#199: Securing Decentralized IT at UT-McCombs & Tanium's 'Whole of Education' Framework [EDUCAUSE 2024]

Joe Toste: Today, I am so excited. We have Corey Wilburn, CIO at the University of Texas McCombs School of Business and Doug Thompson, Chief Education Architect at Tanium. Welcome to the Public Sector Show by Tech Tables. Thank you, Joe. I am really pumped because we are inside the Carisoft booth and it, you, the camera most likely won't pick this up.

Joe Toste: It is actually somewhat very loud right now recording the podcast, but I'm used to a quiet room. So this is pretty awesome right [00:01:00] now. So Corey, for those who don't know you, quick intro. So my name is Corey Wilbert,

Cory Wilburn: Chief Information Officer at the University of Texas McComb School of Business. I've been here for a couple of years now working in higher ed.

Cory Wilburn: Prior to that, I was with Texas State Government with the Texas General Land Office. I've got a 27 year career in IT and proud to say all of it in the public sector. So really excited about doing work that I find, that I believe is meaningful and makes a difference. And you forgot something. You were TASC president up until most recently.

Cory Wilburn: That's exactly right. President of TASC. It's a great state organization for state higher education and state agency leaders. Love that. Doug? Thanks a lot, Doug Thompson.

Doug Thompson: I've been at Tanium for about four years now. I spent 20 years at Microsoft before that when I actually worked back in my previous role and was part of the account team to do that.

Doug Thompson: So I'm just basically a sales nerd, chief education architect is the official name, but sales nerd is what I do as a passion. I'm just curious about technology and how it can help business and schools and stuff be safer and do things better. And you also have a podcast. I also have a [00:02:00] podcast. I host the Tanium pod.

Doug Thompson: I like to talk and I've done a TED talk. So I like to do

Joe Toste: all that stuff. So yeah. Okay, awesome. I love that. Maybe we'll cross post this episode to the Tanium podcast. And that'll be a fun time. Corey, you spent almost just exactly, you said, two decades at GLO. And we had two great interviews.

Joe Toste: One of my favorites, I think it's because it was at the Commodore was episode 107, How to Develop and Multiply Leaders. That was with Retta Mosley, also, who I thought she just went off into the sunset. And now she's at DIR. That's right. And she came back. I thought she was like gone. But she's back.

Joe Toste: Love Retta. She's fantastic. So from there to you've been at McCombs for two years. Give us the layout of the land of McCombs right now

Cory Wilburn: First shout out to Rhett as she and I had a glass of wine about four or five days ago So I'm glad you brought her up great friend of mine At UT McCombs, we are you know, super busy with a number of projects out there I think probably the one that's getting the most headlines right now is the new building that we're building.

Cory Wilburn: It's called Mulva Hall it will be a new undergraduate school of business that [00:03:00] we're just now breaking ground on. We've torn down a parking garage. We'll begin that construction. And we should be ready to have classes in there by 2028. If

Joe Toste: construction schedule holds. I love that.

Joe Toste: That's fantastic. Doug, on our podcast intro call, you mentioned whole of education, which I really loved. But before we jump into that, you've been at, you mentioned the last three years at Octanium. Don't mention Microsoft. No, I'm kidding. Yes.

Doug Thompson: Yeah.

Joe Toste: Sorry.

Doug Thompson: Another tech company.

Joe Toste: Yeah, another tech company.

Joe Toste: Where you've developed comprehensive education strategies aimed at safeguarding the sensitive data. And I did glean this from your LinkedIn profile. 50 million students. I like that number. So I was first curious, how did you get to become a chief education architect and tell us more about that role and then jump into what you do.

Joe Toste: The whole of education.

Doug Thompson: Sure, when I came into Tanium, it was because of the sales nerd role that came in, and they didn't have a lot of big focus on how do we do things in education. Because even though if you're state and local government, it's still different than what education is. And in my previous role, I spent 10 years on the [00:04:00] education team, so I understood the environment and all.

Doug Thompson: So I came out, here's a strategy of how we can really help go do things. And with the Tanium platform, there's some things that we could do that I wasn't able to do in my previous company because of the way the architecture and stuff comes up. So I'm really excited about that. I wish we had 50 million customers, but that's a lofty goal.

Doug Thompson: That's a, that's the that's the addressable market, let's just say that we could go out and protect.

Joe Toste: Got it. Got it. Okay, so now tell me a little bit more about this. We were talking about the whole of education.

Doug Thompson: So it is an offshoot of what we call our whole of government approach, where we're finding in a lot of institutions that.

Doug Thompson: That it's hard to get all these disparate players to play nicely together. How do you have one place where you can do like an AWACS plane where I can see the entire playing field of what's going around? Due to point solutions and security boundaries of different either cloud or on premises, That makes it darn near impossible to get that overall view of things that's going on.

Doug Thompson: And at a high level, if somebody at the University of Texas gets breached or something like that, it doesn't matter that it was maybe in Corey's [00:05:00] department or another one, it's got that brand name on it. And how do you get visibility into what all that is? And that's really what we can help provide.

Doug Thompson: And getting that visibility, then you can also then delegate control. So it's about How do we mature the educational market to go ahead and manage more like you would like in an enterprise? That was one of the interesting things when I started my previous role. I I thought UT system, I thought, okay, this is like an enterprise.

Doug Thompson: Everything goes up there. Oh no. It's probably best described as a coalition of the unwilling at a lot of times.

Joe Toste: Okay. Oh, so the unwilling. So let's dive in before we jump back to Corey real quick. One to two of your favorite higher ed customer examples.

Doug Thompson: I, there's one, it's Winston Salem State University, and actually we had a, did a podcast with her.

Doug Thompson: She they came to us they came to look at Tainium, I did the original demo to them about what went on. I visited her a year later, they came in and she said, look, this just totally transformed what we did. Before they were stuck in where we're patching, I'm still waiting, anybody here getting in for patching?

Doug Thompson: I keep waiting for somebody to get in IT for patching, nobody ever answers [00:06:00] that. But they, their total attitude changed because with Tanium, they got that visibility across things. They were able to automate things that they hadn't been able to do before. And now they're coming to her as opposed to simply going in and okay, I got to go work today.

Doug Thompson: They're coming here with ideas and she's got to hold them back. And this is one of those things that you don't think about, how a technology can impact the people, the environment around it. And I watched your episode with the leadership type thing. I thought it was great, your approach to have that.

Doug Thompson: It's a lot like it. How do you help people reach their potential? And this was a great way to do that.

Joe Toste: Love that. So Corey, in our previous podcast, you talked about empowering it teams to drive innovation. How has this evolved since our last convo from GLL to McCombs state agency to higher ed?

Cory Wilburn: That's a great, that's a great question.

Cory Wilburn: I still think I still have that belief that, the best way to empower people is to get them in the door and explain the assignment, get on the same page, make sure that they understand the requirements and the constraints. And then give them the opportunity to make choices.

Cory Wilburn: I think when they feel empowered to make their own choices, people really get skin in the [00:07:00] game and they take ownership and that makes them more dedicated. From my perspective, I don't think that's changed. I think that's a great way to approach public service. What really has changed, and it's not just necessarily tied to higher ed, is There's just more noise out there than there's ever been before.

Cory Wilburn: There's so many distractions. There are so many competing priorities in our organizations and in our personal life. All of the craze over A. I. And how fast new technology moves. So it's hard to fight all that noise and keep people focused. I think the second thing that's out there is, over the last couple of years, complexity has continued to grow.

Cory Wilburn: We are, we're now integrating all these different point solutions and Data lakes and Lake and, it's different tool sets. And so I think that all of that complexity makes it more difficult for us all to stay on the same page. And I think that's what you've got to do is have that constant communication and coming back together to say, these are our values.

Cory Wilburn: This is our mission. And this is what we're trying to accomplish and interest doing the best you can to keep everybody together.

Joe Toste: Okay, that was really great. So How do you foster [00:08:00] that growth mindset? Because I think that's exactly what you need. Absolutely. So

Cory Wilburn: it starts with a culture where we're safe to make mistakes, where if you're trying to innovate and you're trying to move the ball forward and do the right thing that you're among friends and there's not going to be a gotcha out there if you happen to fall short.

Cory Wilburn: So I think, that's where it starts is creating that culture of safety where we're all here to get together and do move the ball forward. We've tried recently taking a systems approach to our work, right? So making sure that everyone understands the organization, how it works, what are the different levers you can pull and understanding exactly where our team fits within the scope of our mission and our organization and tying it all together so that everyone on our team knows how that machine works.

Cory Wilburn: I think that's really important. And then lastly, encouraging learning and sharing and collaboration. I think it's a learn skill. That you have to model as a leader to just keep coming out there and being vulnerable, being open and communicating. I think if you do that, it will [00:09:00] encourage those that you work with to do the same and that's

Joe Toste: how you build that culture of trust.

Joe Toste: That's great. Doug, who are the customers across your portfolio that you see that most resemble Corey's leadership?

Doug Thompson: Yeah, him exactly. University of Utah, they do a pretty good job of that too. He's empowered the team to go do that. I'll use a sister organization of yours up at, Cheryl, up at the University of Texas at Arlington.

Doug Thompson: She's got that approach, and I worked with her back in my previous role and stuff, and I really love that team. I work with them a lot. But, those, the best leaders I've ever had have been those that are, have that vulnerability. And to your point, if it's okay to fail, as long as you don't keep making the same mistake, that's bad.

Doug Thompson: But you, I almost think, cause, cause that's where you, that's where the growth happens, is when you're out stretching and looking at things. As we look at the way education, higher education, I see it transforming into the more mature model, more of a, okay, look, we need to get the bigger picture like you're talking about in the bigger picture of the organization.

Doug Thompson: That encourages the ability to go in and try that because before it's okay, if you're, it's a punitive and we can't really do that. We always have [00:10:00] to do it the way it's always been done, right? Or we did this ourselves. We can build it better than somebody else. Maybe. You can leverage another platform to go do something even more than that.

Doug Thompson: But you have that safety zone as he's talking about to go try to feel and grow. And the best leaders I've found have done

Joe Toste: it that way. Yeah, no, that's fantastic. Corey jumping back to you I was thinking about this. Have you been to the Texas Chili Parlor? Oh, yeah, I love it. I went with Dan Texar and his team there.

Joe Toste: I was thinking, actually this would be a great question. What advice would you give to a state agency CIO? Looking back at your time now, both having been two years at McCombs, you did almost 20 at GLO. You're sitting down with Dan or somebody or another or, or John Fowler, any of those Texas CIOs, agency CIOs.

Joe Toste: What advice would you give them?

Cory Wilburn: The first advice I've given them is you find yourself at the chili parlor, get the enchiladas. They're fantastic with a cold beer. I think giving advice about specifically moving into higher education, there are a lot of similarities, absolutely, between agency and higher ed.

Cory Wilburn: All of the higher eds [00:11:00] in Texas, the state supported ones rather, are state agencies, technically. So there's definitely some tie in there as it comes to contracting, regulation, and purchasing. But what I was not quite prepared for was the decentralized nature of higher education. When you work in state government, there's usually a directive from the legislature or an elected official who's got a top down, very mission driven culture that they're pointing you in the direction that they're expecting you to go.

Cory Wilburn: In higher education, we're decentralized and we build our vision through collaboration and consensus. And on the one hand, Some days that's frustrating because it takes longer, but we get the most creative solutions that way that really take into account lots of different perspectives. And so I think once you can understand, you're gonna have to have some patience once you get when you get to the other end of the tunnel, you're gonna end up with something that's really valuable and probably is a great fit for the organization.

Joe Toste: Yeah, that's really great. You said decentralized. I want to hit on this. Doug, you've been able to see so many [00:12:00] customers. What kind of insights have you gleaned around that ecosystem of a decentralized environment in higher ed?

Doug Thompson: Yeah, that, that's what made the higher educational system was found sort of the autonomy and that, and each you have your budget they all have these other things that go on, which gave you some freedom to explore.

Doug Thompson: But I think at a higher level now they're realizing that, hey, if we combine forces and leverage, we can get more outta what we're doing. And learn more from others. So the ones that I've seen are really embracing that. What can we learn from the other groups and do? Just because we've always done it, is not a reason to keep doing it.

Doug Thompson: What's new that we can go do? Again, when you're looking at this whole of education approach, at the top, how do we make them feel safe as well, that they have a good picture of what's really going on in all the institutions? Because if you've got these little fiefdoms where I'm sending in a report, How do you validate that report, right?

Doug Thompson: How do I trust the data that is there? And giving them a platform where they can see all of that in one place, and in the state of Hawaii, they use, the [00:13:00] CIO there used Tanium, and he created this dashboard of all the different governmental departments, and it's red, yellow, green, on what they were doing.

Doug Thompson: And he published that, it's just a transparency type thing, and it's amazing how fast everybody turned to green. When they got published. But again, you've gotta, you can then, as a legislator or something, I know that the money we're allocating is being well spent and protect, doing the ultimate end, protecting the citizens of the state.

Doug Thompson: Doug, I wanna

Joe Toste: zoom out across all the portfolios. What are the two biggest, two to three biggest themes that you're seeing across your customer base?

Doug Thompson: One is a lot of interest is coming from the c, the CISO side of the house. And it's what vulnerabilities do we have and all that. And I was doing a little research this morning and still even today that 80 percent Microsoft did a study, sorry, I miss it.

Doug Thompson: Not too long, a couple of years ago, that 80 percent of the vulnerabilities and breaches are unpatched software applications. That's still today, right? And of those 80 percent of those, 80 percent could have been prevented if they would have simply done that. So knowing what [00:14:00] you have is the very first thing.

Doug Thompson: So the decentralization makes that really hard because, especially if you're using different tools and doing that, how do I report all this stuff in a consistent manner?

Doug Thompson: So they're trying to get this, how do we get a true picture of what our environment is? That's the very first thing to go do. Then evaluate. How do we simplify things a little bit, because the more complex they are, as an old quote from Star Trek and Scotty, the more they overwork the plumbing, the easier it is to clog up the drain.

Doug Thompson: How do we simplify life and maybe standardize on a few things, and then it's empowering the people to go and do that. It's rewarding them for coming up with ideas on how to do things differently than we have before, and then sharing that information with them. That's one of the great things about EDUCAUSE, there's so much sharing between.

Doug Thompson: The institutions and all, and everybody here, even the partners,

Joe Toste: Sharing that. It's a really great story. So you said CISO, and I was curious around what's driving this? Is it the rise of the CISO in the last couple years? Just as far as it making it to that C suite type of role?

Doug Thompson: Yeah, we're it used to be CIO, then now they're [00:15:00] like pairs, and there's different ways of doing it. You have the CTO above it. The org structure is constantly changing. But they understand how important it is. Information security used to be about just simply protecting the data.

Doug Thompson: Now it's more than that. How do we protect everything that we all the assets that we have? And I think it is due to that transformation, the rise of that to try to be on par with what the information officer does. So the two sides of the house or the whoever's in charge operations. How do we work together?

Doug Thompson: That's more than the single best impactful thing is where you've got the operational side of the house working with the security side of the house to come up with a strategy opposites. That's not my, it's not my fault. They're doing that. And it's just how do we work together to do that?

Doug Thompson: So that's

Joe Toste: probably the key thing. That's great. So Educause is top 10. This is number one for 2024. Cybersecurity is a core competency, but balancing cost and risk. So Corey, how has your approach to risk management evolved with the increasing complexity of it? You just hit on this earlier and the cybersecurity threats in higher education.

Joe Toste: Walk us through how you think about I. T. [00:16:00] Visibility and risk management at McCombs heading into 2025.

Cory Wilburn: So that's a great question. And it is something that is at the forefront of our mind. We have a duty to our students, our faculty and our staff to provide them with technology solutions that are secure and resilient.

Cory Wilburn: That can be incredibly difficult on a college campus where everyone wants openness and to be able to share everything, all of their work at once. And so sometimes it feels like those two things are diametrically opposed. I feel like our role is to make sure that our faculty and our students are educated that they have all of the information about what are safe practices, that we provide them with resources that, that they can use that are secure.

Cory Wilburn: And I think that you always have to find what's that right balance of risk and innovation, and it really depends on your organization, and it depends on, The sensitivity of the information in question, right? So if we're building a solution that deals with a student record and FERPA protected data, we're obviously it's, a much more higher standard that we're putting to that solution than [00:17:00] something that, that really focuses more on collaboration and sharing of data that's public in the first place.

Joe Toste: I'm hammering this home, but this is like one of the biggest common themes. When I met with CIOs heading into EDUCAUSE the greatest challenge is That the open campus right? It's and not to mention for universities that have large research centers oftentimes, people are bringing in their own laptops.

Joe Toste: Professors are bringing in their own stuff whenever they want. So you don't know what is going on in the environment. How are you handling that? How do you even think about handling that? So that's a

Cory Wilburn: Yep. Camera's right there, Corey. Like I said, education and tools. Providing, provide, making sure that we have tools tools that are secure and that we are providing the right repository for the right set of data.

Cory Wilburn: Like I said going and educating folks and saying, Hey you've got to, you've got to treat this data set with extreme care. And so it belongs in this tool or in this repository, whereas this other data set, which is publicly accessible [00:18:00] data, very low risk. We can be a little bit more open with what tools we use on that data.

Cory Wilburn: And so I think that's been that's an approach that is working well for us right now. At the end of the day, they say, your biggest risk points are your users. They're the ones that are utilizing your systems. And if they don't know what they should and shouldn't do, then there's no tool set in the world that's going to fix everything for us.

Joe Toste: That's great. Question, I was curious about, I didn't ask you about this before, but does McCombs or UT have its own SOC?

Cory Wilburn: Yeah, so Cam Beasley, we at University of Texas Austin, our chief information officer, pardon me, our chief information security officer is Cam Beasley. He has a SOC and he has an outstanding team.

Cory Wilburn: He monitors all of the colleges that are part of the University of Texas at Austin. They provide great service to us from vulnerability reporting, they have a SOC. They're constantly doing scanning to tell us what we need to patch up on our side. The vulnerabilities that you mentioned before that go unpatched are almost always because that patch would break something.

Cory Wilburn: And so my [00:19:00] team is constantly in that mode of going to figure out, Okay, we do have a vulnerability here. If we happen to run this patch right away, we're going to break this system. What is the risk versus reward of temporarily taking this system down to do a major upgrade versus leaving it open while we take a little bit more time to think through it.

Cory Wilburn: And so we are constantly going through that risk reward trade off of how do we move forward with this? And we get a great support from

Joe Toste: Cam and his team. That's great. There's a quote where there's a, there's no perfect solution. There's only trade off. That's exactly right. And yeah, no, I really liked that.

Joe Toste: Doug, on a very kind of similar vein, how do you see supporting your customers in that decentralized environment, especially you got the academic side, the research side, they're bringing their own stuff. How does Tanium try and help? Is it education? It can't just be solely through technology and

Doug Thompson: again, because we can overcome some security boundaries and stuff of existing things because we can, I'll get down a minute because we can overcome that.

Doug Thompson: We can help them get that [00:20:00] visibility. So when I, it comes up with a great point is what makes the education great is also Achilles heel for the freedom. And then, everybody's an administrator. I go try to explain to my commercial counterparts, look, everybody's an administrator and half of them can hack into your network without even thinking about it.

Doug Thompson: So how do you protect that? How do you get that? But the ones that are thinking ahead are saying again, you're turning the water up slowly in that look, we want to put this agent on your device. We're not going to manage it, but we need to see what is there. And ultimately, it's better for you to know what your risk and stuff is.

Doug Thompson: So you're not taking over their environment, but you're simply looking, Hey, you're part of the universe. We want to see what's in there. Especially like research. Researchers love to stuff under the desk and things like that. And it's just so that you know what you have. Again, you know what your risk is.

Doug Thompson: What's the reward piece of that comes on? So we enable that technology, but that's a discussion I have a lot. And if those that are forward thinking are doing some of that, like when talking about Cheryl, that was one of her ideas is we just need to know what the risk is, and then we can work on [00:21:00] mitigating later.

Doug Thompson: So it's just an evolution, not a, so it takes a while to get to that transformation phase that progress is being made. If you had asked me this before COVID, I'd have told you no, because I've seen that. No, we're always doing it this way, and this is the way we're going to do it. COVID changed a lot of things and accelerated and actually showed what I.

Doug Thompson: T. Departments could do because I would have customers say we can't do that because it's just too hard. But in three months they had done exactly the same thing I've been trying to do to get them to do for a long time. And I say, you can't use that excuse anymore. We're changing. We're playing well together.

Doug Thompson: Education. Everything's connected to the Internet. It's the most open environment that you say, and it makes it hard. B. Y. O. D. Comes in. What are you connecting to? Everybody's got to divide. IOT now is what's really a big concern. You've got all these things out there were designed to it's out in an oil platform way out in the middle of nowhere.

Doug Thompson: How do you go protect that? Because now it's not even physically protected. Because if I get in my truck and drive out there, I can get access to it. So thinking about those other things as well, because now the number of end points that can be exported is. It's the [00:22:00] magnitude of hundreds over what it was just five years ago.

Cory Wilburn: Oh, you're exactly right. Everyone's got, everyone walks in the door with multiple devices and you add to it with the classroom. Now there's so much technology, the classroom and we are buying a lot of standalone point solutions that need internet connectivity. So we need to put them on the wifi and we need to put them on the network, but we don't have the ability to directly patch them.

Cory Wilburn: You rely on the manufacturer to push out those updates. And so a lot of times. It's the number of devices that we're having to worry about. The number of end points is mind boggling.

Joe Toste: Yeah. So Corey had a quote in one of our, it's either the very pert. No, it wasn't COVID hadn't happened yet. So it was the second one.

Joe Toste: And you were talking about, your team had gotten really good at fighting fires. You were like professional. So Doug, I'm curious, how do you keep that? How do help your customers keep the same level of intensity of. You can actually go do this versus the, hey, we can.

Joe Toste: The first thing

Doug Thompson: you do is you got to give them some time. And that's one of the things that Tanya really does. You think about the things that are very intensive. Patching a [00:23:00] SQL cluster. That is not something that happens, there's man, there's manual steps, there's other things that get involved.

Doug Thompson: But yet there's, you've got a manpower there that could be going to fight that fire or doing something else. How do you take care of that 80 percent of the problems that you have? with as few people and resources as you can. Tanium really helps enable you to do that. So that, I don't think anybody ever has enough staff to get things done.

Doug Thompson: But this sort of gives you that staff multiplier. I go back to the Winston Salem State. Her people were now doing higher, not value, but higher level things because they were freed up from that stuff that nobody gets in there to do. That's been a problem for two decades since it came up. Giving that, doing that, and then giving the visibility.

Doug Thompson: Again, because of our architecture that you can then know, yeah, we're making progress and track it over time and partnerships with other organizations like service. Now, if you want to create automate again, not trying to promote these things, but how do you partner with these other things rather than being a point solution?

Doug Thompson: How do you be part of the solution, right? As opposed to another problem or another silo?

Joe Toste: Yeah. Corey, [00:24:00] your team at yellow, you left, you get this new team. How do you, they don't have that context. They don't have that perspective. How do you drive the ball forward? That's a great, it's a lot

Cory Wilburn: of give and take, right?

Cory Wilburn: And so I think I came in with being asked to make some change and deliver some specific initiatives. And so part of it's getting the new team aligned to, to, Learn how we work together and how we're going to move down the path and execute this plan. A lot of it is me changing and me learning about the organization, learning about their background, learning about how the culture has has operated successfully here in the past.

Cory Wilburn: And so I think it's a lot of give and take and learning from one another. I think if you do that with with openness and if you if you create that trusting culture, it makes things a lot easier. I like that approach too, in that you're

Doug Thompson: not coming in to simply overturn the apple cart. Not at all.

Doug Thompson: You're learning what everything is, and then how the thing, your past history, how can that maybe help make this better? And use it within the envelope that you have, rather than simply blowing everything up like too many

Cory Wilburn: people come in and do. We all [00:25:00] have a lot that we can learn from the different things that we've been through together, and, when we all come in and we pledge to work together and put those ideas on the table and talk about it, nine times out of ten, we agree on the way forward.

Joe Toste: What's when you come in? I'm just curious. You go super long, but you come in. Are you meeting with everyone on your team one on one? What's the tactical process for you to get the buy in with your team?

Cory Wilburn: I think coming in, establishing those relationships, meeting one on one. Try to talk about things that aren't work related at first.

Cory Wilburn: Tell me about your family. What sports team are you rooting for? Where did you go on vacation? A lot of that in meetings just getting to know people as people first and then starting about that background. Tell me about some of the projects that you guys have done here.

Cory Wilburn: What are some of the really successful ones? What are some of the ones where we've struggled sharing my experience and just really getting us all on the same page and getting to know each other first and taking that fear out of it. I think As a leader, when you come in right away and you're talking about mission and execution, I think a lot of people can get the wrong idea, and I think that causes [00:26:00] some fear and some concern.

Cory Wilburn: So you really want to put people at ease, build those relationships, and gradually start moving forward together as a team with an understanding of all of the things that we share in common.

Doug Thompson: Yeah, the human side and the relationship side, that's fundamental human communication. If I trust you and I know a little bit more about you, your personal life, I'm more likely to go ahead and yeah, okay, that really sounds good.

Doug Thompson: Be open to that rather than, okay, he's just trying to go up the, go up the leadership chain.

Joe Toste: Yeah, no, that's great. Corey, Doug, we're gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna close out. I got a couple more questions. We're gonna close out. We'll start with Corey. Corey, if you could give one piece of advice to a rising technology leader, this is Corey when he's 25, in higher education, what would it be?

Cory Wilburn: The title I have now is chief information officer, but really I think my job is I'm a C. A. O. I'm a chief alignment officer. I feel like my organization performs best when I am making sure that everyone understands their role. Everyone understands how we contribute [00:27:00] to the overall mission, how other departments understand How we work and how we add value.

Cory Wilburn: And how we can align together, how executive leadership understands what we need from a technology perspective to be successful and what we're going to be able to do with those resources that help the organization move forward and meet its goals. And I think constantly just going around, communicating, keeping people on the same page, moving in the same direction and being that chief alignment officer, that's what you need to do.

Joe Toste: I see. So there's the chief alignment officer and I'm blanking on the, I'm going to remember it afterwards, but there's the it's what CIO also stands for. Career is over? Yeah, that's the one. Yeah, I'm glad he didn't respond with that one. So Doug same question. What's a piece of advice that you would give to a rising cybersecurity leader?

Doug Thompson: Always be learning is the, the key thing, but, and this could go for anybody in technologies, you need to learn to be able to tell stories. And there's one from a communication standpoint. How do I share with my users why this is important? What's the value, the [00:28:00] extra value they get in a minute?

Doug Thompson: You have to tell that story in a language that they can understand, a framework from which they have. That's why when I go to education, because I've been speaking in it so long, even though the same problem may exist in the oil and gas, the words that are used are very different. How do I use the things that are appropriate, getting back to that relationship, connecting with people?

Doug Thompson: And then also it helps you from the storytelling perspective is looking out there, you see this is going to be a problem. I've seen a theme, stories repeat themselves and get ahead of some things like that. And when you're a storyteller, that's, I forget who said it, but that's, they'll take over the world.

Doug Thompson: And that's the way, and you tell stories to your reports when you're trying to build these things. You tell stories every week with your podcast guests. That's the most powerful tool you could get in anything, but from cyber security. You're explaining to my mother why clicking on that link is a bad thing, right?

Doug Thompson: That's a totally different skill set that if I'm talking to Corey or somebody else that said Understands the ones and zeros to how to do that. So being able to do that. That's

Joe Toste: the key thing. Yeah. I love the [00:29:00] story I love the Simon Sinek, right? This is like very classic like getting at the heart. There's just so many good stuff I am laughing because My grandfather's passed away now, but when he was alive My goodness, the guy would click on everything worked 50 years at UCSB, one of the smartest professors.

Joe Toste: This guy would, I would tell him you've got to stop handing out bank account information, all this stuff. Grandpa, I know you're old, but you don't know this person. They're like, no, they told me that they know me. I'm like, that's not a link you want to trust on your iPad. Yeah, that conversation radically different than Corey making an executive pitch for why he needs to purchase.

Joe Toste: Whatever software he needs to do. But yeah, I love the story element. It's so critical. Understanding your audience, speaking to your team, is much different than, a peer to peer type of dynamic. I love this conversation. This is absolutely fantastic. Doug, as we continue to just highlight all these amazing leaders here at Educause inside the Kairosoft booth.

Joe Toste: Is there anyone else that you [00:30:00] would recommend that I interview next or even after this event?

Doug Thompson: Yeah, Cheryl, I would go talk to Cheryl because she's got a great and I wanted to get her on the podcast, but she was unavailable. She's got a forward thinking, a nice, from that information security offer perspective.

Doug Thompson: She's forward thinking and she puts it very nicely. I would also go talk to out in Winston Salem State, the CISO there, she's got a fantastic story. I let her talk the whole time, I didn't say anything, it was like, okay, go ahead, you're doing a great job of doing that. But, cause she's been in there, and she can tell that story about how the people were impacted by something that they started using.

Doug Thompson: And that's, again, that's an important story because, ultimately, you want to make your lives, the lives of your employees better. And give them something that they can then go do the interesting things, as you talked about it before. So those are some things I would do. And the guy from Utah, I would do that as well.

Joe Toste: Is Sherrilyn, is that what you said? You said Sherrilyn? Sherril. Sherril. Is Sherril, she's the CISO? Yes. At, is it UT System? Arlington. At Arlington. Okay, got it. Cause we're gonna have on William a little bit [00:31:00] later. Yeah. Yeah, he's fantastic. And we got Kendra on, I think, this afternoon, too. She'll be the podcast after this., she's coming. So Corey, same thing. Who else should come on the podcast? Frank Fegans, UT

Cory Wilburn: Dallas. I think they're doing some really good. He's a CIO there, and I think they're doing some innovative stuff in the higher education space. And my colleague Chris Tidrick with University of Illinois Geese School of Business.

Cory Wilburn: He's the CIO there. He runs a great shop as well. I think those are two leaders that you do really

Joe Toste: well to talk to. Awesome. I love it. And Lee Brian is coming on. Holy Brian's awesome. Email me last night, 11 57, Joe, I'm coming. I was like, Oh, fantastic. We were going to make it on. So thank you for coming on the public sector show by tech tables.

Joe Toste: Thank you. Miss it. Thank you.

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