Introduction
This week I’m joined by Howard Miller, the CIO at the UCLA Anderson School of Management.
In our discussion, Howard discusses how the CIO role can be a lonely one. However, the importance and power of a CIO network and relationships can change the dynamics. While preparing to receive an award and taking an introspective look at his own accomplishments he talks about the importance that the team plays in those successes. We touch on his thoughts about AI, how he engaged with the board and ultimately became an AI thought leader. Beyond AI, Howard shares his view on innovation and what corporations can learn from b-schools.
Speaker Profiles
Howard Miller LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/howardjmiller/
UCLA Anderson (X): https://x.com/uclaanderson
UCLA Anderson: https://www.anderson.ucla.edu
Audio File
Featured Hashtags
#CIO #Leadership #CEO #DigitalTransformation #CIOitk
Podcast Transcript
Tim Crawford 0:05
Companies are looking for new ways to transform their business to remain relevant and differentiated within their industry. Technology now plays a central role in this transformation. Hello, and welcome to the CIO in the Know podcast, where I take a provocative but pragmatic look at the intersection of business and technology. I’m your host Tim Crawford, a CIO and strategic advisor at Avoa. This week, I’m joined by Howard Miller, the CIO at the UCLA Anderson School of Management. In our discussion, Howard discusses how the CIO role can be a lonely one. However, the importance and power of a CIO network and relationships can change the dynamics. While preparing to receive an award and taking an introspective look at his own accomplishments, he talks about the importance that the tim plays in those successes. We touch on his thoughts about AI, how he engaged with the board, and ultimately became an AI thought leader. Beyond AI, Howard shares his view on innovation and what corporations can learn from B schools. Howard, welcome to the program.
Howard Miller 1:17
Thank you, Tim. It’s really great to be here. I’m excited to talk to you and get into this a bit.
Tim Crawford 1:21
I am too. So, just maybe as a little bit of background. So, Howard Miller, CIO at UCLA Anderson School of Management, one of the top B schools in the country. To get us started, maybe tell us a little bit about yourself and your role as CIO. Thanks again, Tim. And as you said, I am the CIO at UCLA Anderson. I’ve been with UCLA for about six and a half years at this point. Prior to that, I was the acting CIO and CISO at Columbia Business School in New York. So I’ve spent the last 13 years of my career in higher ed, and then prior to that, I had about 20-five years in a combination of pharma and life sciences, biotech, etc. and I think that’s going to be really pertinent to our conversation today because you’re not just an academic CIO, but you’ve also been a corporate CIO, and there are a lot of things that we can learn, kind of going back and forth between those two. But maybe let’s start with just talking about the role of the CIO because a lot is changing, and one of the things that has come up in our conversations of late is that you mentioned that the CIO role is a lonely role. Why is that, and what should a CIO be doing?
Howard Miller 2:36
Yeah, it’s a great point. I’ve been thinking about this a lot. I think about it a lot all the time as a couple of different things, right? So the role itself has changed, and that’s true. Let’s get back to that. In this seat, organisationally, you don’t necessarily have a lot of friends, right? You have stakeholders to whom you need to reach out, and whose help you either need or want your help in getting things done, but you have staff that works for you. But when you have a problem, or when you need someone to reach out to within your own organization, there’s very little places to where you can turn to get that help, right? So the backdrop, the other side of that is okay. If I need help, where do I go for that help? And so, what I figured out, and maybe a little bit the hard way, but what I’ve been intentional about, especially since I’ve gotten to UCLA, is really the importance of networking. I really can’t understate that enough. You need a network. There are a lot of different ways for you to get a network, but if you don’t have one, you’ll find out very quickly that when you run into problems or issues, or even just want to bounce ideas off of someone, that it’s really helpful to have that network. And I think you need to be intentional about it. Right? It’s easy to go out to LinkedIn and send out 1000s of requests and ask people for time for interviews, and I think that’s all good. And I do a lot of that. For me, I think the important part of that is to really give to the network, and intentionally give to that network, and just not look to take, take, take, right. And I think when you go and you help people, and you’re genuine in your connection, you’ll find that if and when you need that, it will likely have value.
Tim Crawford 4:26
Oh, I love that, and I’ve often said, you know, as a CIO, it takes a village. We talk about this with kids, right? It’s no one parent that raises kids, and the same thing is true with CIOs. It takes a village to be successful. You have to rely on your peers, and so I love kind of the talk around networking and the importance of that. You know, one of the things that that came up as part of that, and especially as as you get more visible, and especially among your peer group, is you get identified for different. Accolades and accomplishments, and one of the things that came up is you were recently named as an Orbi finalist. When you think about these accolades, what does that mean to you in terms of where you are and what you’ve accomplished?
Howard Miller 5:14
And I’ve given that a lot of thought too as this process has evolved, and to even get into the Orbi cycle. Somebody actually has to take the time to nominate you, right? And so, for me, looking back, one of my peers, another local CIO here in SoCal, took the time to nominate me. Not somebody with whom I work day to day, but somebody with whom I’m on boards in other organizations locally. So, again, maybe not even knowing a lot about the work I do, knew enough to say this person is worthy of being nominated. And again, that gets back to the point of validating having a network, being visible, being open with what you do, and having that impact on the people with whom you’re interacting day to day. So that’s the first step of that process for me. Somebody said once you were nominated that it was worth going through the process, and I didn’t necessarily understand that at the get-go. I’m like, okay, it’s a nomination process. How difficult would we think that would really be? And so, just to get past that first hurdle to get to be a finalist, they have to do some kind of filtering. So you have to put some time and energy, and effort into an application. And really, what I found through this process is the need to be a lot more introspective about a couple of things. Right? It’s not only talking about what you did, but how you did it, why you did it, and why it really matters, and that forces you to be introspective, right? It is a reflexive moment. It’s a reflective moment, maybe more accurately. And then I think the other thing about it is, it’s your opportunity to highlight yourself, and I would agree, or I think people would agree in general, to get to this position, you have to have some kind of ego. But I don’t know that it’s really an inherent function in a lot of people, or at least my opinion. I’m I’m not one that looks to go and brag about myself all that much. I think we all have figured out in today’s day and age with LinkedIn and social media that you need a presence, and I try to do that in a respectful way, and not to push that over the top. But as part of this Orbi process, you actually are forced to brag about yourself.
Tim Crawford 7:35
Interesting.
Howard Miller 7:36
That’s not a normal thing for me.
Tim Crawford 7:38
I want to come back to what you said about introspective exercise and that perspective, it sounds like this isn’t necessarily a natural process that you would do in everyday, but actually caused you to maybe think a little differently about what you’ve accomplished, but then also going forward, how you think about what you’re going to accomplish next.
Howard Miller 8:00
I think that’s fair. So look, a lot of this is team play, and I think when I take credit for anything, it’s only natural, and it would feel wrong if I didn’t give credit to others where credit is due. And I think that was really the hardest part about this for me is taking credit and putting I instead of we. That was the toughest thing for me throughout this process. Is really intentionally putting I instead of we.
Tim Crawford 8:29
Yeah, we often talk about that, right? And even executive recruiters in the CIO space talk about it too. Where if you have a CIO that goes up on stage and takes all the credit, that’s usually not a good sign because at the end of the day, we’re only as successful as our team is moving forward. When you think about that introspective perspective and how you learn from what your accomplishments and the decisions you’ve made, where does risk fit into that conversation?
Howard Miller 9:04
It was a labor of love to get this seat, right? And I really appreciate that. I think some people have different breaks in their careers, and the way that we get these jobs now may be different than it was 1015, 20 years ago, so when I look back at my path, again, it was a hard one to get there. And if I think maybe could I have done something differently, or if I’m advising people on how they might want to get ahead in their careers or get to this seat, I think you have to look at your journey and say, well, can I take more risk? Can I afford to take more risk? And it’s not just the financial risk, but it’s also the risk of doing something uncomfortable. Whether it’s moving to another market, whether it may be more travel than you have, and I know anecdotally, I did some consulting work back in the early 2000s when my kids were six and four, and I thought it was going to be. Regional and it was national, and at the end of the day, I had to give it up. You know, it was going to be grounds for a divorce otherwise. And this continuum of balancing what is the right risk to get you to where you want to go and how you have to get there is important. But if I were to look back on my journey or to coach somebody else through, I think we all have inflection points where there’s an opportunity to take some risk, and I think human nature kind of makes us a little averse to that risk, but maybe there are more opportunities to take it.
Tim Crawford 10:31
Yeah, no, that’s great point, Howard. And I think one of the things that comes up again and again in the CIO community is maybe we don’t take on enough risk, and maybe play more too much of a conservative role. Granted, we have to, right? Because there’s a lot that rides on our shoulders. It’s about balance, and you know, a couple episodes ago, Cindy Stoddard, CIO at Adobe, she talked about balance and some of the folks that she’s worked with, and just missing those opportunities both in personal, but then thinking about what opportunities you might miss professionally too, and making sure you’re making the right choices for you individually. You’ve talked about how CIOs need to hang out with salespeople, and I kind of want to shift the conversation about interactions and people. What did you mean by that? You know,
Howard Miller 11:22
it was an interesting light bulb moment for me, and I was enlightened by a book when I was at Columbia in a class that I took called “Political Savvy, written by an author named Joel DeLuca. He’s a faculty member at Columbia Business School, and it talked a lot about business relationships, and we’ll get back into that. But when I got to UCLA and in this seat in particular, I felt a lot of noise early on from salespeople, and we all know what LinkedIn is these days. You know, if we all had $1 for every time we had somebody cold calling us at this point, or just asking if we had 15 minutes next Tuesday at 2p.m specifically for that demo, we probably could retire at this point. Pretty much. When you start to get all of that in front of you, there was this light bulb moment for me that said, “Okay, I’m getting all of this noise from salespeople. How do I sift through that noise? And so I actually started. There was somebody who tried to sell to me when I first got to UCLA Anderson, and it didn’t work out. I went through a process with them. I enjoyed working with them, but for the solution I was looking for at that time, it just wasn’t the right tim and organizational fit, but I kept in touch with them, and I started talking to them, and then I started to, like I said, just kind of hang out with them, and went to a couple of events through the channel system and channel partners, and even I don’t I don’t want to drag us into the channel partner ecosystem, but I don’t know how many CIOs know a ton about that. Maybe the corporate folks know a lot more. I know we all buy through the channel, but I started getting visibility to that. And as I started doing that, they’re like, “Well, we try to sell this way. I’m like, “Well, why would you do that? And if I go back to that example of, “Do you have 15 minutes next Tuesday at 2 p.m. If I see one of those, I get turned off right away because my first reaction now is, this is all about you. Yeah, this is not about me, right? And I’m trying to look for the what’s in it for me, and then taking that the next step further, and where I think this is important, right, is that aha moment that, as a CIO, we’re equally selling as well, and I really didn’t have that light bulb moment until I started to look at all of this. Right, I’m talking to a CFO. I’m trying to sell. I want to do this project. I need this money, or I’m trying to sell my team. I have this vision. We’re going to do this reorg. Right? How do you get the things that you’re doing, which are selling,
Tim Crawford 14:00
right, into a narrative that you can actually realize that you’re selling for a living and doing that more effectively. Sure, no, that makes sense. That makes sense. But it also goes to how you interact with people and the point of interacting with people. And you’ve talked about this in our past conversations too, where you brought up the importance of how you interact with people and why it’s important, maybe you could kind of delve into that a little deeper. Yeah, and so the anecdote I tell people, and we hinted at this before, right? Is I came from corporate, I landed at Columbia Business School, and I thought this is going to be a slam dunk, right? I’ve worked with people. I’ve worked in cultures, and I got there. And I honestly tell everybody, I got to Columbia Business School, and I kicked my butt. I’m not shy about that, but what I really didn’t understand at that point is how critical it is to be able to tie business relationships together to be.
Howard Miller 15:00
To get anything done, and probably even more so in academia, right? And so when I got to UCLA, the first three months, all I did was sit and listen to people tell me about IT, tell me what’s going on, tell me about what’s working well, tell me about what’s not working well. And I remember I got into one assistant dean’s office, and she said specifically, specifically to me, “You are the first CIO that’s ever come over and talked to me and sat in my office. And I was like, “Wow, right? But it was a big aha moment at that point. It just highlights that when you are personal, when you do take those time, when you do take the time to build those relationships that are ultimately going to matter with the people who you need to get your job done and who are looking to you for technology solutions, that really is the best strategy in the CIO world today, in my opinion.
Tim Crawford 15:57
No, I agree with you. I think relationships and building those relationships and listening, going to where they are, not asking them to come to you, in terms of the conversation is really important. Are there some roles that kind of stand out in your mind? So, for example, when I was at Stanford GSB, one of the relationships that I thought was important was with audit, was with legal, and I had this is something that I’ve seen kind of play out in other roles too, because you’re going to go through audits, you’re going to go through that process. Are there specific roles that you tend to seek out to ensure that you have solid relationships with, at least as a starting point? Because you can’t do it all day one, but as a starting point in either academia or in the corporate world,
Howard Miller 16:45
I’m going to highlight two. One is going to be real; they’re both probably going to be really obvious. Let me just go through them anyway. So I report to a chief operating officer, and what’s evident to me and and Tim and I were talking about this before we got started today, is that when IT people report to operations, you tend to lose the strategic side of that argument because inherently somebody who runs operations is interested in how the business is running and keeping the trains moving, not necessarily in where you want to invest or strategically how you want to advance the narrative, so it took a long time for me. It probably took a solid year for me to really hone in that relationship with my boss, who’s the COO. That was something that took a lot of time and a lot of persistence, and just a lot of effort to build that trust. But that relationship is in such a good place today, and it would have been easy to walk away, or to just say, “I don’t know that this is ever going to work. But that one was one relationship that, at the end of the day, you need a sponsor within your organization. So I would highlight that. The second one, and this is also going to be obvious, but it’s the CFO. And if I go back to selling, or if I go back again, it ties into what I’ve said about business relationships and trust and selling. If you can have that relationship with your CFO, because that’s ultimately who you have to convince that you want that effort to proceed, then that’s a relationship that’s important to manage for sure.
Tim Crawford 18:22
Yeah, great insights there, and I think that that point of investing, investing time, investing in relationships is so important. Is a takeaway. Let’s talk about investing in other ways. One of the topics that’s coming up again and again in our peer group is AI. I mean, even beyond the CIOs, when you look at companies and how they’re thinking about bringing innovation into play, you’ve talked about this before. But where does AI come in for you?
Howard Miller 18:53
Yeah, I’m going to get carried away here, so I’ll try and reel myself in a little bit. I always start and tell the story this way: It’s late November 2022. ChatGPT hits the market. I have a meeting with my dean, and he says, “Howard, I put my final into ChatGPT, and it got to be plus. He didn’t necessarily go as far as saying what’s our value proposition, but I think it was kind of hinted at in the room, and I think it was way too far to the right at that point. So we’ve come back to the center. But about five months later, at a board meeting, he challenged the board and everybody who was listening on that board call to say, “I would like Anderson to be an AI thought leader. And really, for the last two plus years, I’ve been trying to figure out how to take that statement of how we could be an AI thought leader and make that a vision and a reality, right? And I think I’ve done that. I’ve been running production use cases since April of 2024. We know anecdotally that we’re winning locally in our market because people are citing the fact that they know the AI that we’re using as a deciding factor in coming to Anderson. It’s been amazing just to see what. AI can do how transformative it is, and I get I’m bullish on it, and I get I’m lucky and maybe different than a corporate CIO that I don’t have to necessarily measure the ROI specifically yet, but I know anecdotally we are for people who are using even Copilot 365. There’s definitely improved productivity and efficiencies. I know when it’s being used in the classroom in simulations. I can tell by number of conversations that in a two-week period,
Tim Crawford 20:30
students were more than excited and blown away by being able to use the simulation in their classes. And as higher ed is going through this period of financial pressures and federal funding and whatever that backdrop is going to be, AI actually gives us the ability to do more with less. And so, figuring out how we can, through change management, sort of enlighten people to take advantage of the technology-that’s all been pretty much what I think about on a daily basis. No, I love that. I love that, and that’s just such a great story. My final got a B plus. Let’s kind of double click on innovation because AI is seems to be kind of front and center when we talk about innovation. But I want to kind of back away from that a little bit and talk about your perspective on what working at a B school can offer in terms of those that might be coming into the corporate world or might be in the corporate world. What corporations learn from B schools? Like we both have worked at B schools, myself at Stanford, you at UCLA. I would love to get your thoughts on what corporations can learn from B schools, and maybe even vice versa. A
Howard Miller 21:45
couple things, and it really didn’t hit me till about two or three years ago that I had this this little chip on my shoulder that says, “Gee, I make MBAs for a living. How rewarding is that? But really, what we’re doing, and if you look at the work at UCLA Anderson that we’re doing, is we’re sending transformative leaders out into companies where they’re going to be using technology to make a difference. There is no doubt about that, right? And so the culture itself is one that sort of thrives on entrepreneurship. There have been no barriers or anything that’s gotten in my way at either of the two stops that I’ve been to move forward with technology solutions. Right, both schools have been very-I don’t want to necessarily say cooperative. I’m searching for the right word here about again no barriers for you going forward with an innovative solution and making that happen. Right, it’s encouraged. It’s fostered. Right, and so that spirit is in us as IT, and it’s also in the students who are using the technology while they’re at our schools to go out into their future companies, right? So I think culturally, just the backdrop of fail fast, fail forward, but look for innovative ways to solving problems is just generally encouraged. Nobody’s asking for specific solutions. They might in certain cases, but again, I think that spectrum is wide open to say, go do take that idea and run with it, and go find that solution that works, and that’s encouraged end to end.
Tim Crawford 23:18
Yeah, I love that about B schools is you have that space. You’re given that space and encouraged to use that space to experiment and try new things. Do you think that that space could be built out within a corporate entity? Do you think a corporation could like if you were to take yourself back and put yourself back in the corporate world for a minute. Do you think that corporations could build out a similar type of culture to be able to create that area of experimentation and innovation?
Howard Miller 23:52
I think they can. I think maybe the difference in this case is I think it happens more organically at business school and in the corporate world, I think you have to be more intentional about it. By the same token, at least with the lens I have into corporate these days, there are companies that are doing this and that they are being intentional about having a even if it’s a small team that’s just looking at innovation first, right? Defined, but that is their role to be out in front of emerging technologies, for example, right? I definitely think there is space for it, and companies are adopting it. Yeah, no,
Tim Crawford 24:30
I love that. So let’s double click on kind of this intersection of innovation and AI for just a minute. Maybe kind of run through a bit of a lightning round for a minute. Where do you think that innovation and specifically AI are going to impact things like innovation and how you think, leadership, relationships, you as a thought leader? Maybe you could just run through some of those quick hits. It’s interesting, right? Because. Because in my travels, I still find folks that haven’t really started their AI journey, because either they don’t know where to start, or for whatever reason they’re bored, their business hasn’t pushed them to start. But in many cases, you know, I think even if you haven’t started, there’s opportunity to catch up. I don’t think that train has entirely left the station, but you know it’s getting close to that point where we’re going to be moving out of the generative AI conversation and into agentic
Howard Miller 25:30
AI and beyond. So I think at least for us, we had a task force. People have had centers of excellence. People are running their pilots. I think until you know specifically what use case or use cases make the most sense for your business, and then how you can scale that, and what that’s going to cost, it’s hard to proceed, right? And so I think people, if they haven’t focused in on that already, should be focusing on that now and figuring out what that’s going to mean going forward. I think that’s important. We’re starting. We are doing a basic agentic AI use case. I can honestly say we’re doing it. I can also tell you it’s probably about as rudimentary as any agentic AI use case can be right now. But I think the fact that we’re starting is sort of where the puck is going at this point and beyond. So trying to figure out how to get agents to talk to agents meaningfully, and how to drive to having agents doing outcomes, and just in general, whether it’s AI or not. And I agree that AI is probably the most transformative technology we’ve seen to date, but it is another technology. So you go back to fundamentally how you’re affecting change management in your organization to get people to use the technology, whatever it is, you know, is still the most important stop on this journey.
Tim Crawford 26:49
Yeah, no, I love that. I love that. But I think the one piece that I wanted to kind of bring out. So I think one of the things I heard is, don’t sit and wait. Figure out what your business opportunities are, and start moving forward before that window completely closes.
Howard Miller 27:05
100% The use case is always the toughest place, right? And I think for us, where we’ve been most successful is where we started with things that were quick time to value. So I get it’s very cliche to say don’t boil the ocean, but find your quick wins. What was most evident to us is we could talk about it all we wanted, but when we actually showed people what the art of the possible was, we got that next level of ideation, and I can’t say how important that really was to us.
Tim Crawford 27:38
No, that’s great. So as we kind of close on this episode, I always like to ask, what excites you most? You’ve served in an IT leadership role now, both at Anderson, but then prior. When you think about where you go from here and where the role goes from here, what excites you most about the role of the CIO
Howard Miller 27:58
over the last 10 years? It really, you know, is not lost on me that the CIO used to have to be the most technical person in the room, and it wasn’t really until COVID in my current role that IT had the strategic seat at the table. But I think in business today, any business that’s not using technology as part of their strategy going forward, is missing the boat, and I don’t know that that really applies to many that might be listening to this podcast. But actually, being noted as much for the strategic contributions to my organization as much as the technological ones is probably what excites me the most. In addition to the work that we’re doing with AI going forward, that intersection of strategy and technology. Again, when I describe what I do, is I deliver technology in support of business objectives, right? And the more important part of that statement is the business objectives and not the technology.
Tim Crawford 29:01
Yeah, love that. Well, we have to leave it right there, Howard Miller. Thank you so much for taking part in the conversation today.
Howard Miller 29:08
Thank you, Tim. This was awesome. Appreciate it.
Tim Crawford 29:12
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