RMIT University is a center point of technology and design based in Melbourne, Australia. Its purpose is to create transformative experiences for students around the world, and Sinan Erbay, the public university’s CIO, breaks down its value proposition as an applied learning style.
“We have both face-to-face and virtual learning experiences,” he says, “and my team is responsible for technology and enabling all of those journeys for our students — from the moment they knock on our door and they’re interested in studying with us, all the way through to post studies. So we look at our students as lifelong learners fully connected in our ecosystem.”
Technology for the entire university is the responsibility of Erbay and his team, whether that’s at Melbourne’s main campus, a sister university in Vietnam, or among other international partnerships, all of which make up one of the largest universities in Australia, with just over 100,000 students. With such a broad range, it’s imperative to have a cohesive team working internally, as well as trusted external providers.
“It’s both give and take working with partners, he says. “Partnerships need to complement. There needs to be that cultural fit in the way they operate, so I see a partnership as an extension of my team. And I hope they also see us an extension of theirs.”
With such a coordinated synergy, Erbay is able to get the best out of this extended team and create an environment that helps it thrive by adhering to a customer-centric style.
“I’m very passionate about distributed groups,” he says. “So that means spending a lot of time across the university with stakeholders, and working together on problems or opportunities with them. It’s encouraging for our team and our operating model to spend time working outside of IT. At the same time, I love capstone projects where we bring small cohorts of students into IT and think of it like a graduate program where we give them some real-world problems.”
And this kind of environment enables a stronger tech workforce for the future.
“My advice for aspiring CIOs, or any leader, is be open to growth,” he adds. “Move out of your comfort zones. Take on some innovation initiatives and champion them, but also be collaborative. Success rests on opportunities to partner across a broad skillset in an organization, and embracing change. Resilience is the key attribute leaders need.”
O’Sullivan spoke with Erbay about building capabilities and pushing boundaries at the university’s Living Lab, and why he’s a big believer in distributed teams and driving a customer-first approach. Watch the full video below for more insights.
On the digital journey: It never stops. It has many chapters, and many starts, stops, and restarts. But what I’m proud of over the years is there’s a few key initiatives that come to mind on cloud adoption and being a cloud-first capability. One of the proudest moments, now that we have it up and running, is RACE Hub, which is our supercomputing facility based on cloud services. We provide supercomputing power to our research community, on demand anywhere at any time. Along with that, we’ve significantly improved our operational efficiencies, and we’ve been focusing on student satisfaction and improving their experience with student systems, digitizing their college experience. I’d also flip it to the academic side and our professional teams as well. So digital literacy is as important to us as it is for everybody. There’s been a lot of leaning into that digital literacy in the programs we’ve been running across the university.
On aligning with the mission: Technology underpins and enables the university strategy, based on knowledge with action. What’s really important is the tech strategy has to be built with agility. It’s important to continue to walk together with stakeholders, understanding the true impact that the strategy will have on them and their experiences. So it’s forever evolving. There are regular reviews to understand the various needs of our student, research, and academic communities. And we also supply industry. So it’s also having industry embedded in what we’re doing as well. We’re in our first phase of a nine year strategy and there are a few things there we’ll continue to progress to the second stage. But ultimately, it comes down to getting the basics right. If you can do that and build trust with your communities, then you get to enjoy that conversation of creating and innovating together.
On cutting-edge innovation: We’ve been focusing on AI and have implemented a number of different capabilities. One is in your typical smart campus or we describe it as the Living Lab. There’s so much opportunity about automation, AI, and IoT that we’re looking at, but also on pedagogy and students — how do we assist our students in their learning experiences, complemented with AI capabilities as well. Then we look at the other side where we’ve got our research communities, and they’re doing a far better job at research and innovation. We work closely with them to see how we can accelerate some of their research, take out some of the administrative burden, and automate remedial tasks. So we’ve got AI intrinsically built within capabilities that we’re already leveraging, and good investment in our machine learning and analytics platforms that I’ve worked closely on with my peers. We then have automation to look at how we operate. Think of a university and a university’s size, especially RMIT. It’s a significant footprint and scale. So to be able to automate and find efficiencies in those buildings, there’s quite a bit of automation that needs to be applied. Another big part of that also plays in our own technology and how we accelerate development and delivery, and take ideas from pilots, to proofs of concept, all the way into production so end users can benefit from capabilities that have been designed.
On legacy systems: You have to plan. We all have some legacy systems that are still there that are still important to operating the business. So it’s taking a phased approach, gradually implementing change, and maintaining robust practices to ensure you’ve done all your quality checks before you release it into the production environment. It’s also regular assessments and prioritization of what needs to be delivered. So it’s keeping the it all robust, and ensuring you always adhere to at least adoption of good standards for both your security and cyber practices as well.
On handling cybersecurity: It’s not easy. It’s an environment where we encourage open learning collaboration, not only within the university, but externally as well, so sharing data, working on big problems together, and finding solutions. For us, it’s maintaining a balance — what’s the core, what are the different levels of protection to apply in different protocols. You then move down into different platforms that are more open and accessible to our community. So different levels of security are needed to be applied. It’s a journey and there’s a lot of investment and adoption happening. But for us, it’s very much around that continuous monitoring and improvement using technology. And considering the education sector especially, I think we’re a significant target. You’d love to lock everything down, but that’s just not pragmatic and that’s not the way a university should operate.
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Source: News