Introduction
This week I’m joined by Mitch Davis, who is the Chief Information Officer at Dartmouth College.
In this episode, Mitch talks about how IT really manages chaos and how it ultimately turns CHAOS into Order. He goes further by discussing the ‘cost of awesome’ and how he moved clients from a change-negative to change-positive culture. As part of this shift, Mitch outlines why he focuses on the client you want, not the client you have and how great experiences play a role. Lastly, we cover a big topic around diversity and how Mitch makes it an everyday conversation the to the point that people from outside of IT are choosing to join IT.
Speaker Profiles
Mitch Davis LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davismitch/
Dartmouth College: https://home.dartmouth.edu
Audio File
Featured Hashtags
#CIO #Leadership #Diversity #Culture #Bias #DigitalTransformation #CIOitk
Podcast Transcript
Tim Crawford 0:06
Hello, and welcome to the CIO in the Know podcast, where I take a provocative but pragmatic look at the intersection between business and technology. I’m your host, Tim Crawford, a CIO and strategic advisor at Avoa. This week I’m joined by Mitch Davis, who is the Chief Information Officer at Dartmouth College. In this episode, Mitch talks about how it really manages chaos and how it ultimately turns chaos into order. He goes further by discussing the cost of awesome and how he moved clients from a change negative to change positive culture, as part of this shift, Mitch outlines why he focuses on the client you want, not the client you have, and how great experiences play a role. Lastly, we cover a big topic around diversity and how Mitch makes it an everyday conversation to the point that people from outside of it are choosing to join it. Mitch, welcome to the program.
Mitch Davis 1:04
Hi, Tim. Nice to talk to you.
Tim Crawford 1:06
Thanks for taking the time to join the conversation. You know, I’ve always been impressed by how you think about the role of the CIO and your organization. Maybe to start us off, you can talk a little bit about your role as CIO at Dartmouth from a leadership perspective, and how you think about the role of IT in the CIO.
Mitch Davis 1:27
I think what I noticed during the interview was that their perception of who the CIO was was more of a service agent than it was a leader, because one person in the meeting said to me, so you think you’re going to be a leader at Dartmouth. Like that was an unusual thing. What I said to them was yes, and that I also plan on being a catalyst for change across the board, but also inspiring other people to lead anew in different areas, and that was not something they had heard before.
Tim Crawford 1:58
That’s an important aspect.
Mitch Davis 2:01
Well, I think it was for me, because why was I leaving Bowdoin? Why was I going to go to Dartmouth? Is I needed to know that I was coming to a place that was going to allow me to be a leader and not just accept me to make sure that the trains were on time.
Tim Crawford 2:15
Sure,
Mitch Davis 2:16
that was not where I wanted to go. I always saw a role for a CIO that was at the top of the organization, driving change, driving various institutional efforts, driving business process, and making sure that all of those things were in alignment with the mission of the college, and was it going to make the place better?
Tim Crawford 2:36
Absolutely, you came to Dartmouth as a disruptive CIO. I mean, the way you think is not your traditional operational CIO. One of the things that you tend to talk about is this concept of turning chaos into order. Can you maybe spend a few minutes and elaborate where chaos started and how that has evolved to order over time,
Mitch Davis 3:03
so started I started noticing it when I did a presentation way back when at Stanford, was that I tried to understand what it was that we were doing, and when I finally figured out what it was, I created these letters, and I went to a meeting, there’s about 600 people, and I spelled out an anagram from the words letters and chaos, and then I asked everybody in the audience, what is it that it does, and they did all the standard, we manage a network, we manage this with that, and I said, no, what we really do is we manage chaos, and I took the anagram, and I spelled it out in front of me in chaos, and what I mean by that is, on any given day, hundreds, if not millions, of lines of code can be changed, hardware can be changed, all of these things will be changed, and everything’s changed or built to be just good enough, so there’s going to be conflicts, there’s going to be problems, and yet our clients have been led to the expectation of perfection. This phone needs to work perfectly. These networks can have a problem, and email must come through unfettered 24/7 To do that, it takes a lot of it. People thinking about these inconsistencies and that chaos that is being created to bring chaos to order, that order allows all of this stuff to work together in a way that provides a solution to the client that’s perfect. I always love it when people who are not in it say, “At some time we’re not going to need it, and I said, “Well, that day will come when you guys keep stop buying new technology and are willing to sit around with that 20 year old piece of equipment, and so we can stabilize everything, rather than picking up the newest shiny thing, and tell us to make it work perfectly.
Tim Crawford 4:49
The idea of it going away, I think, is one that exemplifies someone who misunderstands the value that it can bring.
Mitch Davis 4:59
I even have it around. AI is obviously talking to a group of people, a person from B2B and Oracle, and we were talking about AIs, and now they both run their own AIs, and they’re thinking, like, well, the AIs are going to take over, and there are some aspects of the business that AI’s can’t like be missed. mist.com is a wireless solution, what that has a built-in AI called Marvis, and Marvis actually, for some companies, resolves over 50% of their wireless calls. Marvis will submit a ticket, tell everybody what’s wrong, try to solve the problem, solve the problem, and close the ticket for 50% of the time for a major corporation, and that you can see the AI is getting together and making that 50 6070 frame, diving deep into applications, being able to solve things well. Who’s building the AI, unless they built themselves? And who’s managing the, you know, the APIs? This is what we got to. Who’s managing the APIs for the AI’s and the security around AI sharing information, so that they can make everything work well together. For me, I always see that, yeah, the the bar goes up as far as the knowledge we need to do, but the amount of work we have to do it again to deliver an environment where stuff is built just to be good enough, it no AI is going to save us from that. It’s going to take people sitting around figuring out all these things and delivering it, and I guess when civilization decides they’ve had enough technology and it stops expanding, then there’ll be a time when it will level out. But from what I have seen, technology changes now every three months. If we’re not there with a solution to make it perfect, we’re probably behind the curve.
Tim Crawford 6:39
Wow, that’s something that we all should be kind of thinking about. That’s a three month window, which is not a lot of time. I want to shift it a little bit from chaos to order, and there’s another presentation that you and I have talked about that I think is really interesting, and I’d love for you to share your perspective on, and your presentation was titled The Cost of Awesome, and in the presentation and in the conversation, you talk about moving from a change negative to a change positive. What do you mean by that? And share how you change that perspective.
Mitch Davis 7:18
So, the cost of awesome came out of a banner of deployment that we were trying to do, and we were going to do, and one of the things we wanted to recognize is we had projects that would be launched, and they would have the client would have an awesome experience. So one of my staff said to me, waving her hand, and said, So what you’re asking us to do is determine the cost of awesome, and I said yes, that’s my presentation, that’s what I’m going to do. And so we, when we took about a month, maybe two months, and sort of broke out what was the difference between an average experience and an awesome experience with the client, and what we felt is we could deliver an awesome experience most of the time, that that would change the perspective of our client to go from a change negative, where we are highly resistant to absorbing technology, to a change positive, because we would be delivering value and we would be articulating to the customers the sense of that value prior to us delivering it, so if you measure the success of a launch of an application that banner application, because of that process, we ended up with a standing ovation, but we really ended up with is we ended up with a whole bunch of clients that were now very positive about receiving technology rather than resistant, and what I found was that allowed us to execute much quicker, so that the next time we did our workday update, instead of executing in 18 to 24 months, which is some of our peers were doing, we were able to execute in nine, and then when it was launched, everybody was really happy with it. All the teams were completely bought in, nobody was fighting the process, they all believed what we were doing was going in the right direction, and when we launched again, wild success, and it moves the client a little bit further again, more change positive, so each of your communications, all of your marketing, everything that you do has to be into creating the client that you want, not the one that you have
Tim Crawford 9:21
interesting, but the other piece that’s foundational to what you’re talking about is also looking at the client and asking yourself what is it that would make it a great experience for them, so that they see the value
Mitch Davis 9:37
that’s right, and then you have to articulate that for them sometimes. Remember, they don’t always know what they think they want and what they actually want are two different things, and you have to be willing to take a little bit of risk there and say that I’m going to give them something that’s way beyond what they ever thought was possible, and that’s part of the cost of autism, you can tell them you’re going to deliver one thing, but then you deliver it with a. Something that is makes it incrementally better for them, so it’s a surprise at the end, and there’s, and a sort of very positive surprise that gets them excited about the fact that we had done this application for them.
Tim Crawford 10:13
Yeah, one of the things you mentioned as you started to explain the shift is the marketing aspect, and it’s something that’s come up amongst IT leaders for some time, is where does marketing kind of fit into technology, and there are a number of changes that you have taken to change the focus of IT, you know, marketing being one of them. I know you’ve done some interesting things around compensation. Can you maybe spend a few minutes talking about your perspective on marketing of it, and maybe also where compensation and time comes into that.
Mitch Davis 10:49
So, the CIO is the Chief Sales and Marketing Officer. Is basically, we set the communications for the college, and if we’re going to change starts at the top, and that means I have to show value in every meeting I am. I’m probably in my sales marketing mode 90% of the time. When I’m talking about what we’re doing, I’m talking about it. I’m talking about a different state, whether it’s through business process or what everything I’m doing is basically geared into changing the client to being the kind of client I want, who is also focused on the value we’re creating for them, and that requires that you have very, very confident people to deliver, right? You can’t promise something and not be able to deliver. So, how do you recruit those kinds of people? Is one, you talk about an IT that they’ve never heard of before, one that’s working in ways that they’ve never even experienced, and that’s kind of what I’ve done on a consistent, but you think it at Bowdoin we were able to, well, I have a pretty unique compensation structure myself, is that 50 days of the year I get to do outside consulting, I can go do what I want as far as developing myself in my career, or for whatever reason I want to, and I’ve had that since I’ve been in higher ed to Oregon, Stanford, and Bowdoin, and now Dartmouth by Bowdoin, they allowed me to move that down within my department, and I was labeled to let people consulting on the outside, so we were keeping really highly talented people in positions that allowed us to execute perfectly, because, as I was said you had a top tier team that wasn’t that you didn’t have to pay top tier money, we paid them well, but they also had an ability to go out and compensate themselves with things that they wanted, and they also felt that they were part of a team that they, as they said, they never felt that they would be able to put that together again anywhere else,
Tim Crawford 12:39
and so that compensation is more than just dollars, it’s also helping folks grow, and and offering things that they wouldn’t necessarily get at other institutions or other organizations,
Mitch Davis 12:53
right. So the person, when they enter our department, a new person, the first book they get is Designing your life, it’s a class that’s taught at Stanford, but every one of their managers has gone through the book, and basically it says it helps you have a conversation with yourself about where you want to go in the future, and our job at it is to help them get them there, create the opportunity to move them forward, create learning experiences they didn’t, and basically teach them how to be exceptional in their life and in their job,
Tim Crawford 13:27
and very closely related to that, and I know this is something that that you are passionate about, is how you bring in the concepts of bias and diversity, and learning about those. Can you talk maybe a few minutes about how you have changed it to become more approachable and your perspective on bias and diversity?
Mitch Davis 13:50
So I had this question that was asked to me by a woman when she was doing I was in at Stanford during the.com so I was working with a lot of startups and stuff, and she asked me, well, how diverse was it? And I said it was really diverse. There were Asians, there were blacks, there were Mexicans going right across the board, and we were all there. He said, how many women were there? Oh, there weren’t almost none, and she said, why don’t you read this book? It is called Brotopia. So I read that book, and I realized that I had a bias in myself that I didn’t even notice was that my perspective of where women sat within leadership, that wasn’t what did I always think of as my responsibility, and then I took that on my mantle, is that’s my responsibility, I’m required to do that as a CIO, and if there’s going to be a diverse environment at any organization, that’s on me. So, at Dartmouth, and beginning at Bowdoin, but really at Dartmouth, I made that a focus, so bringing in a consultant, and she was both black and a woman. In to help me understand, how do I build an organization that gives both people of color and women an opportunity to advance to the highest levels of the organization. And very shortly, we were able to differentiate the top level of my staff. It was all men when I got here, it was now it’s about half and half. This year we were over 50% of our recruiting was diverse, which they told me when I first came here, that that was going to be really hard in the Upper Valley, and we’re trying to push this message and sell this message across it, and working with Dartmouth across the campus as a value, right, the state where we are is not where we need to be for the future, and if we don’t address this now, it’s something that’s going to eat away at us long term, but if I build a culture here that basically embraces all of this, our ability to recruit across the board the best people we can possibly find is going to get incredibly easy, and I’ve seen people today that are very passionate about what we’re doing here, to the point where they’re coming here, so they can be part of it, which is exactly what I was hoping would happen.
Tim Crawford 16:08
That’s impressive. That’s impressive. I mean, partly because Dartmouth is not exactly in a very accessible location, and so you have a number of factors that you have to consider when you’re trying to attract great talent,
Mitch Davis 16:24
but I think opportunities in corporations and other companies aren’t as what they aren’t as good as people think they are. People feel that of color, at least the ones I’ve talked to feel like they’re stuck somewhat in their roles, and also that a lot of times the diversity conversations and get get sidelined, and they’re not really a value. It’s more lip service than it is actual work. And what I’ve done, and I’m continuing to do, because I feel like we’ve just touched on this, is trying to make it where people are a little more uncomfortable every day discussing this to the point when people walk in our departments. I was talking about this today. When they walk in our departments and sit down with us, and we’re just having a biased conversation across the table, that anybody that walks in our group is incredibly uncomfortable, because they’re not used to talking about the things we’re going to feel very like it’s an everyday part of speech, because if we can’t make it that, then we aren’t going to solve the problem, and I’d say rather than solving the problem, is create a solution that actually works, that we could hopefully can spread beyond
Tim Crawford 17:32
us. Well, and I think to that point, if you look at your organization, where it was compared to where it is today, you know, the proof is in the pudding, so to speak,
Mitch Davis 17:42
right? So all the things that people thought was couldn’t happen at Dartmouth, we’ve been able to do. Did we take alternative paths to do so? Yeah, we didn’t follow standard recruiting practices. We dumped a bunch of people in a car and we drove to RIT and MIT, and all the job fairs hung out our sign, and from a very top to bottom line we sat around and talked to people, and what that reduced, you know, within three weeks we had 160 resumes from people who wanted to come here, because our message was much different than what they were hearing from other people, and that was not the same thing, and I tell people we’re not going to institute change if all we think we’re going to do is a little bit more of what we’re doing,
Tim Crawford 18:23
so let’s talk about change a little bit from a different context, which is how you’re thinking about the IT organization and shifting it into more of a research organization. Now, some may say this is specific to higher education and doesn’t apply to corporate organizations. I personally would say it does apply to corporate organizations, but why don’t we start with sharing some of what you’re doing at Dartmouth, and how you’re making that shift take place.
Mitch Davis 18:55
I’d say the first thing that was a change in the name, and you’d say, well, what does that mean? Well, you’re starting to establish your brand, you have to have something to wrap your brand around, but we changed the name from Information Technology Services to Information Comma Technology and Consulting. So, rather than just a research organization, we’re a consulting organization across the board. Number one is to, how are we going to move business process better? How are we going to make the client value what we do in the sense that we go from being the required provider of services to the desired provider of those services, and actually think of ourselves as a company that’s actively out there trying to sell our services and create services that people want to use. It just so happens that research was a place where that found a foothold very quickly, and we were able to bring in disparate HPC groups, high-performance computing groups, data analytics people actually chose to come to it that were in other areas in the medical school and stuff, so that they could work with us as a team and a partner and I. Think of a CIO. I told them they didn’t have to report to me, and also I say this to the other schools, is that I’d like to earn my place at the table, my influence plays at the table every day for what I do and what I say, and that is something that I consider every morning I get up. What can I do today to make the position of it a much more leadership role, and also one where people value that input and value having them at the table,
Tim Crawford 20:26
but part of that aspect is really leveraging it as an incubator in some regards, wouldn’t it be?
Mitch Davis 20:34
Yep, and that’s why you think of it as an incubator. We do actually function as an incubator for projects across the campus, we work with faculty now. We didn’t before, we worked with the Dali Lab, which actually teaches students how to work on projects and stuff in computing. My staff is actually taking the class that is the Dali lab and worked with students and launched applications out of that that are now being used across the campus, to the point, now we’re thinking of creating a Dartmouth nonprofit consortium, because a number of people have come to us and said, hey, could we buy that, we use that app, and we’re thinking, well, we have to maintain it, we don’t want to create something we can’t maintain, so we have about three or four, maybe five apps right now that people have wanted, and we’re thinking that people would pay maybe 500 or $1,000 to support the consortium to have access to any software within it, and for let’s say if we did a fishing tournament app, right now all fishing tournament apps are included in major software security packages that can run you up to $60,000 a year, I think people would pay $1,000 a year to have access to a just the fishing app to be able to run a fishing tournament. What I mean by, you know, what I mean by fishing, right?
Tim Crawford 21:51
Sure, sure,
Mitch Davis 21:51
security fishing, yep. So to have access to that app to run a quick fishing tournament across their campus, and also come with documentation and marketing about how to sort of run this project. How do you run a fishing tournament? What’s the value? The value is you get this huge communication opportunity that is fun and interesting with your campus about security, so you can educate them much more clearly about one of the biggest risks you have at the campus.
Tim Crawford 22:16
Now that’s great. So, as we kind of wrap on this episode, there’s a question I always like to ask my guests, which is, what excites you most about the CIO role? You’ve been CIO at a number of institutions, you have a very unique perspective on the role of the CIO and where it’s headed. What excites you most as you think about where things go from here?
Mitch Davis 22:38
I think the potential for.. I just think I’m scratching the surface of what the CIO can do across the board. If you think of it, even as we go forward in the future, there’s nothing that people do that isn’t touched by technology. So, if the CIO, instead of being at the bottom level providing the services, is at the high level, thinking strategically about how all of these services are in alignment, and if all of that alignment allows the business or allows the institution to accelerate its ability to innovate and move forward, that’s a really interesting space. And those people, they’ll get that job. The fact that I feel that I do some of that today, but then I’m just barely there, and also think of that we’re able to create opportunities for understanding bias in a way that they haven’t done before, and you can move that not from, but not just here, but across the campus with various members of the campus and college, and if you’re successful in it, it actually positions you in a much different place than what you would have been before. Right,
Tim Crawford 23:39
that’s great, Mitch. Thanks so much for taking part in the program today. Love it.
Mitch Davis 23:44
You’re welcome. Thanks, it was fun.
Tim Crawford 23:47
For more information on the CIO in the No podcast series, visit us online at CIO itk.com or you can find us on iTunes, Google Play, and SoundCloud. Don’t forget to subscribe, and thank you for listening. Thank.
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