Northeastern University Reflections

October 7, 2023May 1, 2024 / Cole Camplese

Northeastern University is a private R1 institution that operates on a global scale. With campuses spanning from London to Vancouver, Northeastern is known as an epicenter of experiential learning across all academic offerings. We are a large and complex university that focuses primarily on residential instruction, with an expanding set of hybrid and online degree programs. The Boston campus is positioned as the global headquarters, but much of the uniqueness of the institutional culture shines through from our other 13 locations. Northeastern is one of a very few universities that offer a holistic undergraduate experience at multiple locations globally. Each campus focuses on the notion of experiential learning, but borrows from the local communities and contexts to shape the research agendas and programs offered. Northeastern is a dynamic and exciting first mover in the world of higher education.

In the role of CIO, I oversaw Academic Technologies, Enterprise Platforms, Network and Infrastructure, Research Computing, Cloud Center of Excellence, Salesforce Center of Excellence, ServiceNow Center of Excellence, an enterprise Project Management Office, Customer Support, Marketing and Campus Engagement, Information Security, Finance, and Vendor Management. In addition, the information below represents unique differentiators from my time at Northeastern:

Global IT Leadership: Northeastern is a global university with campuses in London, Toronto, Vancouver, Charlotte, Silicon Valley, Oakland, Washington D.C., Miami, Seattle, Burlington, Nahant, and Portland. In addition to managing the IT infrastructure for these campuses, I played a critical partnership role in campuses’ ongoing and unique IT interests. This included models to support campus-specific teaching and research agendas, as well as external partners co-occupying campus spaces. In addition, I led the successful launch of multiple campuses to ensure robust communication, networks, and AV. I led all IT aspects of the merger of Mills College into Northeastern to be our first undergraduate campus outside of Boston. I led a similar integration with Northeastern London to be complete for Fall 2024. This includes transitioning all students, faculty and staff, leading the consolidation of enterprise systems, vastly improved connectivity, and the introduction of digital workflow.

Enterprise Resource Planning: Developed and executing on strategic roadmap to transform every aspect of our ERP environment based on the results of an enterprise review of systems of records that are internal to central computing, academic units, and distributed business units. This roadmap includes the completion of the implementations of the Canvas learning management system, Slate enrollment management platform, and Workday Human Capital Management. I oversaw the initial readiness work and business case development to lead a move from Banner Finance to Workday Finance as well as the implementation of an entirely new, Salesforce advancement platform to support our capital campaign. My roadmap also included the transformation of our student information system, scheduled to begin in 2026 or 2026.

Global Digital Platform: Envisioned and implemented a new model for digital engagement between and amongst the primary audiences of the university community. This platform is a “Platform of platform” strategy that integrates and streamlines access to dozens of existing systems of record to provide a more frictionless way to connect and engage with university digital services built on a robust API-driven event architecture. Both the Student Hub and the Employee Hubs are used thousands of times a day across Northeastern to help students, faculty, and staff to engage in the various tasks related to being a member of our community from a single web and mobile view. The Student Hub includes seamless access to cloud capabilities, learning activities, registration, bill paying, clubs, groups, digital communities, and more. The Employee Hub supports the work of our faculty and staff by offering a single location to access critical work assignments, support tickets, HR information, personalized systems of record, as well as AI-powered training and learning recommendations. The newly released, Parent Hub will bring a one-of-a-kind digital experience to parents designed to alleviate the stress and overhead associated with managing interactions with their student’s university life. This platform will also make intelligent recommendations to bring university events and activities to their fingertips daily. Finally, the Alumni Hub, slated for development in 2025, will integrate across our enterprise giving platforms, provide access to various campaigns, deliver customized news feeds, and make intelligent recommendations to enhance alumni engagement.

Digital Transformation: A key strategic driver of my work at Northeastern is the overall digitalization and optimization of analog practices to decrease costs and increase productivity. From digital dashboards that support and inform operations, an identity and access management modernization that is leading to a password-less future, a next generation data management platform to support university decision making, cloud utilization that is now at 75% of our total enterprise computing investment, to tools designed to support faculty in the classroom like “one button classroom” use and classroom technology health dashboards, to an environment devoid of traditional telephones replaced by Microsoft Teams capabilities built into all offices and collaborative spaces. Since 2018, we have moved hundreds of processes from paper to digital to streamline HR, Finance, Enrollment, the enterprise Call Center, Facilities, and others.

Research Computing: In 2018, Northeastern had a total of .5 FTE focused on the growing need for research computing support. Through ongoing collaboration with the Office of the Provost and the Research Computing Committee I was able to grow this to a team of 20+ scientists, engineers, security experts, and consultants who work with faculty to take advantage of computing to power their teaching and research. In addition, Northeastern is a partner in the Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center that houses our high-performance computing platform, Discovery. We have seen double digital growth in the adoption of research computing resources each of the last four years, with no sign of slowing down.

Customer Service: In my first year, I completed a successful overhaul of our customer experience function with a focus on rapid and accurate closure of tickets across all service areas. I led the introduction of an entirely new service catalog, an evergreen collection of self-service knowledge base articles, walk up support modeled from first-hand learnings from Apple, digital locker lending of equipment, and AI-powered chat bots. Recently introduced a managed service desk model to further reduce costs and enhance support.

Classroom Technology: In 2018, less than 20% of our 300+ classrooms had modern AV functions to support teaching and learning. Today all but a very small number have been upgraded to support lecture recording, hybrid learning, and digital tools to engage in-class and remote learning. As part of the classroom modernization roadmap, established the Global Classroom standard that provides one-touch AV activation, cable-free teaching from any device, multi-site simultaneous section participation, and personalized dashboards for faculty to proactively understand the overall health of their assigned classrooms before arriving to teach. Recently introduced a managed AV service provider model to further reduce costs, enhance support, and to vastly reduce downtime for faculty.

COVID-19 Response: To meet the institutional desire to remain open for the residential population during a period where most universities moved to fully online delivery, I led a series of digital transformations to support that goal. We created dozens of specific, custom applications that allowed students to continue to attend in-class lectures via a dynamic scheduling tool that allowed them to request a seat in de-densified spaces, a COVID-19 test scheduler that allowed us to perform daily health checks and schedule and test each student every three days and faculty and staff every five days, the complete testing center workflow including mobile check-in, lab system integrations, and the secure delivery of results.

Infrastructure Modernization: Currently in the third year of a five-year plan to vastly enhance and modernize the overall connectivity of our campuses. This includes increased speeds to researcher desktops across all locations of the global network to allow faculty and graduate students to take advantage of both our own high performance computing environments and public cloud providers. Additionally, we are replacing thousands of outdated wireless access points to vastly improve wireless connectivity in classrooms, resident halls, study spaces, administrative and faculty offices, as well as public outdoor spaces.

Information Security: Introduced Northeastern’s first information security roadmap, based on the outcomes of an enterprise security review conducted in 2019. This includes the adoption of an industry-standard security framework, new tools, and outsourced managed security operations center. During my tenure, we doubled the size of the information security team so that we can spend more time working directly with end-users to prevent human triggered incidents. We have also established a CMMC practice to secure CUI to maintain our ability to conduct research with defense and government entities. Finally, we established an incident response playbook that provides guidance for responding to security incidents that integrates university police, the office of general council, and our central marketing and communications organizations.

Under my leadership, ITS staff grew from 170 to 245 FTEe + 500 student workers

Clickity Clack

April 15, 2010 / Cole Camplese / 3 Comments

One of the things that keeps my energized is knowing that the work we do here in higher education almost always impacts students somewhere along the line. Even though we mostly work with faculty, the fact of the matter is that when we work with faculty to rethink their practice the resulting design ultimately happens to their students. Knowing that leads to a very positive sense as I do my work, but I do wish I had more time to talk directly to students … and I need to figure out how to do that.

Case in point — I had a really interesting morning where I got to spend about 90 minutes in a Communications class with 30 students who want to be journalists talking about the iPad. I was invited by Steven Sampsell to come and answer questions on a relevant technology issue in education while all 30 of the students role-played Collegian writers. Getting a chance like that is at the top of my list of things to do. I always leave feeling amazingly positive and the same thing happened today. One thing I will mention is the sound of 60 hands typing feverishly on keyboards is really disconcerting at first — imagine the silence as a student asks a question and then all 30 of them spring into action clickity-clacking on really loud PC style keyboards. I hadn’t heard that since I was in high school typing class.

One thing that was interesting was how much I had to think about what I’ve thought about the iPad as a tool to support my workflow the last two weeks and how that might relate to a college student. I was a little surprised that I struggled to answer questions like, “why would a college student want to buy this?” or, “would you buy one of these for your kids?” Those are tough questions that I had to really stop and think about. I was looking at skeptics and I didn’t have answers immediately to address them.

It wasn’t until after the 20 minute interview session was over and we just started talking did it start to become clear why one might want one … and the answers are a bit surprising to me even now. They are the simple things — a really long battery life, the size, and the ability to get on and off the device with a swipe of a finger seemed to really resonate. When the iPad was introduced so many people said this was the killer device and it was going to save newspapers, magezines, television, radio, movies, textbooks, music, and of course education. From where I sit much of those things don’t really need saving and the ones that do maybe they don’t deserve to be. Not a single student asked me about digital textbooks. What finally got the students’ attention were the conversations about those simple things — and the idea that you can actually use the iPad with an iPhone to flip Scrabble letters through the air.

In my own work the past two weeks I have found the iPad to be a smart and very serviceable device for doing much of my work. Is it as killer for my work as my MacBook Pro? No. Can I go for really long stretches without needing to use my MBP now that I have this device? Yes. Simply put, this thing is different from a laptop and it does support a similar set of work tasks well but it is doing it in way that has challenged my traditional patterns of interaction. I do the bulk of my work moving between apps, but they enter and leave so quickly it is a heck of a lot like expose on the MBP. I am struggling with some things because I am learning how to compute all over again — I am still unconvinced that rethinking all of it is a bad thing. Let’s revisit this after tomorrow morning when I give an hour keynote using nothing more than my iPad (I am terrified of that).

As an example, the students were honestly blown away that “documents” don’t go in a folder or on the desktop. They are instead embedded in the application that you would expect them to be accessible from. That made a heck of a lot of sense to them — they are used to just putting pictures “in” facebook and not worrying about where they end up. They don’t need to care where there stuff is “physically” located because it is part of the application that created it. I think this is a fundamental change that bothers a lot of us in the tech space, but thrills those outside it. I want to look at pictures, I open the Photo app. I want to work on a spreadsheet, I open Numbers. I want to work on a presentation, I open Keynote and all of my existing stacks are sitting there. I know lots of people who recreate content over and over again because they have no idea where it is. And let’s get real, more and more of the stuff we create is in the cloud and if that is your workflow an app like Good Reader gives you access to all of it.

I hope you aren’t reading this as a fanboy post, but one that is made after really struggling to find a place for this device over the last two weeks. Have I found a place for it yet? In a word, yes. I’m not sure if that place will be the same in another two weeks, but so far this fits not only my work workflow, but it is now part of my life workflow. It moves more elegantly from my early morning email and feed reading to full day work back to evening browsing and play with the family. When the students and I started to explore their workflow I saw them think about what a device like this could mean for them and when I passed it around I did notice the looks of wonder on many of their faces. They started to see it in a light that wasn’t a distorted reflection of a laptop or a phone — they started to talk about how they work and live and where this could support much of it. And when I showed them Scrabble it was all over.

NetFlix Values

August 5, 2009August 5, 2009 / Cole Camplese / 3 Comments

Catching up on TechCrunch this morning I came across a post about Netflix and its attitudes towards its employees. Inspiring to say the least. They seem to value a culture that puts the company and the people on even footing — a place where you make decisions with the best interests of your life and the company. The slide presentation below is said to be a leaked internal presentation that was designed to shed light on the company’s policies. No matter what it is, it shows that Netflix has figured out that motivated and interested people make a huge difference. Kinda makes you want to work for them too … my favorite statement:

Imagine if every person at Netflix is someone you respect and learn from …

Culture

View more presentations from reed2001.

Could a set of policies like this work in Higher Education? I’m not sure, but I am betting it could. The idea that you are responsible enough to decide how much vacation you need is very similar to the arrangement I had with my faculty appointment while in the College of IST. I doubt we’d extend that kind of practice to everyone, but when taken within the framework of the Netflix environment it makes sense. They make it clear that they have intense expectations of each and every person in the company and if you aren’t pulling your weight it is time to find another place to work. I wonder how this makes people in education feel?

Why Run a Service?

March 22, 2009March 22, 2009 / Cole Camplese / 23 Comments

The debate over when to build, buy, or use is one that rages in higher education information technology units all the time. I am constantly asked why we’d run that service versus just relying on someone else to host it for us. I sit in meetings where the debate over taking something off the shelf for our use is weighed against our desire to build it. It never ends and I don’t expect to ever really have a solid answer.

Not too long ago, I was sitting and talking to Brad Kozlek about our choice to run our own blogging platform. I go through these massive swings about the topic — usually settling somewhere around, “why not just lean on wordpress.com and focus on training and adoption.” That argument works on lots of levels. On this particular day we came to another conclusion about why it is so important that we are running our own service — the potential for community.

Several weeks ago I was lucky enough to spend time talking and presenting with Dr. Abdur Chowdhury, Chief Scientist at Twitter … I wrote about it then, but have been thinking about it nearly nonstop. What became incredibly clear to me was that Twitter is sitting on an Ocean of data. Data that they are working really hard to turn into meaningful content. If you go to the Twitter Search page you’ll see that they are making sense out of this data and showing us how clearly the social web is plugged into what is happening. They have their “Trending topics” displayed right below their search field and it shows you what we are all talking about 140 characters at a time. I’m sure many of you have heard the story about how reports in Mumbai were first broadcast via Twitter and the first picture of the plane landing in the Hudson River came through the same channel — its obvious that what is wrong with big media is the same thing that is so very right with the social web — connections building community that is, in the case of Abdur and Twitter, predicting the future as it happens.

Disheartened

October 28, 2008October 29, 2008 / Cole Camplese / 8 Comments

Last week I went to beautiful Bedford Springs, PA to speak to Superintendents from the Allegheny Intermediate Unit … it was both intimidating and exciting. I am always a little nervous speaking to K-12 educators because I always make the mistake of thinking our worlds are so different. It was exciting because I always end up finding out how similar our problems and issues really are. This was no different. I went in thinking I was out of my element and left with a new found appreciation and confidence in my understanding of our shared issues.

I shared a mix of stories and statistics that described how social computing is being used (typically outside of formal learning environments) to create new and engaging online conversations. I was surprised that this group didn’t come at me with the typical doom and gloom questions — they instead were (for the most part) eager to embrace what was happening in the “real world” and engaged me in a pragmatic discussion over what to do. One of the things that was funny was that many of my answers seemed so basic, yet created so much more thinking. I was particularly struck by a question over how teachers should use social environments … as I answered I heard myself talking about how critical it is for teachers to understand how the environments work. If you are going to use youtube for teaching, understand how related movies are chosen, know when to embed a video instead of using the youtube page, and make sure you can navigate the environment. Talking about facebook felt similar … we stressed how important it is to know how the privacy features work, how to really use the environment, and again, just know how to move around. Not earth shattering ideas, but ones that surprised me how much they resonated.

This was a smart group of K-12 administrators who are striving to do great things for their teachers and the students in their districts. They, in general, were very open to new ways of thinking and wanted me to assure them that the teachers we are producing at PSU are prepared to deliver the kinds of educational experiences that will ultimately make students successful in higher education and beyond. We spent a lot of time talking about how important it is for new teachers to foster feelings of creativity — even in the face of strict state standards and the constraints of the no child left behind initiative. I was a little worried about the emphasis on new teachers and not just teachers, but in general I was heartened to hear it and felt like our schools were in good hands.

I contrast this with the experiences I am having with my daughter’s public school education. I hear very little mention of innovative practice and I am certainly not seeing the ability to be flexible in the delivery of curriculum. I am not pointing fingers at teachers I am just seeing a system that wants so badly to be agile and effective, yet is trapped by red tape and outmoded methods. I don’t see anyone openly discussing learning styles, embracing digital literacy, digital story telling, or portfolio thinking. I mentioned reflective practice to a teacher in my daughter’s school and got a very strange look, as if she were saying, “why do that?” I want so much for my daughter to love school — she is still only in first grade … and I want her curiosity and creativity to be promoted, not stunted. Unfortunately what I see is a path that has been walked on for decades being the only direction, that change in thinking isn’t going to be tolerated, and that a push to the middle is the only option. So, with all the hope and promise of administrative leadership comes the realities of the trenches and I once again realize just how different my environment is than theirs. I am disheartened.

The Intranet — Gee, That’s Exciting

August 6, 2007 / Cole Camplese / 4 Comments

That seems to be the general reaction I get from people when I start talking Intranets. Back in the day we didn’t really think about how we worked to use the web to influence what was going on inside an organization — we were so damn busy just trying to build and launch some sort of externally facing site. I recall our first Intranet at Cogence Media back in 1996 … it was an old Apple FileServer that we discovered we could deep link into via a browser. The funny thing was that we didn’t do this deep linking via web pages, we did it from a bunch of individual Word documents that we kept on the shared space of the file server. I embarrassed to say that I was part of the web team and it just didn’t dawn on us to use real web pages to manage the knowledge of the organization. But when I really step back and think about it, we were doing the best we could with the tools of the day — sort of.

The last couple of years that has all changed though — especially for me. I have become just as interested in the conversations that go on inside an organization as the ones that are directed at customers, readers, audiences, or whatever else you want to call the people you are speaking to on the outside. The emergence of web 2.0, especially in the last year or so has given rise to many new ideas I am banging around in my head related to increasing opportunities for internal dialog. I have started reading more and more about the notion of Enterprise 2.0 (mainly from Andrea McAfee from Harvard) and I have to say it seems to be a perfect blend of my interests in communication technologies, organizations, and people. One of Dr. MacAffe’s posts that I have gotten a ton of mileage out of is a simple profile of one organization’s use of MediaWiki as a very powerful Intranet tools et. In it, he profiles this organization and the way they are using this site as a hub to both changing internal and external communication. To me it is a fascinating, yet simple study in how to get organizations to pay attention to important internal conversations.

One of the things I discovered when coming to ETS 21 months ago is the importance of an online place for sharing organizational information. This stuff takes the form of posts, stories, wiki pages, travel reports, and all the things that make a medium to large sized work-group go. What I found is that without some sort of hub at the center, keeping up on it all is just too difficult. Once we jumped the hurdle of simply providing a platform and the encouragement for people to participate as a part of the organizational story, we have started to think about how to better organize it all.

I have been working with one of my colleague here at ETS to rethink our Intranet space … let me say that I feel our local Intranet (it supports about 100 people within Teaching and Learning with Technology) is successful at helping us all share information in a somewhat organized way. We still struggle with architecture, but we are getting better at it. We are also getting better at bringing content from outside sources in … currently there are dozens of staff who are blogging, tagging links in del.icio.us, and photos in Flickr that are relevant to what we do and we are working on. The goal is to make all that “meta-content” seamlessly integrate with our internal content. It has been fun and an interesting little project. Just today I did a wire frame to share my thoughts on how we could mix the internal with the external to provide access to dynamic and organizationally important content in one location. As it comes to life, I’ll share more of it. Now that people are writing as much as they are around here I am struck with the need to have greater access to it all.

At any rate, the real reason I am posting is a cry for help … I have recently been asked to help with creating a new Intranet strategy for my parent organization here at PSU — Information Technology Services (ITS). ITS at Penn State is a very large and diverse organization that takes residence in no less than a dozen buildings on campus. This creates all sorts of challenges as it relates to sharing information in an efficient and effect manner. We do a good job, but it is high-touch and requires a ton of work. With that said, we are just too big to get together as much as we should and now that many of us are blogging the discoverablility of content is very low. One thing I would love to learn more about from all of you is what type of Intranets are you using within your organizations? How are you leveraging your understanding of information technology, people, communities, and web 2.0 to create new opportunities for computer mediated communication? I’d like to know more and I’d like to find ways to talk with you and explore what you are thinking and how you feel it is impacting the organization. Any takers?

Google Presentations

April 19, 2007April 19, 2007 / Cole Camplese / 2 Comments

We’ve all known it would happen sooner or later … well, it happened. This is certainly not new news, but it is a very good development — Google let the cat out of the bag for its forthcoming web-based version of PowerPoint, Google Presentations.

What is exciting is that this is collaboration on the creations side — unlike tools like SlideShare.

They got here by acquiring Tonic Systems and in the linked blog post they welcome to the Google team. I honestly have no idea if this can compete with PowerPoint — I know for a fact it can’t offer the slick look that Apple’s Keynote does. If it works as smoothly as Google Docs we could have a real winner on our hands. The reason to use Google Docs for me is all about collaboration … I know I’ve said it before, but when I have shown faculty, staff, and students Google Docs they instantly get it. It supports the way they work. Students are increasingly asked to work together to solve problems and the idea of pacing Word documents back in forth via email has become not only a pain, but completely outmoded given the state of collaborative technologies.

We’ve already freed those of you working in teams from the burdens of version control and email attachment overload when going back and forth on word processing and spreadsheets. It just made sense to add presentations to the mix; after all, when you create slides, you’re almost always going to share them. Now students, writers, teachers, organizers, and, well, just about everyone who uses a computer can look forward to having real-time, web-based collaboration across even more common business document formats.

If Google Presentations has the same level of collaborative capabilities then we’ve just found another tool that fits the workflow of so many of us — and our students. I spend a lot of time creating presentations … I also spend a lot of time emailing .zip files of these presentations to colleagues so they can reuse them. I also find myself collaborating with other staff a lot in the creation of presentations — and that is where this thing could be big. In addition to students writing together, we are asking them to create and present together more and more.

We aren’t ready to put away Office quite yet — the Google Docs and Spreadsheets tools aren’t at that level yet. I am very anxious to see how this one looks once it is released this Summer. I love tools that can support needs … now if I could just figure out how to feel 100% confident in letting my content sit on Google’s servers. That’s a post for another day.

The Beta Question

January 23, 2007January 23, 2007 / Cole Camplese / 3 Comments

I am sure this isn’t news to anyone, but it appears as though much of the web is in a constant state of beta. Think Gmail and its constant little reminder that this isn’t a real service … heck it could go away at any moment. I use it, my wife lives in it, and lots of people at the University forward all of their mail to it. Does anyone care it could disappear? I use Flickr for all my online photo storage and sharing … I do this even though I have a .Mac account that is not a “gamma” product like Flickr. I notice lots and lots of people spending time in there … the list just rolls on — you know, services that we rely on that we just turn the other cheek to the reality of their potential lack of staying power.

In higher education we seem to have some very strict definitions of what a service means … in my higher education administrator’s mind a service is a fully supported tool that has close to five nines reliability. The five nines thing is questionable in reality, but plays well as a goal. I have to tell you that I am now seeing what it takes to support user populations that number in the 100s of thousands I am much more careful of the words I use to describe things. Take the Podcasts at Penn State project … do we have a podcasting service here at the University? Sorta … our iTunes U implementation is in pilot and so are all the supporting pieces to the podcasting stuff going on here. That means there really isn’t any true PSU HelpDesk support, no 24/7 server management, and there certainly aren’t any money back guarantees that it’ll be a five nines environment. But at the end of the day, should that all matter? At the moment, we plaster the word pilot all over the thing, but we have gone from about 35 faculty podcasting last semester to well over a 100 this semester … adoption is happening simply because we have taken the plunge and created an opportunity.

With the growth in the beta mentality of Internet users should we start a new classification of Internet Tools? Maybe instead of talking about our services, we should talk about our emerging opportunities. So as we look to release the first bit of the Blogs at Penn State project we could look at it as just an emerging opportunity for members of our community to engage in. Not a full service. Could we create a new classification of opportunities that aren’t judged by their total up time or a promise that they will always be available — even over the long haul?

Can we create more agility of we work to establish a set of experimental opportunities that our communities can simply engage in while they are available? The good ones with high adoption rates would then get the attention they need to become services … if it works for Google Labs, why can’t it work in an environment where technical resources are spread very thin? I’m not talking about creating environments that would compromise end user security, privacy, or data … the building blocks to manage and protect identity are well established in our enterprise. I am simply asking if we could take a step back from the idea that everything has to scale to our total user base out of the box.

This is me just thinking out loud here … anyone have any thoughts on it all? With a change in mentality could we all offer a greater experience to our users? Or would we be cheating them by not making it all bullet proof? Just a set of questions that have been banging around in my head for a while now … thoughts?