#197: LSU's $7.5M Student-Powered SOC + NJIT's Life-Saving Analytics + Illinois' Creative Data Applications Powered by Splunk [EDUCAUSE 2024]

Joe Toste: Welcome to the public sector show by tech tables. Super excited to have everyone on. We're going to kick off with Mary Lou. Short intro and just a little bit about yourself.

Mary Lou Prevost: Sure. Mary Lou Prevost. I manage our state local education vertical over at Splunk. Been in the government sector and education sector.

Mary Lou Prevost: Gosh, 20 plus years. I probably shouldn't say that. But fun space that we get to do a lot of cool stuff.

Craig Woolley: Super [00:01:00] fun. Hi, I'm Craig Woolley. I'm the Chief Information Officer at LSU. I've been there for about four years. I've been in higher ed IT all my career. This is my third school I've worked at. Love it.

Craig Woolley: Kim?

Kim Milford: Hi, Kim Milford, the Chief Information Security Officer at University of Illinois Urbana Champaign. I've been there for about a year and a half, and I've also been around to some other campuses.

Ed Wozencroft: Love it. Ed Wozniak VP for Digital Strategy and CIO at NJIT, New Jersey Institute of Technology. Similar.

Ed Wozencroft: I've been there about three years. So I think we're all on the fun. But lifelong in higher ed, whether it's on other campuses as a consultant for higher edu change agents and executive leaders and excited to be here.

Joe Toste: Love it. I'm really excited about this podcast. So before I was gifted, I know we can see this in the camera.

Joe Toste: I got this Splunk shirt. Can we just, can we see this? That's so dispatch dot fetch and we've got the Splunk. So I was gifted to this, but Mary Lou, I didn't tell you I was going to do this before, but,

Mary Lou Prevost: [00:02:00] I'm

Joe Toste: just going to wear this for the podcast real quick.

Mary Lou Prevost: My favorite one is taking the S H out of I T.

Joe Toste: That's a great one. Craig, you've implemented a unique student powered SOC modeled at LSU. Walk us through the genesis of this idea and how it's involved into a program that not only enhances LSU's security, but also provides a valuable experience and workforce pipeline for students.

Craig Woolley: Yeah, so there were two things that were going on at LSU a few years ago. One, I was new to the job there. I met with my CISO and asked him what he felt like we needed to do to increase our cybersecurity posture. And his answer was, we need a SIM, which he preferred it be Splunk. And we need it monitored 24 7 and a SOC.

Craig Woolley: The problem had been that those can be very expensive, especially for a higher ed institution, especially public higher ed like we are. But I coupled that with, we got a new president, President Tate, who also wanted LSU to be one of the best cybersecurity [00:03:00] education institutions in the country. Which, I took that to mean we need to give our students real world experience in cybersecurity.

Craig Woolley: So by coupling, putting our students in a SOC along with us being protected, it'll, it, it covered both, right? It protects us and gives students that experience. It's a twist on a typical student run SOC. We call it student powered, and that's because we created a public private partnership with a company called TechStream, to where they're partnering with us to do the MDR services.

Craig Woolley: So it's not relying solely on the students, but they are partnered with TechStream. They are onboarded as if they're TechStream employees, even though the students are employed by LSU. And they are working on the front lines real world. The beauty of this model is, I don't need them working 24 7, which is a nightmare in a college setting.

Craig Woolley: So we have them just working Monday through Friday, 8 to 5. And then TechStream is alongside of them during the day, but at night, it's 100 percent TechStream. [00:04:00] So we don't have to worry about 24 7 in that model.

Joe Toste: That's fantastic. Just quick follow up question on the model that has expanded to places like over here, and we're gonna get to him in a second, but how is this cross institutional collaboration works?

Joe Toste: Kind of what challenges have you faced? And what are some of the key lessons in trying to scale this model out?

Craig Woolley: Yeah. So from the get go, when we worked with texture, we wanted to create this as a scalable, repeatable process, much like a fast food franchise. We wanted everything all created and set so that other schools can adopt this.

Craig Woolley: We got buy-in from our state, which funded this project with seven and a half million dollars in recurring money. And so we have been onboarding schools in the state. We are over 20 that have been onboarded in this model. Each school gets their own Splunk ES instance so that there's no issues of, students or other people seeing other school's data.

Craig Woolley: It's all siloed in a Splunk ES, but we use automation and Splunk soar [00:05:00] to pull all those together. and operate in conjunction and do automation that allows us to be very quick and nimble and solve incidents as quickly as possible.

Joe Toste: I love that. Mary Lou, from your perspective at Splunk, you've been closely involved with LSU's innovative SOC program.

Joe Toste: Walk us through how Splunk has supported this initiative and what are some of the unique benefits observed in implementing the student power model.

Mary Lou Prevost: I think one of the big challenges that students run into when they graduate with a cyber degree, if you don't have hands on experience with the manufacturers out there, a company has to invest over a year or more to get you productive.

Mary Lou Prevost: And so it's a real challenge. There's over 2. 3 million open cyber jobs, right? So we have to address this challenge. My biggest challenge in public sector is talent, right? So love this program so that we can get the right talent out to government, out to education, out to private sector. [00:06:00] So it's a win for I think all of us as citizens, right?

Mary Lou Prevost: And what's unique for Splunk? That's, we've got to have that staff. All these fine folks have great programs that all need staff, right? So it answers that big challenge. And on top of that, There's so many different types of data use cases, even beyond security. So helping people understand the power of data, and how that can be used to make decisions in so many different aspects.

Mary Lou Prevost: It's a win. And what we do specifically is we offer up all of our curriculum, our online training at no charge, for all the faculty, for the students, to help build these kinds of programs to accelerate that education cycle.

Craig Woolley: And one thing I wanted to add that's important for the leadership at LSU and also our commissioner of higher ed.

Craig Woolley: This program is open to students of all backgrounds, so you do not have to be in an IT degree or cyber degree. All we do is we give them a critical [00:07:00] thinking test that TechStream developed. And they have to score a certain amount on that test to be considered for the job. But you don't need any IT background, and then we will train you with some of the Splunk training that Mary Lou was talking about.

Craig Woolley: TechStream does some training. And we can get you onto the front lines from the time a student is hired, to the time they're on the front lines and the SOC is six weeks that we've got it down to.

Joe Toste: Ed, you're in the process of implementing the student powered SOC. at NJIT, inspired by LSU's model.

Joe Toste: What iterations are you making to fit this into NJIT's specific needs? And how do you see this initiative contributing to the workforce development of New Jersey overall?

Ed Wozencroft: Yeah, so three years ago we started, we realized we didn't have a SOC on campus at all. So we outsourced to the classic movement, said throw it out there, have somebody run this for us 24 7.

Ed Wozencroft: In year three, we're starting to reevaluate where we want to go. Q, getting to know Craig, a site visit to LSU to see what the program was like and experience it in real life. One of NJIT's goals in our 2030 strategic plan is to have every single one of our [00:08:00] students have some form of experiential education by the time they walk out the door.

Ed Wozencroft: So Mary Lou is talking about what Craig is talking about, having that hands on experience we found it makes the students so much more successful and prepared to enter the workforce. And being the state's public polytechnic institution, we just said, it's a no brainer for us to start to, to take a program like this and scale it.

Ed Wozencroft: We already signed with TechStream. We signed about three weeks ago. By the end of November, we plan to be up and running on TechStream, on the security stack, backed by Splunk. And what we're going to do is, realizing that it'll take us a little bit of time to scale students in, I'm actually going to lean on Craig at LSU and his student powered SOC to protect some of our data and our assets day to day.

Ed Wozencroft: What that's doing is it's actually writing down our costs and that, that's very unique. TechStream is willing to make less from you as you scale your students, but still take on the liability and train all of your students. And what we're doing too, it's very easy to fall into the trap for us to say, Hey, we have a big cybersecurity program, let's hire all cybersecurity students.

Ed Wozencroft: We're actually interested in tapping out to our engineering departments, our liberal arts, our college of [00:09:00] arts and design, because we're realizing that security has so many different disciplines that are starting to emerge. We need to prepare the workforce. What I'm also doing is partnering with our state CISO at NJ CIC, New Jersey's Cyber Intelligence Division to start looking at how we can actually create beyond a public private partnership, a multi pronged partnership that actually looks at how do we train workforce for government jobs.

Ed Wozencroft: So how does the state CISO, the state SOC, tie into this? How do we look at small, medium, local businesses, municipalities, organizations that typically have The IT guy, who's also the mail person, who's managing the phone system, it's one person. You can't do cyber justice with just one person. How can we scale this so that we have branches of a student powered SOC that support private industry, higher education, and this, we want to open up similar to Craig to any school in the state of New Jersey and then beyond and federate as we see other systems and other schools tie off, and then also bring it to government.

Ed Wozencroft: From an economic development and workforce development, the whole goal is the same as Craig's. Keep our students in our state. So [00:10:00] in a world where far more virtual employment opportunities come up and people might not want to relocate, they can take a job at LSU or with TechStream or with Splunk and stay in the state of New Jersey, which is huge for our economic mission.

Joe Toste: That's great. Craig was able to get buy in at the state level. How are you working at that level and that collaboration community?

Ed Wozencroft: So we're working a bit opposite. What what's a little bit unique about New Jersey's public higher education is that We aren't systemized. We do have a commission for higher education, but we're not organized in one shared model.

Ed Wozencroft: We don't have an overarching board of regents or a board of a board of overseers. Every school is a I forget the legal acronym, the legal terminology for it, but we all operate as sole entities. I'm taking a bit of a backwards approach to say, I'm building this for NJIT, and then I'm working with organizations like New Jersey Edge, who's our higher ed consortium in the state, and we're going out doing roadshows like this to say, you can be a part of it.

Ed Wozencroft: It's complete voluntary opt in. But what we're seeing is that the power of coming together is so much stronger. So the goal coming into the fall of this upcoming calendar year [00:11:00] is that find at minimum one community college, one private institution, and one four year senior public in New Jersey. So three different schools that are willing to partner into this model.

Ed Wozencroft: Similar to Craig's, they can have their own student powered SOC, but it's really about creating that neighborhood watch program at the top level that says, let's share threat intelligence, let's share what's going on, because the power of all of us is so much higher than the power of one of us.

Joe Toste: Yeah, no, that's fantastic.

Joe Toste: Kim at the university, you've expanded to use Splunk beyond just security to broader data analytics. Walk us through some of those use cases that you're using right now.

Kim Milford: I would love to we use it a lot for analyzing email data. Things that go out like alerts that go out or messages from our strategic communications group. They want to know Who read it who opened it who clicked on the links? How did that work? So all that email data was already going into Splunk because we wanted it for security and so they were able to Be creative and they came to our data analytics [00:12:00] people and said we want this data.

Kim Milford: We want to know this from email And and so we set up this really great process, but they now have that data and they can self serve, they have dashboards, it's all presented to them in the way they need it to do their jobs and to make decisions. So that's a really powerful one. Our library uses it.

Kim Milford: We use it for e texts in our we have a dashboard in in Canvas for e texts so you can see what's been checked out if you, if there are e texts in your class, your course. So that's a fun use. And then the library uses it for their licensed products too. So I just love the creativity that's been applied.

Joe Toste: That's great. I love that. One of the big themes is that, especially in the higher ed space, is the kind of decentralized nature of the universities. How have you approached cyber security and data management at kind of a 30, 000 foot level?

Kim Milford: Very carefully. Would you all agree with that?

Kim Milford: Yes. Oh yeah. It's, we have to do things, One at a time, so for instance we're starting our cyber security [00:13:00] initiative improvement initiative and we're doing that department by department where there's no hardcore mandate. You shall all and then we expect them to do it. So we're going out to each department.

Kim Milford: We answer the questions about it. We talk about what their needs are to support it. And frankly, we're paying for it. Because to charge a department, Okay. To protect university resources just makes it not able or not willing to do it. So I'm like, we're just paying for it. And I had funding for it.

Kim Milford: Thank you, university for making sure that happened. So that's a great example of how we need to go one by one. And sometimes it's faculty by faculty, very carefully and patiently.

Craig Woolley: Yeah. And that's one of the things that we also came out with 14 brand new cybersecurity policies because ours were way outdated.

Craig Woolley: We have partnered with our faculty senate to do like what you were saying, almost faculty by faculty. So they created a faculty senate IT committee, which I'm so thrilled with. We meet with them 90 [00:14:00] minutes every week. And my CISO and I sit down with, there's about 7 or 8 faculty members on this committee.

Craig Woolley: And we go through line by the policies, making sure they understand them, making sure they're telling us here's where our concerns are, and we have a long dialogue. We've been doing this for a year, right? So we've spent hundreds, over a hundred hours together, but our policies are better written because of it, because the faculty give their insight, and they understand where we're coming from, and we also understand where they're coming from.

Craig Woolley: And so I think that has been a really rewarding experience. It's a lot of time, but it is really worth it.

Joe Toste: I love that. So Mary Lou, I didn't actually put this in the questions cause I wanted to put you on the spot, which is great. I love, this is my favorite. That was my favorite. So I wanted to give Mary Lou the opportunity to brag on each one of you.

Joe Toste: So Mary Lou, you can start with Craig and we'll go down the aisle.

Mary Lou Prevost: What I think is so unique about all three of these individuals is their collaborators. You just heard it. They're going [00:15:00] across and working with Whether it's the state, whether it's with each of the influential parts of the campus, whether it's all the different deans.

Mary Lou Prevost: Amazing collaborators that aren't willing to, that are willing to go and step beyond what is normally the box that we might fit in. And by doing that, they've done amazing things. That are just, it's not heard of in other places. I think just the innovation they have brought by their willingness to collaborate.

Mary Lou Prevost: I'm just bragging on all three of you because you all are spearheading amazing initiatives from that standpoint and I couldn't be more excited to be sitting and I'm humbled to be sitting with the three of you at the moment to be Honest,

Kim Milford: I'm the only one that can do a hair flip okay,

Joe Toste: so this is really great and one so Mary Lou has a very unique perspective she's seen a She has a huge portfolio.

Joe Toste: She's seen customers across state agencies. I cover all the public sector, but she's covering all the public sector, too. So I [00:16:00] would love to hear what are some of those, what are the best from these three that you've been bragging on, what are some of those best lessons learned or themes that you think Because we're going to have state agencies listen, we're going to have K 12, we're going to have state CIOs listen what would you say are some of those, the best that these three universities bring that would be a huge benefit to some of the other CIOs around the nation?

Mary Lou Prevost: Okay, I can go one by one. I think one, when I look at what Craig is doing he wasn't afraid to think bigger. And he wasn't afraid to say, I need to protect LSU. But, by bringing in the students. I can probably get some more folks behind this and he wasn't afraid to go out to Department of Ed and work with the Board of Regents to expand what they're doing, right?

Mary Lou Prevost: And and equally What we also see, Kim, we see so many people that will take a data and they'll say, no, it's my tool. And what is so unique with what Kim is doing at the University of Illinois is it's our [00:17:00] tool. You guys have a sandbox. Go ahead, play with it. She's allowing that innovation to happen real time to solve real problems.

Mary Lou Prevost: And when we don't do this, we can do a lot more when we expand that. Equally, you reached across, you saw public safety was challenged, right? They're sitting there trying to do active shooter drills. And you're like I got all the, I can tell you where everybody is. We get all the end points, right? So he has all that telemetry to offer up and now he's part of those drills.

Mary Lou Prevost: Using I. T. Right or even when it was I love that story. It was a student that was in trouble and they had to find that student very quickly and using Splunk, they were able to find that individual and no harm occurred. And so it's these amazing stories of not being afraid to say, I'll help right or you can or let's try.

Mary Lou Prevost: And I love that, right?

Joe Toste: Yeah, I love that. That's fantastic. That [00:18:00] dovetails very well with the story you're about to tell is exactly what she just said. So give us the details of that story.

Ed Wozencroft: About two years back one of us, for any of us who work on a college campus, one of the most disturbing things right now is that mental health is at an all time low.

Ed Wozencroft: And students were seeing now for the first time in history that more students are stopping out of college because of mental health, not because of economic issues, not because they're not fit for it or not making the right path. Over 80 percent of students that have stopped out of a college or university in the past two years are largely reporting that it's because of anxiety, mental health, depression, related issues.

Ed Wozencroft: We have to do something about that and the best part of my job is I work closely with our dean of students, our campus police, our public safety organization to do everything we can and one of the realizations we had is, wait, we have this data. So about two years ago we had a student, as Mary Lou was mentioning, who was in crisis.

Ed Wozencroft: A friend called into our CARES hotline, which is a 24 7 hotline that gets you instant priority. It's similar to 911. [00:19:00] However, when you call that, you know that it's likely a mental health, behavioral, some type of life safety incident that it'll spark instantly a ping to our student life and our dean of students, our chief of police, and anyone who needs to be involved.

Ed Wozencroft: They were having trouble locating the student where their friend who had reported them had said that they were. Police went, dispatched, not to be found. We're swarming campus. What happens in a public safety incident in this nature is that the police literally have to start from rooftops and go on down of every building on campus until they find this person or can rule out that they're not on campus.

Ed Wozencroft: When you think about the amount of time and risk there is in that is we have probably about 60, 70 buildings on campus, two very tall parking decks. They have to go to those, swarm, and while we are generally covered, that's a very human related response. They were having trouble finding this particular student.

Ed Wozencroft: Our networking team got wind of it, and late at night, I believe it was about 2 a. m., one of our, one of our network engineers went into Splunk, found where this student's cell phone [00:20:00] was hitting certain access points, pinpointed a general location, saw that they were active, and within seconds were able to dispatch a public safety officer to go intervene before the student was about to do something more drastic.

Ed Wozencroft: That was the moment of realizing, for me, the power of data and analytics, tools like Splunk, and how IT could really think differently and serve a public good.

Joe Toste: That's great, Kim. I'm curious. Is there an impactful story around data and analytics that you've seen? Wow, this has just been a game changer at our school.

Kim Milford: Yeah, absolutely. There's so many. But COVID our use of data and Splunk for analyzing the data quickly and being able to take action on it. I'm getting it again to the decision makers to take that quick action because we were all there was no playbook on COVID for anyone, right? And so we had to figure that out as we were doing it.

Kim Milford: There was a lot of great help within the higher ed community, but we're also very different, so that was probably our most gratifying success.

Joe Toste: Fantastic. [00:21:00] Craig, I'd love to hear if there's a story around, specifically around data analytics at LSU. I

Craig Woolley: think the biggest thing for us still is on the SOC.

Craig Woolley: We get to see where we're having attacks come in. So we did that when we did our ribbon cutting last year. We were able to show on our big screen inside the SOC exactly real live, here's where our threats are coming from, their active attacks coming and even which school they were attacking. And I thought visually that was stunning for the news and our officials from the state were there for the ribbon cutting.

Craig Woolley: That really was an eye opening.

Mary Lou Prevost: And you're humble. Your governor was at the ribbon cutting. My

Craig Woolley: governor was at the ribbon cutting. When I Along

Mary Lou Prevost: with the university president.

Craig Woolley: Yeah. It was it was a great event. Yeah. Anyway I, when I Pitch this idea to our commissioner of higher ed. She loved it.

Craig Woolley: And she said, I want the governor to come someday to the ribbon cutting. And I was like, yeah, I'm sure that will happen. And sure enough, in september, I got a call saying the governor wants to come in october to do a ribbon cutting for cyber security [00:22:00] awareness month. And it was a wonderful event.

Craig Woolley: And there's videos of that online and it was really good and shows the collaboration we've got between the state, our university systems, the Louisiana optical network, which is our network that connects all of our schools. All that collaboration and with Splunk and TechStream all came to light in that day.

Joe Toste: I was thinking about this. I interviewed the 23rd governor for the state of Arizona earlier this year on cybersecurity. And I was like, blown away just at the level of buy in that he had. Seems very similar in Louisiana. What were the feelings that you were feeling showing up to this ribbon cutting?

Joe Toste: What were you feeling? Like the governor's here? I

Craig Woolley: was I was proud as can be that we did something that rose to that level and I was proud that our governor was very well versed and he couldn't have been better. He came in early. Went into the SOC, talked with our students, asked them, where their backgrounds were, all of that.

Craig Woolley: He spent a long time. [00:23:00] Then we did the ribbon cutting, and he stayed after and talked to people. So it was a really good event.

Joe Toste: Just want to continue with you real quick on the workforce pipeline. When we met, you were super passionate about that, and I want to just give a few more minutes to that.

Joe Toste: Because aren't just going through the program, right? Like they're getting a job. Can you speak to that?

Craig Woolley: So the design of this all along was around the students and giving them good job opportunities in any school in the state. So any school, much like Ed was talking about, can open up their own sock and give their students that opportunity.

Craig Woolley: When we approach text stream about partnering with us to do this they were immediately excited and I think they were thinking of themselves of this could be a great opportunity for us. So they, okay. They did ask me if they could have dibs on our students. And I told them I don't feel about that.

Craig Woolley: Yeah, I said I don't think I have the ability of CIO to give dibs on our students, but their mind was in the right spot, which was we need talent, too. So we've got our first cohort of students graduating [00:24:00] at the end of this semester three because we just started in last spring. All three of them have job offers already.

Craig Woolley: Three job offers for text stream even. And so it And we're going to be tracking this always on, on how well our students are doing. And we're creating, through this program, so any school that joins will have this opportunity, report cards for our students that are directly out of the analytics and things that come out of Splunk, all the work they've been doing, the incidents they've solved, how quickly they did it.

Craig Woolley: We're going to have a personalized scorecard for each student for them to take when they go to interviews or to submit with their resumes, which we think will be a huge help for them.

Joe Toste: There's gonna be like a scorecard in the office and it's gonna say 0 and Mary Lou's gonna get competitive and be like, I need you to go higher.

Ed Wozencroft: That's the way it should be. That's

Joe Toste: exactly the way it should be. So I want to jump real quick. Workforce. Pipeline management. Are you thinking about the same thing? How are you thinking about this?

Ed Wozencroft: Absolutely. NJIT has, and has always done a great job placing students, getting them [00:25:00] experience, but we don't have nearly enough cyber professionals in any state, in any industry.

Ed Wozencroft: And if we can look and one of the things that's unique at NJIT, we actually don't have a bachelor's in cyber security, which kind of amazed me when I started and was going about this program. And we realized it's because we feel that cyber security is a very diverse skill set. And we want somebody to have a better foundational knowledge.

Ed Wozencroft: So our goal, and it's really to scale, it's we're starting with about 5 to 7 students. I want to see, we built out a suite that's capable of supporting about 20 to 30 of them. I want to see that suite full, and then I'll go find more and more. And having industry partners like TechStream, like Splunk, like a lot of our other partners.

Ed Wozencroft: A huge part of my job is going out and advertising to them what they're doing, because I want to see them hiring our students. It is, that to me, when we're talking about points of pride, the single greatest thing I think any of us could achieve out of this is helping our students get a job in today's market, where they expect you to have experience coming out, and a lot of students don't.

Ed Wozencroft: We're giving them that opportunity, and that is, that's why I'm in higher education at least, and the [00:26:00] part that drives me day to day.

Joe Toste: Love it. Kim, one of the things I did want to touch upon was the emerging technologies that you're seeing across your portfolio. Could you just speak to the intersection between cyber security and data analytics and what you see in the next couple of years?

Kim Milford: That's a really good question. Using the data, the same data. It's data from our logs, email. Network is using that data to, to help solve their problems. So I see this quest for where is the data?

Kim Milford: What data do we have? Can I put my data in there? And and then how can we make the most use of it? So it's very efficient.

Joe Toste: So we're gonna start to wrap this up. So one of my, one of my kind of my favorite questions this the last few days has been like what's one lesson that you would like to pass down to one of the kids at your university?

Joe Toste: So it might be specific to each of you. I know you don't have a stock at your university, so it might be more focused on the data analytics or the cyber. But if there's a rising technology star university, what are you passing down to them?

Kim Milford: Be creative. Thank you. [00:27:00] Be innovative.

Kim Milford: Don't think siloed. Don't think, this is for this. Expand your thinking. Look for opportunities outside of traditional use of technology. Or use it any tool, truthfully. You're going to use a hammer for a nail most of the time. But maybe, every now and then you need to use something else.

Ed Wozencroft: Love it. Ed, I similar but different. I would say be bold and it's incredibly scary for anyone these days to be unemployed or be looking for a jobs market. And these programs, it's not always easy, especially for younger students who say, Hey, I'm looking for a job. Can you help me out? I don't have the experience.

Ed Wozencroft: Go out and ask network. I my favorite thing to do when I'm on campus is meet with our students. But it's difficult to try to get them to engage at times. And if I were to say to any of our students or anyone out there, be curious, not judgmental. My favorite Ted Lasso quote. Love Ted Lasso, by the way. So great.

Ed Wozencroft: Best lessons on leadership on earth. But really, that quote means a lot to me because it [00:28:00] asks the right questions. Don't be afraid to be the loud one in the room. Go to when we do events on campus all the time to help with training to give exposure. We'll have Splunk on to give industry thought leadership.

Ed Wozencroft: I want our students coming in drones, raising hands, asking about the jobs market. What skills should I do? That's only there to help them.

Joe Toste: Yeah, I love that. And just to speak so I forget how this happened, but I was at task a number a year, two years ago, I think it was, and we got connected. Didn't happen.

Joe Toste: We just, I think this is the first time we met, right? This is the first time we met. It's been two years. And I had no idea someone was like, Hey, you gotta be Mary Lou. I'm like, I have zero clue who that is. And in fact, to be honest cause I didn't come from public sector and I didn't know what the term sled was when I started this business for the first, like nine months, people kept saying sled.

Joe Toste: I'm like, okay, I gotta look this up. This is like snowboarding. I'm like, oh, it's like a sales term. Okay, got it. Okay, cool. But then two years later, just, it, it happened, right? So that, like that community. You just never know who you're going to come into contact with. And we had UTSA on both [00:29:00] Vanessa and we had Kendra and just the students were out here and it was so awesome to see the students.

Joe Toste: I was at UTSA last year, so a lot of them were returning and a lot of them were like, dude, I want to be a creator like you and I'm like, cool. Awesome. Like X number of years. Like whenever you start, just email me and love to pass the favorite out, right?

Ed Wozencroft: Yeah, that's exactly what I'm talking about.

Ed Wozencroft: Yeah.

Joe Toste: Yeah. Craig.

Craig Woolley: What you're passing down. I think follow your passion, first and foremost. But then, to me, everything is about relationship building and building trust. The more you can work with folks, the more you can collaborate, like what we've been doing, the more successful you're going to be.

Craig Woolley: You can't do it all by yourself. You've got to learn how to work with others and collaborate.

Joe Toste: I wish that my memory was so good, because I want to really pull a Ted Lasso teen quote right now. But I can't but maybe in post production. I'll just pop in and add a clip in there and then I'll pop out Mary Lou, what would you pass down to a rising technology leader in your field?

Mary Lou Prevost: So I would say look [00:30:00] for the shining stars and to me these three exemplify the shining stars right and I learned so much from the people we work with and to be able to share those ideas, to inspire others, to go out and do great things and highlight where you see great things. What more can you ask for?

Joe Toste: I love that. Thank you for coming on the public sector show by tech tables. Super excited to release this episode and I appreciate you all.

Mary Lou Prevost: Thanks. That's

Joe Toste: right.

Hey, what's up everybody. This is Joe Toste from techtables.com. And you're listening to the Public Sector Show by TechTables. This podcast features human centric stories from public sector CIOs, CISOs, and technology leaders across federal, state, city, county, and higher education. You'll gain valuable insights into current issues and challenges faced by top leaders.

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