Interview Series, Episode 9: Lev Gonick

Tom Andriola  0:01 

My guest today is Lev Gonick. Lev is an, educator, technologists and smart city architect. He’s currently the Chief Information Officer at Arizona State University where he leads the University Technology Office that provides technology services to all students, faculty and staff. He is co-founder of digitalC, the award winning nonprofit organization enabling and celebrating innovation, collaboration and productivity through next generation broadband networks, big open data solutions and IoT or for public benefit. Lev is very celebrated. He’s in Insight Business Magazine’s Power 100 in 2015, as well as many, many other recognitions as a CIO. I’ve been admiring him for many years. And he is especially passionate about topics such as smart city solutions, Smart City architects, the future of education, broadband, and the network economy. Lev, thank you for joining us on the podcast today.

Lev Gonick 1:04

Tom, thanks for the invitation, looking forward to our conversation.

Tom Andriola 1:07

Absolutely, absolutely. So Lev, when I think of ASU the words that come to mind for me are innovative, deliberate. But I would love to hear as an ASU Insider, what makes ASU unique in your approach and how you think about technology and data and its ability to drive the mission?

Lev Gonick 1:30

Well, Tom, I think from my experience, and I imagine it’s yours and your listeners as well, higher education over the last 50 years has evolved. And if you don’t mind me saying, devolved into an environment in which long standing principled commitments to access for higher education have began to get eroded in a kind of competition for a vision of what higher education might look at as an elite sport, only really having rhetorical interest in commitment to access, which, of course, especially for land grant institutions, going back over now, 140 years, that was supposed to be what higher education in America was. And it’s largely again, in my view, at this point, a suspect proposition, but not at ASU, I would say one of the principal pieces here is that we have challenged the idea that if you want to be a great research institution, you have to give up on teaching excellence, we’ve given up on the idea that somehow all you want to do is teaching, you have to give up on research. We’ve also clearly rejected the idea that somehow this is an ivory tower, isolated and separate from the community around us. So at ASU, what makes us fundamentally unique is our commitment to broad access that 150,000 students, which makes us very large, great research, we are in the top five research organizations in the country without a medical school. That’s a big deal. Closing in now on $800 million sponsored research activity. And we are absolutely, fundamentally committed by our charter; to being of service and support to the needs and priorities of the community around us. And so notwithstanding our, I would say extraordinary outward facing innovation agenda, what I think motivates, certainly me and I know it’s the same for President Crowe, is a commitment to this effort to disrupt many of the trend lines of higher education. And to ask, as it were some radical questions, radical in the sense of going back to the origins, what are we actually here to do in order to support and advance a competitive America and educated America and the like.

Tom Andriola 4:11

I think that’s great. And that’s one of the reasons why I wanted to bring you on here, as I think of your model as being disruptive, but without compromising on the mission of what a land grant university is, and also bucking the belief that, a long standing institution can’t reinvent itself.

Lev Gonick  4:29 

ASU, absolutely in time, just to be really clear, we’re not a land grant institution. We’re just large like a land grant institution, but we’ve added, we’ve actually assumed the mission. And again, we call it at this point, because we’re not so much interested in looking in the rearview mirror, we call this the National Service University model. We’re of service to the nation, it’s kind of a regional focal area here in the southwest, touching all of the states in this country, students from 153 countries with physical presence in 45 countries around the world. But it’s a national service model that I think is, what ASU and now a number of other institutions are committed to trying to reinvent into the 21st century.

Tom Andriola 5:21

Fantastic. So Lev, one of the challenges in bringing you on the podcast is that there are so many topics that I want to ask you about. And so, in terms of the traditional things, I’m going to ask you to talk about the, the concept of student analytics at ASU and how you thought about that as an institution, and then your role in kind of driving what I think is a unique play in the analytic space in higher ed.

Lev Gonick 5:53

Yeah, a couple things here. And let’s go back to our previous conversation here. ASU is not like a lot of the other large institutions in the sense that we are actively interested in accessing the mission. And you know, if you arrive at a university with, a grade point average, in high school, and you come from a range of specific zip codes, you’re going to do just fine at a university. ASU, again, is casting the net by design by charter to a much larger set of learners and their journeys. And one of the central issues that has informed our work for the last decade, has been to use analytics to actually focus in on students success for this broader marketplace that we are trying to help shape and influence. And unfortunately, more broadly in the country, 52% of the students who start college don’t finish college, there’s 38 million Americans who started college who don’t finish, that is a tragedy, right, massive proportion. So our view has always been can we use technology tools like data analytics, to not only retrospectively say, “How come somebody didn’t make it?” but to use just in time focus to actually understand and develop intervention strategies on the basis of those analytics. And so, ASU has a very robust ecosystem that provides analytic inputs from both the use of our LMS, the extraordinary ecosystem around coaches and student success, infrastructure that actually is a regularly monitoring, student formative assessment, infrastructure, monitoring engagement more broadly in the life of the campus and seeing if students become isolated. We use a set of products to actually probe and nudge students into the learning environment, and then monitor their feedback and reactions. We have a mobile app that we’ve developed here in the University Technology Office, in partnership with the provost area, that focuses in on engagement, specifically and again, with permission of the students, affords us a chance to analytically make use of those insights in order to create a better experience. So Analytics has become, a huge driver and we measure it Tom all of the time, to specific outcomes. We know we have specific retention goals that we’re working on as again, a big institution that broadly like the rest of American higher education was failing our own students, we’re now absolutely committed to getting to a point where retention and then persistence to degree begins to achieve the best. And certainly as good as anyone else who only recruits A students, we’re doing that obviously, with a much broader cohort of incoming students, we want to at least match, if not do better, than those so called ‘elite public’.

Tom Andriola 9:10

That’s great. You also have some non-traditional projects that I see ASU innovation driving. Can you talk a little bit about digital wallet.

Lev Gonick  9:24 

Yeah, sure. So again, one of the sort of central themes here that ASU has led is the idea of how to help students take greater agency, greater ownership of their own learning journey. And certainly, Tom, you and I have a certain generation where interest, you know, when someone sort of said, what evidence do you have of your undergraduate experience, you’d say, well, I got a degree, I have a transcript, and I can show you my GPA in my major And that’s about it. And we know obviously that there’s a much richer reality that is there, that is lost in the way that institutions capture and then represent the learning journey of students. So the digital wallet concept is really the idea of which we call “Pocket” here at ASU is the idea of affording students an opportunity to curate their own learning journeys, and put in their pocket in the form of a mobile app, pointing to all of the artifacts of learning that they want to represent, either generally to the public or to specific opportunities, whether that’s graduate school, or to a job, or to a family member to friends along the way. And we’re using a distributed ledger infrastructure, sort of the blockchain world to afford an opportunity for institution to institution collaboration with challenges like reverse transfer, which are hugely important, massive amount of lost credits, when students try to transfer from one institution to another, trying to use the machine to get a whole lot better at that. We’re now, at ASU, over a million course equivalencies already worked out, that allows us to create opportunities for students to maximize or optimize and represent that when they do so you know, through their digital wallet alongside obviously, if they have a piece of performance work, or a poster session, or something that they are particularly proud of, they can capture that in one of our other digital repositories. And then in their wallet, they get the chance to represent that and share that as they see fit, and not be sort of held hostage to a sort of single kind of, if you will, or certainly 19th century idea of how to encapsulate the learning. So obviously, we’re okay with skipping a century here, and leaning into a much more dynamic way. And our hope, honestly, here, Tom, is to open this up to all of higher education, because if there’s a network effect, if we can create a trusted learner network among higher education partners across the land, and beyond, then this creates a very dynamic, learner centered approach to their journey and to our ability as institutions of higher education to support that journey.

Tom Andriola 12:30

I have to ask this follow up question on this topic, because I love what you’re doing here. Has this been introduced to some of the major employers you work with? And if they leaned on to this concept of as they recruit talent into their organization, looking beyond the traditional resume and GPA as the only mechanism to evaluate talent for their organization coming in?

Lev Gonick  12:54 

Yes, yes, indeed. In fact, that is absolutely part of the blockchain. Large employers here in the metro Phoenix area are part of some of that early work, as are a number of very important national research institutes who are likewise interested in gleaning more insight than simply a representation and a transcript of what impact the student learns and knows. And so part of the schema is actually a competencies schema, which again, can get represented by an instructor who’s either offered a class or who’s offered a micro credential, or is offered to a student participating in a hack-a-thon. And actually, that can be represented by an authoritative source who basically creates an immutable assertion that, in fact, students accomplish what they accomplished. And that is indeed what the large companies are looking for, and a way of also, much more agilely and much more velocity being able to assess and evaluate match between, students, their assertions of competencies. And so, I think we have some opportunity, in a fairly selfish way, at least for the short term for creating an ASU advantage here. Our goal is not just for ASU, we hope that this gets picked up and feedback from the employer base that we have shared this with is, let’s agree to the competency sets, the skill sets that can get tagged not only to courses, but again to other artifacts of learning, and begin to let the machine generate insights on essentially, correlations and pathways to allowing those employers have a better bet for a match.

Tom Andriola 14:54

I want to ask you about digital trust. Is that a different project of what you just articulated?

Lev Gonick 15:04

Digital trust is is actually an adjacent activity. But in fact it, absolutely, you’re absolutely right. It’s very much part of the idea of flipping the focus to a student-centered approach. The learning outcomes we want to have represented in a digital wallet, the framework, the underlying approach to trust, digital trust, is a huge part of a shift here that we’re representing an ASU. And in my operations, Tom, I chose to architect the role of the Chief Information Security Officer, as the Chief Information Security and digital trust officer. And her role is actually to architect both sides, both keeping the bad actors outside and inside the network infrastructure from having added here, but at the same time, to begin to build trust by design, unlike a lot of big tech that’s out there that it basically has built surveillance by design or churning, we as individuals into things that, you know, they get to ingest and, and sell back to us, we have developed, as I mentioned, a digital mobile app with over 300,000 users and this individual users in this last year consuming it, all of that is designed both with privacy and with the digital trust, in the framework itself, to try to make sure that our relationship with our learners is not one in which they have to start by saying “what is the institution going to be doing with my data that’s going to end up, violating my own sense of impropriety or other things that that, again, is real in the broader society?” Obviously, we think that is as important to the overall environment of security, you know, at a place like ASU.

Tom Andriola 17:12

Fantastic, fantastic. Lev, I also noticed that you do a lot of partnerships, examples, dreamscape, immersive, Smart City cloud Innovation Center work with Amazon Web Services. Can you talk a little bit about how you, as a chief information officer in a major innovation force, how you think about partnerships, and what have you found has worked to bring good partnerships to higher education?

Lev Gonick  17:53 

Yeah, Tom, I mean, that’s a really good insight on your part. And again, I think it’s a whole institution that leads through partnerships. And again, I’m, you know, I have a piece of that in my portfolio. But it is part of the ethos of ASU, led by, our president who is very much committed to that partnership model he comes to us with that, essentially, in the DNA of how he thinks to build generative social scale institutions, that partnerships are hugely important in our case. As a CIO, and you know this very well, we ultimately have stewardship responsibility for fairly substantial amount of investment that the institution makes through vendors, in procuring technology, and my proposition here has been, there are a handful of those vendor relationships in which both parties aspire to more than simply a buyer-seller relationship. And a lot of it has to do with the opportunity to bring, 27,000 engineering students, which is what ASU has, which is larger than most universities are engineering, student body, and what are these companies all…Certainly technology companies all want a pipeline of talent. Well, there’s a disconnect that somehow the Career Services group at the University is the source for finding talent at the institution, when students are ready to graduate. We see this partnership model as if you’re in the information security business and we’re buying endpoint infrastructure or you’re in the collaboration services area and you’re trying to beat the competition. You want access to our students, not when they are semester away from graduating. You want them now. You want them to be engaged now and those opportunities, you want the r&d that our faculty are working on with their postdocs. You want to be able to tap into that now. So we have reciprocal sabbatical relationships with many, many companies where their r&d teams are here for their sabbaticals. We send our faculty, our grad students to companies, we set up Centers of Excellence Innovation here, you mentioned a couple of them. This week alone, we’ve had three large vendors that I do business with, your Institute’s Collaboratory. Today, we literally just came from, from a chat, Tom and, you know, a company that’s just made a seven figure investment here and is trying to figure out what its physical presence will be, and how to combine their interest in student pipeline talent. Because that is the, the great competition for technology companies, it’s all about sourcing talent. And we think we can do that in a way that is not just about saying, “We’ve got really smart students see their digital wallet, see their, transcript,” but also to actually embed the technology companies. In our own environment, we’ve literally built a smart city, which we call Novus Innovation Corridor, 355 acres, right in the middle of ASU Tempe campus, filled with technology companies who are there because it’s a great access to the freeway into the airport, but more more importantly, it’s because they have access to not only 27,000 engineering students, but students who do Art Media, and Engineering, and countless other kinds of blended degrees, all forged in this idea of creating partnerships, to support our students success, and obviously trying to attract a much more robust and diverse set of investors in the university above and beyond the public investment here.

Tom Andriola 21:46

That’s fantastic. So I’m going to jump, Lev, to something I know you have a personal passion for smart cities. Tell me about your grand ambition around that and how you plan to have ASU and your office to play a role in bringing that vision to life?

Lev Gonick  22:07 

I think there are a couple of different angles here, Tom, you know, maybe 10 years ago, it was kind of a novel idea to talk about a smart city. At this point, everyone is either on that journey or you know, basically realize that what we really mean by smart city, is really the idea of convening people to talk about priorities, and applying innovative approaches, including innovative use of technology to address those priorities. It is ultimately about responsible and engaged government responsible and engage education sectors, health care, and so on. So for us here, for me personally, my commitment, specifically in the smart city space has been to digital equity. How can we make sure that all of the communities around us are able to articulate their priorities, and that we get to apply innovative solutions to the needs of the community around us. because of COVID, certainly starting in March of 20, until actually, obviously, right up to now, there are a whole slice of the community who simply lost access to all kinds of critical infrastructure services, especially like education and health care, job opportunities, and the like. And so at the university we are committed to leveraging our core competencies and digital infrastructure to help build access through school, a network of K to 12 schools, and from those schools, to the communities that surround them to make sure that no matter where you live, you live in a mobile park or a trailer home, if that that’s where your kids end up sleeping at night, they should have access to internet so they can do their homework, and you should be able to access tele-health services. And if you unfortunately don’t have a roof to sleep under, then we want to be able to provide you access to partnerships with the public libraries, or the food kitchens and homeless shelters infrastructure, digital infrastructure, to help you with workforce development. Helping to apply for a job, getting public housing, if that’s something that is of interest to you. So, for me, it’s really always been about a commitment to digital equity along the way and at the same time, trying to spawn the most entrepreneurial and innovative approaches to encourage students and faculty to address, not only the most obvious things like autonomous vehicle futures, and sensor arrays and other things that we are doing here as part of our Smart City work, but to always be mindful of ways of addressing and being of support to those in our community who are less fortunate.

Tom Andriola 25:10

Excellent, thank you. Over the course of my career, I’ve had the opportunity to be the CIO/technology functional executive, but I’ve also been the business executive of technology businesses. And those blended experiences have taught me to approach the CIO role in a certain way. Given your long career trajectory of accomplishment in different institutions, I’m kind of curious, especially with so much interest about, EDUCAUSE talking about the integrated CIO, really the evolution of the role…How do you think about your role in managing your executive peers? How do you think about that role in kind of being effective in your role and contributing to the overall mission?

Lev Gonick 26:10

It definitely, our role as CIOs continues to evolve, I don’t think there is actually necessarily a kind of prescriptive orientation, I do think that it’s always about fit, there’s sort of three things that I think have to fit together in order to sort of advance. One is, of course, when, as the executive, IT leader, your own core professional competencies, your core value system, to make sure you understand what those are. There is the relationship that you individually have with your peers, or the executive team at the University, that dynamic is absolutely a non-prescriptive that takes working through that chemistry regularly. And then the third element is the broader culture that has been set in the institutional framework, sometimes, over a very long period of time, other times during, disruptive moments, a much shorter period of time. And I’ve always sort of seen that the piece here in the council I give people is to make sure you understand your core system, and make sure that when you look, your CFO or your chief academic officer, your president, in the eye, you actually sort of say these are the kinds of people I actually feel like we can work together and I can provide value to them. And likewise, hopefully, they can provide value because they understand that at ASU that the true chief disruptive innovation officer is President Crowe. I don’t have, I don’t serve that world. I’ve done that for 25 years before I arrived here, that can be very arduous and difficult work, depending on that set of other criteria, namely, the broader culture, and the relationship with the other executives that are there. In this case, I have the luxury in many ways of riding the coattails of one of the most, I would say forward thinking and disruptive thinkers in our industry, and helping to shape it rather than to have to frame it. And that, for me is a huge advantage. And he’s got all of his executive team, I think aligned to that work along the way.

Tom Andriola 28:38

Thank you. All right, Lev. Last question. My guests get the same last question. And one of the the benefits of having guests who have been so successful in their career is, is the opportunity to ask them about what are two or three, actionable pieces of advice that you give to technology professionals who are growing their career. A lot of our listeners are people who are on the up and coming level, they want to be you somewhere in the future…What are the two or three actionable piece of advice you’d say in terms of building a successful career in the technology field?

Lev Gonick 29:15

One, don’t shy away from actually diversifying your own experience. Oftentimes, people get stuck in a swim lane and don’t realize that if you want to become a CIO, one of the most important things that you can offer is the broad overview. Second, don’t feel that you need to actually know everything. There is a tendency, certainly among people with technical backgrounds to feel that their leadership is directly connected to their knowledge. And you come more to the leadership, I would say to the leadership opportunities set based on where you’ve come from, and you’re hopefully curiosity and commitment, to continuing to learn. But I certainly, in a large enterprise such as ASU, the most important thing I can do, is actually to surround myself with a diverse group of colleagues who actually are in many ways the subject matter experts. And then finally, in terms of sort of advice to folks, especially if you work in a university, which is to say, in a highly decentralized, or if you’re luckily, a highly distributed environment, is embrace ambiguity. Don’t look for a complete clarity of mission and purpose and objective. It’s simply not going to be there. And you will frustrate yourself and your team. If that is the Clarion commitment that you have, run your operation, the way as best you can, and the way it makes sense to you. But don’t look to the rest of the institution to be anything other than this wonderful cauldron of very ambiguous, dynamic and oftentimes contradictory realities.

Tom Andriola 31:08

That’s fantastic, Lev. Thank you. I’d like to thank our guest Lev Gonick for joining us today. Lev, thank you for being a part of our podcast series.

Lev Gonick 31:16

Thanks, Tom. Have a great rest of your day.