Digital Leadership Must-Haves for 2025: A CDO's Picks
A Q&A with Ed Wozencroft
For many years we've watched the increasing impact of digital information technologies on our higher education systems. Top-level leadership has overwhelmingly recognized this important factor in strategic discussions and institutional planning, such that the higher education CIO is now more commonly seen "at the table" as a valuable input to strategic initiatives.
And we're seeing the emergence of a relatively new role: the chief digital officer; the CDO [sometimes called the CDIO]. The New Jersey Institute of Technology named Ed Wozencroft as their first-ever CDO in March of 2023. (Wozencroft also serves as NJIT's vice president for digital strategy and CIO).
Now that he's more than a year and a half into his official chief digital officer role, we've asked Wozencroft to reflect on his areas of concentration: What work must digital information leaders "own"? And given the prominence of digital leadership roles, what will those "must-have" concentrations be for digital leaders working in higher education in 2025?
Mary Grush: What are your picks as "must-haves" for digital information leaders working in higher education in 2025? I'm not asking for a comprehensive list of everything they should be involved in — but please comment on the areas you feel will be the most necessary foci for successful digital leaders this coming year.
Human-Centered Digital Transformation
Ed Wozencroft: My first pick is a call to action and a reminder to continue to focus on the human-centered aspects of digital transformation. Now more than ever, that's incredibly important, especially given the current perceptions of AI. Our students — and future members of the workforce — are nervous about AI: "Will AI displace me? Will I be able to get a job? In four years will AI have replaced the thing I'm now studying?"
Even at a polytechnic, students are more leery of this than perhaps many would think. Students understand that AI
can be assistive, but they're very worried about it replacing them, and about it replacing their classroom and faculty interactive experience. They worry about our societal lack of maturity around AI and what the career landscape might look like for them 4, 10, or 20 years out.
At NJIT, we're committed to improving registration, class scheduling, and advisory services based on human-centered design principles, and, leveraging AI, we're focused on giving the student a far more personalized learning experience than they've ever had. And several course components allow them to explore, safely, the parameters and ethics of AI in instructional settings.
Grush: I'm sure students' worries over AI point to a very relevant example of why human-centered digital transformation is a critical piece of effective digital leadership. Readers should check out the Q&A we did together for Campus Technology (April 2024), "Toward a Human-Centered Digital Ecosystem: NJIT" for a deeper dive.
What's your second pick for the "must-haves" list?
Ethical AI Integration
Wozencroft: My second pick, parlaying into the first, is AI integration with ethical guardrails. That means making sure that as AI continues to emerge and change, we're thinking about the ethics of it and understanding privacy concerns, algorithmic bias, transparency issues, and questions of equitable deployment. It's something that I've been in a lot of conversations with CIOs about, and it's only getting more important.
Many times a CIO or a CDO will find themselves on the responding end of an inquiry about why someone's data was used in an inappropriate way. AI has the propensity to make that conversation tenfold times more difficult for us.
If your campus doesn't have an AI committee, you need to start one. This doesn't necessarily mean creating policies to say what people can't do. It's merely offering ethical guidelines. That's something we pretty much all missed, initially, with social media — whereas here, we have the opportunity to get it right at the outset.
Grush: That's a great point!
Workforce Development
Wozencroft: The next one is workforce development, or more precisely, workforce development through automation and augmentation. The prime example of this gets into the security side of the house, where we are increasingly facing cyberattacks. There's a lot of chatter out there, with CIOs and CISOs starting to think harder about how they'll be able to automate defenses: "How can I make better use of my logs?" and "We don't have nearly enough of the workforce focusing on cybersecurity." AI and ML can help us trim the noise, but you still need the human touch.
This is where NJIT's play for a student-powered security operations center, similar to the Louisiana State University's SOC, can leverage one of the best assets we have on a higher education campus: our own students.
It's a double win, as we can serve students better by getting them an experiential learning component and hands-on training at a lower price point, while offering significant relief for overburdened IT organizations.
Grush: I'm guessing you have personal experience with, or maybe in, the student workforce…
Wozencroft: Yes, that's both how I got started in IT as a student, and professionally how I've been able to "pay it forward" by offering a similar advantage to our students.
What was incredibly meaningful for me as a student was that I felt very confident entering the workforce because I had something tangible on my resume. It wasn't just, "Oh, I did a project," or "I learned something theoretical." I knew how to take what I learned and apply it immediately.
Grush: That's great! What's your next pick?
Long-Term Budget Strategies
Wozencroft: The next one I have is budget and building long-term strategies. This plays a bit into the idea of the digital team getting to sit at the table for strategic decision making. But it also means starting to understand that for a lot of colleges and universities, IT is considered a cost center. That makes some sense; We're not big revenue generators. But IT is too often falling shy to other big cost centers like, let's say, facilities or overall personnel and overhead. Not to say that none of that's important, but it's so much more critical now to have the CIO's perspective at the table for those budget discussions — because it's becoming a much more complex world, with digital technology at the heart of it.
For things like AI, things like data science, and other areas that we're trying to exploit and to make better, I'm finding that industry wide, there's not a lot of understanding or shared perspectives. So, in the office of the CFO and other business units, key budget decisions have too often been made solely on how "costly" these investments are.
Grush: It sounds like the CIO-level needs to be present for those high-level conversations about budget, but it's not about the IT department scrambling to get all the funding available to it; the CIO/CDO instead should be included in making intelligent funding choices… not just reacting to them. It's not a simple case of "everything I can get for IT".
Wozencroft: You're right. And if you actually add it all up, a university can very quickly sink itself if it just says "all digital for everything". So being a member of that planning committee means sharing perspectives on how we balance tuition, academic delivery, faculty lines, staff lines, new buildings or renovations, and so forth, and still keep digital priorities.
Again, the long-term picture is becoming increasingly more complex. I think budget strategies can no longer be decided in a vacuum without the CIO or CDO at the table.
Grush: It seems like a lot is at stake. What else is on your list?
Sustainable Technology Practices
I think about sustainable technology in two different ways. One is sustainability in a sense that's similar to what I just mentioned about budgets, because I'm asking my team "How do we scale this long term in a cost-effective way?" And that's a particularly big concern right now with AI, given data consumption and operational costs mounting.
But there's also a less obvious aspect of sustainability, which is managed through green IT practices, like energy-efficient data centers, balancing cloud storage and services, and controlling e-waste.
There are a lot of ESG conversations happening around campuses: It's something that I find myself getting more and more excited by, but also struggling to figure out, "Okay, if I do need to scale AI, how do I do that in an environmentally friendly way?"
Grush: I would think that the sooner you get your arms around environmentally sustainable practices, the better — you will be asked about this eventually…
Wozencroft: True! I was actually asked about it at our faculty senate a few weeks ago. We were talking about AI and a faculty member said, "What are we doing to talk about energy?" And I kind of winged my way through it and said, "Well, you know, we have data center partners who are looking at this. And we're talking to the technology vendors who are addressing this in new products."
Grush: Would building your own practices on real institutional data in this context of sustainability be better than relying on vendor products?
Wozencroft: It's hard to predict which tools will be the most helpful. But this is where the CIO/CDO can partner with academia really well: Start with power and see what your own consumption looks like. You can begin to do some studies to identify peak power consumption and move loads so that you're running at cheaper times from a power consumption standpoint. There's a lot of interesting work that can be done there.
Grush: You've now mentioned five “must-haves". Do you have five more?
Data-Driven Decision-Making
Wozencroft: I easily have five more! Let's take data-driven decision making next. It seems pretty obvious, but the big thing here is making sure your data is right. This may become step one before you even get into the AI space. Yes, we're all excited about AI, but what we need to keep in mind is that it's squarely based on the quality of data. So, if you are not in a place where you feel like you're comfortable with your data — which I would say is probably 90 percent of us, if not more — then that's a conversation that you need to be having at the C-suite.
It's data governance, it's data literacy, it's data management… And, it's not an IT issue. It's a campus-wide leadership issue where it can't just be IT saying "Okay, we'll go fix it." The true "fix" needs to be changing the complete behavior or even the culture of the campus to make sure that when we are inputting data into a system, or when we're consuming data, that it is the right data.
Grush: That seems very straightforward, but huge.
Collaboration with Industry and Academia
Wozencroft: Yes! Next up: collaboration. It sounds like a familiar old term, almost worn. But the reality is, it is now more important than ever.
One big area for us is partnerships with companies — like NVIDIA, AWS, Verizon, Dell, or other software partners, to understand the directions they're going with their technology products, and why. And I don't just talk with them about the technology (though they benefit from our feedback). I also talk with them about the workplace. A CIO/CDO can be a great facilitator for building partnerships that help us understand what skill sets students will need for their future employment so that we can deliver more relevant, personalized education that will make our graduates infinitely more job-ready.
Another fruitful area is collaboration with peer institutions and networked communities. For example, as an Internet2 member NJIT enjoys a wide range of community-based information resources as well as access to world-class network, cloud, and security solutions. Through vehicles like targeted conferences, webinars, and working groups, Internet2's 505-strong member community — including 337 higher education institutional members — shares expertise and collaborates to provide a compass for evolving technology platforms. If there's one exceptional model for collaboration in our industry, it's Internet2. We're happy to be a part of it.
Grush: That's really good. What is the next "must-have"?
Infrastructure for Lifelong Learners and Connected Alumni
Wozencroft: We need to build up the infrastructure for lifelong learners and connected alumni, understanding that the world around us has changed, especially as a result of this new technological revolution that we're in.
It used to be that someone could learn a trade, spend 40 years in that trade, retire, and be okay. Now at the rate of innovation, whatever you're learning is changing, perhaps every 6 to 12 months. And in higher education we don't have a great infrastructure for upskilling.
In order for higher education to continue to maintain its relevance, it needs to include that just-in-time, I-need-the-skill-set-right-now type of learning. Yes, you can go on LinkedIn Learning. You can go on Grow with Google. You can use these and similar tools and they will probably be great at teaching you a discrete skill. But I would argue that they are not — yet — teaching you how to make connections and explore a new subject area, or learn something that you then need to figure out how to apply. So, if you learn a skill, that's great, but consider, for how long will that skill be relevant? And are you being armed with the ability to go on to upskill and reskill continuously? Will you be able to gain new perspectives? Do you have the soft/power skills needed to lead from where you are?
And when we think about our alumni, we need to lose the tradition of cutting students loose the day they graduate. Today, we say goodbye to them, and we hope that they come back for some events and perhaps donate to us or attend some different things.
We now have the ability to remain far more connected with our graduates — the potential lifelong learners and alumni — in a much more personalized way. We need to use all that data that we have on our graduates in an ethical — and secure — manner, to support a new degree of personalization and service.
There will be challenges along the way as we learn to deliver a better educational product to our lifelong learners and alumni, but someday they will be connected with richer resources, advanced communications, and highly personalized learning services. And I want to be there.
Grush: I will be there too! What's next?
Cloud Strategies
Wozencroft: Jumping back for a minute into the technical side, I'd like to mention cloud optimization and multi-cloud strategies. Now, there's an emerging market: Everyone's going to be good at something. Everyone's going to be bad at something. You're going to see companies come and go, some seemingly overnight. It's going to be confusing, but you've really got to figure out what that hybrid environment looks like for you. This will take some work.
The CIO and digital technology leaders now more than ever need to be incredibly thoughtful, well-researched, and informed buyers. Because of this unstable market you need to have a risk management plan in terms of your purchasing process — but not like risk assessment plans you've traditionally experienced. This will be different. You will need almost the mindset of an entrepreneur or startup executive: "Where is it worth my making an investment that might be a little risky?" as well as "Where do I need to be very sure that I'm not taking any risk (except for the extraordinarily minimal) in an investment?"
The way I've described this internally at NJIT is this: When I'm preparing something like an ERP, which is mission critical for us, I'm going with a company that has been around for quite a while, that has perhaps a couple of hundred customers in higher education and is fiscally stable — a company that seems innovative, but also seems like they're going to be around for a while.
Whereas I'll make a different type of risk assessment if I'm buying something like a mobile app to fill a gap or to add a nice little value incentive for our students, faculty, staff, or alums, but it's not mission critical. It might just be a fun way to say, "Hey, we saw this. It's new. It's novel. It's innovative." Given all that, I'll be a little bit more risk-friendly, going with the five-person startup. And at the end of the day, if they go out of business, they'll get acquired. The project just changes direction, and I'm not left unable to run my enterprise.
That said, balancing risk with innovation is so much more challenging now than it's ever been. It's almost like "back to the dot-com era" with all these companies starting up and we don't necessarily know where they're going. Just be careful out there in the clouds!
Grush: Your cloud "must-have" sounds like a cautionary tale.
Future/Unknown Readiness
Wozencroft: A perfect transition into my tenth and last "must-have"! It's up for interpretation, so readers are encouraged to ponder their own environment; to read in their own context. Our final "must-have" is: Prepare for the unknown. Future readiness is hard, because things are changing so rapidly.
You have to be ready to pivot and respond to emerging trends, whether they're opportunities or crises. But I believe this will be good for us. We know that there will be challenges ahead. So get out there as a digital leader. The agile CIO/CDO, and the agile university will be the ones to survive and emerge as true leaders in the market, unlike the ones who are sitting back and waiting.
[Editor's note: Image by AI. Microsoft Image Creator by Designer]