I've I've still got some of that. I have to make the person above me happy, but I also have to work with faculty members to make sure that whatever they're doing in that classroom is equipping our students for the student success. Yeah. And that's not necessarily my reporting role, but it's my responsibility to make sure that they can that they can make those things happen. I I truly have talked to parents before. If a student is struggling doing something at Indiana Tech, I've talked to parents. Now I may encourage that parent to have their student give me a call because I want that student to understand that they're growing up now. Yeah. And they need to to talk to people once in a while. It it really seems funny, but I really see that as my role a little bit. I mean, those those students have just gotten out of high school. They're trying to figure out how to live life outside of the roof that may have been with their mother. Yeah. May have been with their father, may have been with their mother and father. Who knows? Yep. And and trying to be sure that they are learning to grow up at the same time they're learning how to connect to the network or they're learning how to connect their TV so that their TV can stream stream audio and video and things like that. And I think the challenge that we have as any CIO in any industry right now is how do you set the guard rails Yep. For what your employees should do, while at the same time giving them enough freedom to learn what AI can do for them and their role that they have. And trying to encourage them, it's like, you know, instead of going to Google and do a search Yep. At Indiana Tech, we encourage them to go to Copilot. We're licensed for Yep. Microsoft. There's some security measures around it and we encourage them to go to Copilot instead. It's like, if you're trying to find an answer, why go to Google and get one point two billion answers? Why not go to Copilot? Well, not answers, remember? Oh, okay. Links. One point two billion links. Yeah. Why not go to Copilot and ask the question of Copilot? Now, when you get that answer, it's gonna give you some references. Check out the references. Yep. Okay. If you if it's life and death or if it's something you're putting in a presentation, you need to Make sure you need make sure that it's not lying to But I think trying to get people to think in that mode of checking it there first instead of what they've done for twenty five years. I've gone to Google, I type it into the search, and I go through and I click trying to find everything. That's one thing. I think the second thing, I think that's what we've kind of encouraged managers to do, is I I read a book called The AI Driven Leader, and one of the phrases that I kept hearing over and over again in that book was being a thought partner, with AI being a thought partner. You you We have lots of things we do every day. But, you know, if I write do a presentation, I wanna be sure the presentation's good. So I may go over to my buddy next door and say, hey. What do you think of this presentation? Yep. Instead of doing that, why not load this presentation into AI? And let's say you're going into a board meeting, why not have it ask you questions of, hey, I'm expecting some pushback On this. Ask me some questions pushing back on some of my points and I'll give you the answers and then give me a summary of how I did at the end. So using it more as bouncing ideas off of Yeah. Rather than just getting answers to. You're still in the driver's seat. You're still the driver. Yeah. Human in the loop. That's the that's the famous phrase anymore in lot of the the sessions I go to. Interesting. I've actually never heard that phrase before. No. Yeah. Several vendors that we're working with with the AI things, they have this phrase of human in the loop. So when they're really critical things, make sure that there's a human that has some kind of oversight at some point in the process. Yeah. And I think even as we're looking at doing some automation of the processes and things like that, especially when you're first implementing something, trying to see if can you trust what it's doing. Yeah. You have to keep that human in the loop to verify and to spot check. But I think as time goes on, that human in the loop's gonna continue to diminish. Yeah. I think there's gonna become enough trust. There's gonna become enough confidence in the decisions that that model is making that you no longer have to watch it. And I think that's, as a society trying to figure out how we're gonna deal with that or we even gonna let some of those kind of things happen. It's gonna be some tough conversations ahead. No. I don't disagree at all. And I think I kind of compare it to the industrial boom of the early nineteen hundreds. Right? What happened to all the horses? You know, what happened to all of these machines that did one specific tab? I mean, they were all just automated kind of overnight. But we survived. Yeah. It's just the things you do shift and the things that you're responsible for begin to shift and Yeah. This is just at a scale that I'm not sure we've seen globally. And I think one of the we've been looking at something called robotic process automation recently. And, you know, I've gone to a couple sessions for it. I heard what some of the cost was and it's like, you know what? I can mention some time, but no one's really gonna grab onto this and still somebody until unless somebody drives it from the business side. Yep. So then the financial people went to went to a seminar and they heard this miraculous things called robotic process automation. Yeah. So so we started having this conversation and we're getting close to doing something probably with some of invoices and things like that first to kinda get our toes in the water, but really getting trying to replace some of the, I'll call them menial tasks, not necessarily, but just monotonous. It's like, why do I have to email this manager when the when the purchase order is not received? Why do I have to do this? Why do I have to do this? If we can automate a lot of those things, it lets that person concentrate on value added things. Exceptions. Yep. Answering questions that really have some some merit to them instead of wasting that person's time on just sending an email. So I think as when we take a look at that and think of AI as becoming that digital person a little bit, it becomes a little more of an It's digital assistant. Right? It's a digital assistant. It's like Clippy from Microsoft Word back in Yeah. Absolutely. Early 2000s. Pilot. Yeah. There you go. The pompilot. The pompilot. You're dating yourself a little I You gotta be careful. Awesome, isn't it? I'm not playing pong anymore. That's exactly So I think you you kinda hit on this topic already, you know, your financial people went to a meeting and came back with, you know, wanna do RPA or, you know, robotic process automation. How do you balance the need for for innovation with stability and reliability? Because obviously they're pushing heavily for this, but you've gotta make sure the framework is there to support it. Right. And and I think from my perspective, one of the things I've always tried to get ahead of is what are they gonna be asking me for next? Yep. So I may not already have something in place, but I at least know enough where I can talk legitimately about it and say, yeah, I know what it is. Yep. But as an enterprise, you know, we're a nonprofit. Okay? That's a tax status. That's not the way you wanna do business. Okay? Yeah. And and we hear that a lot because at some point, the most important things that we can do and for the student success is to make sure all of these things are working well, where nothing is breaking, where I know I have I don't have any crises happening. So when I we look at some of those innovative things, we think about that impact. I have a I have a team I meet with every two weeks, and we just kinda talk about what is changing across the university from a data perspective, from a system perspective that could impact other people. Is this an internal team? It's an internal team. Cross departmental, I think we have fifteen to twenty people on the team. Okay. And we talk about anything from, oh, we need to move an application for our PhD program from this old system to this new system. And as we do that, we have to make sure that the integration between those two systems is modified to accommodate that. Yeah. So I think that conversation is how we make sure that we have stability in the infrastructure for what we have, to tell you the truth. And sometimes that's hardware or something like that we need that we need to install, but more often than not, it's trying to figure out how you connect one application to the other to make sure that the data that we're getting from an application flows into the student information system so the student can register for classes so that that registration for classes can get into the learning management system so they can log on and take their classes. Yep. And that's all automated. And that's all automated. Because if it wasn't, and I'm sure it hasn't been in the We get worried. Yes. Yeah. And I think that's one of the first things that I worked on when we got when I got to Indiana Tech. I had worked in enterprise world up to that point in my career, and there were a lot of things that were automated. And when I got to Indiana Tech, it it just wasn't there. So we we automated, you know, student accounts happening automatically based on enrollment in classes. We automated a lot of things. And just just recently, I mean, if I look over a one week period, we're creating when I looked yesterday, we were creating, like, two hundred and eighty student accounts within a one week period, and all that happens automatically. So if any of the if I get notified that one of those processes is broken, it becomes a little bit of a higher priority that next day Yep. And not about coming to a podcast maybe or something like that. I don't know. It's podcast. I don't know. It's it's top of the But but I think when I look at what I need to do during the week, I look more at it from the weekly perspective than the daily perspective because I think I shift a lot. I don't think it's ADHD anyways. I've never been diagnosed. But but think when I look at what I need to accomplish, I look at it more during the week and rather than a day. Yeah. Because I think things can shift a bit. I mean, the breadth of your domain is is massive. Yeah. So And it's it's pretty complex too, to tell you the truth. Yeah. And, you know, when when something breaks, I've always been a good troubleshooter. I can I can troubleshoot a lot of things? Yep. Network, I'm not as great at. But when something breaks, we can usually narrow it down pretty quick. I've got a good team. Yeah. You know, we had we had an issue. It might have been last Thursday or Friday, and we walk in. We started getting notifications to our help desk that people couldn't connect to the network. And this person said it was the wired connection. This person said it was the wireless connection, and then we get this from some other people. And eventually, it's like, okay. I know that this person's on vacation, but I've gotta text him what's going on. Yeah. He goes, I think I think this happened. It's like, oh, seriously? So we go out, we figure it out, and some things were not really happening the way they said they were happening. But we did find an issue with the wireless network, and we fixed it and we got we took care of it before it turned into a major crisis long term. My first job. Okay. My first job, I I would do whatever I could not to pick up the phone and talk to somebody. And to tell you the truth, now when when I hire student employees, I've tried to talk to my supervisor. It's like, I want those students to be able to talk on the phone and be able to speak to people because I think that's one of the most important skills that any student that graduates from Indiana Tech should have. Yeah. The book works great, but there are so many things that can be handled much more easily through just a conversation with somebody Yeah. And and faster to tell you the truth. Yeah. You've seen those email threads that, you know, you have ten things going back Just spiral out of control. Yeah. And it's like pick up stupid phone and talk to that person, please. Yeah. And I think that's we've lost that in society a little Instead of going out to all this social media and we're spewing all this thing instead of just calling up and just saying, hey, why did you do that, man? Yeah. And and I think at Indiana Tech, one of things we really concentrate on, it's like that's not customer service. That's not how That's Yeah. We have internal customer service too. It's like, I don't want a faculty member yelling at my team. I don't want a faculty member yelling at one of my student employees that they're having problems. Yep. I wanna be sure that we're respectful of each other. We take care of the issue at hand and don't turn it into some kind of crisis that isn't necessary. Well, I think you hit the the nail on the head there. I was gonna go right to the customer service aspect because being in the industry I've been in for the past you know ten plus years, obviously we deal with hundreds of tickets thousands of tickets a I mean it's so much faster sometimes just pick up the phone be like you know hey Jen what can I do for you? How can I help? They feel better on the other end as well. Mean, it it truly creates more of a a, you know, an atmosphere and experience for that person that, you know, they're gonna remember. Yeah. And I think sometimes you just wanna hide behind that technology or hide behind the email saying that, hey. I solved it by tossing it back to them with a ridiculous question. Yep. When calling up could just be a conversation. Have you tried this? Have you tried this? Have you tried this? In fact, even as we're looking for student employees semester, we had a conversation with a supervisor a few weeks ago, and it's like, you know what? Do we really need technology people in these roles? Yeah. Can we just have somebody that knows technology and they know how to log in, they know which which link to click on if they forgot their password, they know some of the basics. Yep. Just to help some of these people through because, you know, we've got the traditional student that's coming in right out of high school, and they're pretty technology savvy for the most part, right? But we also have this adult program where we're getting 40, 50, 60-year-old people coming into these programs. Wow. And some of them haven't touched any kind of education for years, and trying to make things as simple as possible for them has been critically important for us. But once in a while, you you still have one that they struggle, and they call up. And it's like we had sent them a welcome email saying, hey. Here's your your username. Yep. Here's your password. And they're calling up. Say, I don't understand what I'm supposed to do. It's like, well, go into your email and find the email. It's like, well, what do you mean email? I don't know what I use. And you kinda walk them through that, and then you're kind of explaining what a browser is, where the URL, where you enter a URL. And that turns into a forty five minute, two hour conversation sometimes. But that person is trying to do something that's going to improve their life in some way. Yeah. You know, they're struggling going from job to job to job and they're sick of it. They wanna try to get a certificate. They wanna try to get an associate's degree. They want a bachelor's. They're trying to do something that's going to improve their life. And from our perspective, we're just trying to be sure they can get into those systems and make sure that they know where they're at. And then hand that over to the faculty that teach some of those classes. And I think trying to figure out know where our role is in some of those things is important for us and trying to have that patience sometimes where some are just gonna struggle and we're trying to get them to that next step and make sure we have that grace to to give to them as well. Do you feel like you're responsible to to some degree for the success of the students that come through, you know, all the various programs? Well, absolutely. And if if you would ever go to one of our before every semester, we get we get the entire university together, and the president gives us a state of the university talking about our mission, talking about, you know, here's the status of our enrollment, all those kind of things. But student success is a big thing. And if you're looking at prioritizing what am I gonna work on during the day, if it's related to student success in some way, I would probably lean toward most of those things. Because in order for that student to graduate, to get that degree, we have to be sure that they can access and get to all these systems. In order for that student to get to the degree, that faculty member needs to be able to do this, this, and this. That faculty member wants to use this new program Yeah. And whatever. Okay. We need to review this program, maybe. And I think trying faculty to prepare our students for their success is it's critical to whatever we're doing. And even, you know, even if I look at our our help desk right now, it may have five hundred tickets or something like that. If it's something that's student impacting with a huge number of students, we hit it. I mean, that's Yep. My team knows that there are things that are more important than others. And hopefully, we also have that grace from the people that put in the ticket as well sometimes. You know, sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn't. Yep. Yep. Because their emergency is their emergency. Not all criticals are equal. Not all criticals are equal. Yep. And I think trying to get the university to understand those things, it has gone fairly well to tell you the truth over the years Good. That I've been there. I think we've all realized that we're on the same team. We all have more work than we can ever possibly do. And trying to have that understanding of each other has been critically important. So you're all brought in the same mission, vision Yeah. You know, striving forward together? Yep. Motivating our students towards significance and worth. With professional education, it's in our mission statement, and we hear it all the time. And we hear about the retention. We hear about that student success and trying to get everybody on that. If you can get everybody aligned to that, you're in pretty good shape and trying to work systems and integrations and things like that that facilitate that as well. While at the same time, you know, behind the scenes, one of the updates I give to the president once in a while is like, hey, we've gotta upgrade this application. It's not gonna be fun. People aren't gonna be happy with Jeff, but I have to maintain the support. Yep. In order to keep up with things. If I don't keep up with things, then we don't have support and, you know. Do you want some planned downtime now or do you want an incident later on that's It it does. Four hours now saves you a few days in the future. It does. And you just recently switched to Teams Calling. Right? Because you had a phone system that was kinda going in and out and, like, nightmare to manage. It was nightmare to manage. I'm sick of phone vendors, to tell you the truth. I'm not a big phone vendor guy because, you know, and it's like we have a stable infrastructure. We have a stable network. We have an application that can connect all of us no matter where we're at across the world. Yep. Because we've got adjunct faculty, faculty who have full time jobs doing something that they were trained to do, but they teach students in the evenings Yeah. Through the online program and trying to make sure that they can communicate with everybody else across the university through teams or through, you know, maybe it's email or things like that. We wanna be sure that all those are working well. You know, Jeff, I I really appreciate you being here today. I do have one kinda parting question I guess I'll say. Please. Where do you see the future of, you know, university IT heading in the next five to ten years? Oh, wow. It's a softball. Ten? I'm not even gonna guess that. That's future not my problem. Right? Pretty much. Yeah. I I think five, I think. And and I I've even talked to the managers about this as well. So we have a lot of vendors that run things throughout the university from from the housing to, you know, the student information system. And I think preparing them and letting them know that all of those vendors are gonna start putting AI into all of their products in some way. Yeah. Some of them are just gonna include it out of the preciousness of their hearts. I think others are going to charge them for it. I'm encouraging them to make sure that when they're looking at some of those AI things, there's gonna be some value with those. Yeah. And it could be great value. And to but to make sure that as they're working with those that they're if they're paying for it, to make sure that they're testing it out thoroughly before they pay for something that they just thought they put AI in the product Yeah. And it's not really doing what they say You wanna make sure that they're doing it intentionally. Intentionally. Yep. And truly, right now, I can think of five, six vendors that they're really working on AI initiatives in their products where I can ask questions of my ERP and as well, give me this information. Our payroll system just puts some some generative AI thing into their application where Wow. An employee can say how many vacation days do I have left and it's gonna show them. So I I think that journey over the next five years, we think we know what it looks like a little bit, but I think it's gonna shock us a lot. I mean, just think in the past year or two with AI really boom. Mean, it's been around for for years and years, but it seems like it's really only caught traction. Higher res under some real pressure from a lot of things right now. Yep. For many years, we've talked about the student cliff where you have this fewest number of students graduate from high school coming up in twenty twenty six. And so that was been that's been talked to her about for a decade. And we thought that was gonna be the most serious issue we had to deal with. And then the pandemic hit. And then you have just some crazy things at a legislative level now, and education's the bad guy. Yeah. Nobody wants to pay for it. Everybody wants to have it free. So there's a lot more scholarships, a lot more grants. There's a lot more things that are really pushing on on the revenue side and trying to make sure that we're doing things as efficiently as possible. So AI could be a critical component of that as we look at what that next five years looks like. Yeah. For sure. Well, again, thank you for coming out today and and joining us on on an episode of the podcast. And Yeah. I hope you have a great rest of the day. Thank you. Appreciate Thank you. That's going to wrap up today's episode of Unraveling IT: Expert Tech Talks. A huge thanks to Jeff Leichty for walking us through the realities and the strategy of running IT for a modern university. It's a reminder that in higher education, technology isn't just about servers and software. It's about enabling learning, supporting people, and building systems that can adapt to the needs of students no matter where they are. Technology is only as powerful as the strategy guiding it. Keep looking beyond the tools, keep aligning to the mission, and keep turning vision into measurable outcomes. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time.
