Hear directly from other campus leaders as they share their journeys to improve identity access and security systems, and learn how your campus can adopt similar strategies for student and campus success.
Speaker 1: On behalf of Okta and Carahsoft, we would like to welcome you to today's podcast transformation ready in higher education lessons from leaders on identity modernization. During this podcast colleges and institutions across the country in the Tambellini Group, the leading independent technology, research and advisory firm dedicated exclusively to higher education, discuss the status of multi factor authentication on campus, Zero Trust in higher education and more, you will hear directly from campus leaders as they share their journeys to improve identity access and security systems and how other campuses can adopt similar strategies.
Ben Orencia: Thank you all for taking the time to join us today. Looking forward to having a great session. Okta is proud to sponsor this session and be a part of this act as a leader in identity and access management as a service, offering cloud solutions to help secure and streamline and enhance user experiences for all of our customers. So as I mentioned, happy to sponsor and proud of had this great, amazing panel with us today to talk about some of their journeys, challenges and experiences around cloud transformation, monetization, security and identity as well. So without further ado, let me get to this amazing panel, let them introduce themselves and then we'll kick into this awesome conversation. So Steven, I'll pass it off to you first.
Steven Ferguson: Thanks, Ben. My name is Steven Ferguson, and I'm the Chief Information Officer for the Technical College System GA, a system of 22 colleges 88 campuses across the state serving over 320,000 students annually. We're gonna pass it on to Jonathan.
Jonathan Piersol: Hey, hello, everyone. My name is Jonathan Piersol. I'm the Chief Information Officer at Howard University in Washington DC. We are a private doctoral research institution serving about 11,000 students in the Greater Washington area. I'll give it to Fred.
Fred Rocha: Thank you, Jonathan. I'm Fred Rocha. I'm the Chief Information Technology Officer for coast colleges in Southern California, one of 116 community colleges in the state and one of 73 districts. And I'll pass it off to Brad.
Brad Yoder: Hello, everyone. I'm Brad Yoder. I'm the Chief Information Officer at Aims Community College. Our main campus is in Greeley, Colorado. We do have four campuses and about 8400 students, and I'll give it over to Dave.
Dave Kieffer: Thanks, Brad. Welcome, everybody. And I'm Dave Kieffer, from the Tambellini Group. I'm a vice president and analyst at the firm. And we are an analyst firm that covers just higher education technology, as many of you will know, and provide research and advisory services to institutions. So thank you for asking me today, Ben to be the moderator for this discussion. I'm excited about it. Before we dive into the q&a portion here with the panel, I wanted to just talk a little bit about what we're seeing from a market perspective in higher education right now, I would start with from a technology strategy perspective, many institutions are moving into what they're calling digital transformation, which is, you know, whatever term of art you want to use around digital transformation, it's a bit of a buzzword at the moment. But it isn't it isn't. Because what it's come to mean in our industry is a lot more than modernization of technology. It's process standardization, centralization of common services, automation of processes, moving into modern technology that is generally cloud based and not once and done. So this continuous improvement, mentality and culture, as well as moving to technology that really enables institutions futures. So as we talk to folks, we're hearing a lot about moving to these platforms, so that they can transform and continually improve, and of COVID taught us anything, institutions are much more agile than we thought. So folks are pretty tired. I think there is this vision of higher education being a much more agile industry than we've been. And I think this technology wave we're seeing right now is going to enable that. So as institutions go down that path, and what they're finding is are their core components of their technology, infrastructure that aren't modern today. So most institutions don't have a modern identity provider. Most institutions don't have an integration platform, or data governance or some of these other core components that are necessary to really achieve the modernization are looking for. And so we've been looking at all of these underlying technologies extensively over the last year, especially since COVID hit so as they're looking at identity providers, they're finding that a lot of identity providers can't succeed in higher ed because of the real complexities. And these, these gentlemen will speak to those complexities today to some degree, multiple final simultaneous identities that exist in higher education, that really don't exist in this form in almost any other industry. So, you know, identities before and after formal relationships with the institution. So whether it's alumni after that, you know, formal period of being a student, or whether it's folks applying to be students in those institutions, we have people that come and go, right, we have adjunct faculty, we have lectures that come and go, we have employees who can be multiple things at one time. So I know when I was at an institution, which I was for over 30 years, I was an employee, I was a student, I was a parent, I was a donor, I was a fan, all at one time, and a volunteer, right. So you can be all of these things, which are completely different from an identity perspective. And institutions want to know all about that individual and see that whole view, which is a real challenge. So what we're seeing from a lot of institutions is this move from these homegrown ad based database based I am tools, I'll put them in air quotes. And I really tried to move into modern solutions. And I think that journey you'll hear about from some of these folks today, I think it's a really important journey for higher education to get to, because as an industry, we're quite far behind in this space. As we move into the questions here, just wanted to leave you with that we're seeing a lot of interest in moving both to the cloud from an application and an infrastructure perspective. And institutions really need this technology to enable that set of changes to be efficient and effective. So definitely a hot topic across higher education today. So I'm going to turn to some questions. And first, what if each of these folks a little chance to tell us a little bit more background, and specifically about your vision for technology at your institution? And what's driving that vision today? And I'm gonna start with Brad.
Brad Yoder: Thanks, Dave. You hit on already on some of the main points moving to the cloud, modernizing and, you know, with small shop like ours, we need to have a powerful tool that we can also don't have to dedicate a whole team of resources to manage and maintain our journey to the cloud, for us at Ames has been primarily as renewals come up as it's time to reevaluate whether we want to continue with the technology, our first opportunity is in the cloud, that's the first place that we've looked. And so our evolution has kind of been more of a gradual migration, not a wholesale, we're going to map this out, and we're gonna get it all done within a particular period of time.
Dave Kieffer: Makes sense. Fred?
Fred Rocha: I would have to agree with, you know, with the statements that have already been made. For us, it's also including the reducing of complexity and finding tools that are much more standard. Within the technology landscape, I think higher education, for a long time has been really good at creating either spoke tools or processes, because we view ourselves as such a unique entity when in fact, we're all unique, but we're not very different. We all have to register students, we all have to provide transcripts, we all have to be able to pay staff, we all have to be able to distribute financial aid and with that, to be able to have fewer tools that allow us to accomplish that and be able to manage that, especially in the great state of California, which is probably the most regulated state around, there's so many challenges with having to deal with compliance issues, having tools and solutions that are truly industry standard, widely supported, widely understood, allows us really to take giant steps forward in that direction.
Dave Kieffer: That's a great point, Fred. And that's a monumental shift in our in our industry today as moving to standard tools. And I think that's a really important point. Jonathan, what's the view from Howard?
Jonathan Piersol: Yeah. Howard, we started our digital transformation in 2018. When I first arrived, the cabinet asked us to first modernize the ERP. And of course, as we built the strategy to do that, we saw that our identity system was causing us trouble. It was not robust enough to handle the various multiple identities that a single person had at our university. And I think our best example is our president. So obviously, he's the uber administrator, but he's also a practicing surgeon in our hospital, a faculty member in our medical school and a faculty member in our school of education. And so trying to chase all of his identities were causing us lots of problems. We realized that the identity system had to be part of our digital transformation, in order for us to keep up with all of the new things that we were trying to do. So that led us down the path reevaluating our current identity management system and trying to make sure it had enough capability to manage all of the identities.
Dave Kieffer: That's great. Yeah, institutions with clinical operations have indeed a whole double down of complexity that they have to deal with. All right. Steven?
Steven Ferguson: I can echo a lot of what was already said. But I'll tell you that a couple different things and parts of our journey, we started that digital transformation piece in a kind of stutter step right from the very beginning, there was targets of opportunity, now that we could transform in the endemic gave us an opportunity to do transformation at a much grander scale. Not only did it give us that opportunity, but people were less resistant to change of, hey, I've got to be able to do my job remotely, I've got to be able to do things, the students, the people we serve, really wanted the opportunity to continue to education and continue to learn, but in a safe way, that environment that let them kind of do it on their own terms. And so that ushered in not only funding and an opportunity, but certainly the timing was right. And so we started in really a lot of this enveloped under our E campus initiative, we have 22 colleges, we have online learning, what we don't have is a shared model that allows you as a student, or a college within the system to offer programs and utilize the capacity of any other college, for instance, there's programs that exist in a metro area with high populations that are in demand. But if you're a student in a rural area, you're a rural part of Georgia, you may not have the opportunity to take that program, because you may not have talent in that area, there may not be a demand for jobs in that immediate area. And so we've been able to rethink and retool and say, hey, let's leverage the capacity. Let's leverage the knowledge and, and things out of the haves, those that are in areas where it exists. And let's create equity and opportunity for students regardless of their zip code. And so under that banner under that Ecampus platform, we've been able to transform a lot of the way we deliver education, and a big part of making that possible, was controlling that entity. Because if there's a student at one college that is consuming and taking advantage of resources anywhere in the state, then they don't need to have to rely on 510 different logins and Ivy's weed to make that experience seamless for them. We had one guiding tenant, that we went through a kind of a digital transformation effort and workshop together. And, you know, for all the decisions we've made on transformation, everything's had to pass through one critical gate, which is that student obsessed. And for us, one of the core parts of food obsession, really is identity, a single identity for everybody. So they can get access to resources without having to keep track of a plethora of other IDs and passwords.
Dave Kieffer: That's great. It goes back to that simplification idea we've already heard about. I want to drill into this for a second. Jonathan, can you talk in a little bit more detail about how identity plays a role in the transformation that you're going through?
Jonathan Piersol: Yeah, so going back to ERP, as we're deploying a new this new ERP we're learning more about the identities and the roles that different people have, and trying to bring those together. As I said, we just kept running into roadblocks being able to just manage multiple identities or multiple roles on a single identity. We also have students that are moving through the system, starting as you know, FDIC and moving all the way through in a lot of cases graduate school. And we were having trouble allowing them to keep certain aspects of their identity. So their Unified Communication capabilities, email, and calendar and those kind of things. As they move into a graduate program, there could be a little bit of gap between the graduation of undergrad and then moving to another Howard graduate school, allowing them to keep certain aspects and then taking certain aspects away until they re-register as a new graduate student. We just kept having to do rework. We kept having our helpdesk inundated, when they go to start their program, they can't get into things, they're locked out of things. And a lot of that is tied to our identity system. It's the downstream devices that we need a lot more care for door locks, having the ability to access libraries having the ability to access various databases peculiar to a program, such as engineering, or business or medicine. And with all of these downstream artifacts that people need access to, it was difficult for us to do it in our old system, it either could do some of them, but could do them all. Or it could do all of them, but it wouldn't allow a multi-step granularity within that thing. So within that database, or within that access that we are giving, there was more lower level access that we could shouldn't rant or deny. And so we've just saw that it the system we had wasn't going to get it done. And so that was is a challenge for us. And what we're looking for, because part of our strategic plan overall for the university is user experience, particularly student experience. And we were finding our students were struggling, they were having to constantly call it and try to get unlocked or access to something that they honestly should have had, we knew they needed access to it. But we didn't have an easy way to just grant it upon admission, or granted, once you were approved for the program. So it just caused us a lot of trouble. One of our other objectives was really bringing our bringing self service to our helpdesk capability. And we thought, you know, if we fix identity, the majority of our tickets, which are password related or access related, would go down dramatically. So we spent a lot of time trying to strategize. Is the system we have today capable of doing that? Or should we look to do something that's something different? I think we decided we're going to do something different.
Dave Kieffer: And quick follow up on that for a Johnson and please, anybody else chime in on this as well, as you kind of went down into the depths of identity and discovery where there are gaps in process? Did you also find policy issues that you needed to address related to access?
Jonathan Piersol: We did we really started learning sort of, as the ticket flowed by, if you would, that there were policy issues that had to be addressed by as to you know, how students move through the undergraduate institution? How do students move into graduate the graduate institutions? And honestly, how do we handle students who were not undergrads, but did come to a graduate program at Howard that we needed to bring them in to bring them onto the system. So we're partnering with our academic provost office, there's an AP that's responsible for faculty, there's an AP that's responsible for students, and we're working with them to really understand the flow, as well as our Dean's because every school has its own peculiar needs. The law school is certainly different than our pharmacy, school, etc. But yes, policy was a big thing. And also partnering with the functional area, some of these things can't be addressed by it alone, we have to have our partners to tell us what the rules of the road are, and what things you need to access at the various stages or the various years as you pass through a program.
Dave Kieffer: Yeah, a lot of Associate Provost who didn't think they'd ever be talking about access management, right. I want to turn to Brad for a second, if you can talk a little bit more about kind of the detailed journey and those implications for your shop.
Brad Yoder: Well, we're still in that journey. Of course, we have not completely implemented the identity management solution that we're talking about here. But our really our biggest driver to really kick this off was our ERP change, we're moving away to a new ERP. And we're recognizing that any tools or bringing in a modern tool is probably going to be cloud based and needs a system that as the other panelists have talked about, can be managed, is standardized, can move from identity to identity and that kind of thing. We just settled on this, but we are really looking at it. When he's talking about policy as well. I'll just add to Jonathan's conversation, one of the policies that came up as a result of COVID for probably most schools is the telework policy, and the identity, ability to handle that identity. If they aren't going to be on campus, or I've never been on campus, maybe even those kinds of things were part of our challenge. But this, this really helps to having a tool like this really helps to solidify that for us.
Dave Kieffer: That's great. And I wonder as you as you were moving to the cloud from an ERP perspective, how did you make the business case that not only that you wanted to move those to the cloud, but that identity was a part of that?
Brad Yoder: I spoke with cabinet about this. And we kind of walked through the fundamental infrastructure pieces. And the fact that the fundamental one of the most fundamental pieces that we have in our ecosystem was our ERP, that being in the cloud, that was kind of a no brainer business case, along with today's world, where we're kind of always battling that security envelope that is a two factor and all that that has to be in place. Now. That didn't have to be there. 10, 15 years ago, that was a very strong business case in itself, just trying to maintain security and not wanting to end up losing control of that.
Dave Kieffer: I wonder, Jonathan, if you might have anything to add in terms of thinking through the business case, as you kick these off. I know a lot of institutions really struggle with getting their leadership to understand how important identity is and how difficult it is to manage on a day to day basis.
Jonathan Piersol: Yeah, so we came at that strategy from a couple of directions, obviously, the direction that our counterparts have talked about, certainly giving people access with and through COVID The other piece was security in general. So we're doing a large push on taking all of the loosely coupled security products that we have, and turning them into a real ecosystem. So identity obviously is at the center of that having the ability to grant and discontinue access, literally at the push of a button is going to be key to that. The other part is we have a policy server that we use on the network. And so joining those things, we have our, you know, vulnerability scanners and other things, but bringing those products together, integrating them so that they can actually do some work that people normally would do. It was a part of the strategy. But until we had an identity system that would allow us to get to the granularity we needed, because we may not need to turn everything off for a person, just some things, and a lot of that is going to be tied to our grps status of a person. Are you active in the community? Are you know, on administrative leave? Are you on FMLA? Are you on some kind of disciplinary issue, whatever that status is, in our ERP would then communicate to the identity system, and it would decide what system should be turned on and turned off and what accesses and so we're trying to do sort of a, we're using a bunch of cots products that we're going to try to do some automations within the integration system to make that happen. And so I can't say it's been successful yet. We're still working on it. But we're putting the big pieces in place. So we came at it from different angles to answer your question. Obviously, the campus identity was key. But campus security is also a big part of that. And also automation as part of our digital transformation.
Dave Kieffer: Great. I think that's helpful for everybody. So I'm going to zoom out here a little bit for my next question. And, Fred, I want to turn to you first, as you think about what your institution's true goal is, and serving students. How do you really think about students and student experience and how technology supports that?
Fred Rocha: I think there's an important aspect that all my colleagues here have touched upon. And the idea of being student obsessed, I love the praise that Steven use there, because I think that's really where our hearts and minds lead us to, is to ensure that that student experience is not only positive, but is enriching, and that technology is never an obstacle to them achieving their educational goals, but rather as a facilitator for that. Yeah, I had the unique experience of being brought to the Okta table through our chancellor's office, our state chancellor's office. And there was a discussion that was taking place at that layer, acknowledging that even before COVID, and the pandemic impacts hit us that there were definitely digital equity issues within our state. And when you have 116, community colleges, you have some that are located in very rural parts of the state of California, people tend to think that California is comprised of places like Disneyland and the beach, when in fact, we have, you know, the full spectrum of locations. So we have everything from, you know, college to the Cisco news is that the northern most part of our state, out to Palo Verde, which, you know, can be towards the southern most end of our state. And with them, each having a very unique population, we had already begun the journey of having a common application process for our students so that they could apply once and then be accepted by any one of the community colleges. Because with the community college system, we like to say we take the top 100% of the students who applied to the system. So you know, with that comes then the next step in that journey, and then what is that individual experience look like when they come to the individual college, and that's where it begins to fall apart. Because depending on the resources you have, which is based primarily on the size of your institution, you can have a very different digital experience. And that's not really fair to the students of the state, they should have the same quality experience the same tools, and quite honestly have the same expectation for security and privacy for their data as well. So that was really where our journey began is. I was asked to help pilot and understand what the scope of such a change would be within our state, and what that impact would look like at a particular district and college level. So I think the journey for us is still quite underway. But for us being able to make sure that not only the student experience is positive but also our adjunct instructors. Experience is positive. Within our system, it is not uncommon for a faculty member who is an adjunct instructor to teach at multiple institutions. And I think, as Brad and Steven and Jonathan were all mentioning, we don't want to have them have so many sets of credentials that it leads to, you know, bad password hygiene, bad security practices, because that's the ramifications, we see. The ramifications that they experienced, though, is just a very negative experience in terms of the way they interact. Quite frankly, you could lose just as you can lose students to a bad experience, you can lose great instructors to a bad experience as well. And we want to ensure that the steps that we're taking are going to provide the appropriate resources, and all the transportation vehicles for allow them to deliver all their content and their services on the digital highway.
Dave Kieffer: Great, thanks for that, I have to say, I truly admire in the campus, or in the community college community, that the passion around students is truly a phenomenal thing to witness. I think every institution does, but almost the combative like I have to make this good for my students’ view of the world, I think is phenomenal. And in the community college industry. Steven, I want to turn back to you for a second on the same topic about tying your technology back to the student experience.
Steven Ferguson: So I mentioned earlier, the student obsession, and it really wasn't that simple. We pulled together a group of individuals that included 12 of our presidents in the early onslaught of digital innovations that okay, what do we want the future state to look like? What are the two day initial kickoff of that actually looked more like a battle than anything, it actually had us all, kind of circling around and throwing ideas into the ring where the best one, you know, was gonna engage in Mortal Combat with all the others, and the best one was going to arrive. And also, we even argued for a long time over who the actual customer is. Yeah, it's easy to say it's a student, but like, Hey, wait a second is the industry who's hiring your students and is we had these really robust conversations where everyone had an opportunity to be heard and share about defining that future state. And that's what we started as Amazon, we want to call it working backwards, you know, it's like, hey, define where you want to be. And we wrote a press release this month, press release out of, Okay, this is what a year from now, this is what we want the local newspaper to say about what we did. And so we define this and we work backwards and try to define how we get there. And one of the big things we've done is kindness and making it happen. That has been to do so with speed. And to do you have to move rapidly, because when you're trying to implement change, the slower you go, the more deliberate you are, the more time you give the organizational immune system, an opportunity to ramp up and start kicking that change out. Because, you know, a lot of times we find ways to delay things or not do things just because of how hard they are. And that was a big part of tonnison is not only we're going to make these digital changes, they're going to serve our students better, we're going to get them done rapidly. I can tell you this, this community that we signed the contract late January, maybe the first of February, for Okta, solution that will be rolled out across 22 colleges, Ada campuses serving over 3000 people, between May 7 and June one. So from February to May, this product is going live. Yes, speed, right. Just execute, just get it done. Love some other mindsets here. But yes, it's trial and modify. Your planning is dead, just start doing something, the faster you start doing it, the more success you're gonna have.
Dave Kieffer: That's pretty frightening around identity, I'll say but that's, that's great that you're getting it done. Jonathan, can you talk a little bit about that relationship of student experience to technology for your institution?
Jonathan Piersol: Yeah, it's job one for us. Our students have had a difficult experience previously, mostly before this president. And so one of the things that was high on his list, tying a strategic plan is student experience. In fact, student experience carves through all of the five pillars of our strategic plan, because one of the things that came out of a meeting so I have a meeting with the student government organization, every six months, twice a year, I meet with the President and the whole student government cabinet. And one of the things that came from that was, they felt like they were chasing the institution. And that phrase resonated with me as just as an IT leader to say, I don't want you chasing the administration, you should be chasing your education. And we should be bringing administration right to your doorstep right to your phone. So that was woven throughout the IT strategic plan. The ERP system needs to be very easy to use. And no one should have to go to an office to do any of the business of getting through the institution that should have be in a system, it should be something that we can deliver to you mobile, and that you should be able to do any of those transactions. But again, the identity, knowing who you are, knowing what level you're operating, you're in, in your program. And knowing what things you should be having access to, is critical for that. And so although we are also pushing that identity system in and moving that project quickly down the road, we also want to make sure that it's well done, we want to make sure that we have covered all of our bases, particularly around our student experience as a priority. But secondarily to that is our faculty experience, we spend a lot of time and money recruiting faculty from all over the world. And we don't want them to leave simply because they don't have access to things or that they are always struggling with their passwords, what Fred alluded to. And so keeping those groups happy with getting immediate access, we want it to be once we know what your identity is, we can grant you the access to the things you need. And so we want to move quickly, we have a lot of deadlines around our ERP, we have deadlines around starting our student deployment, but identities got to be the glue that holds all that all of that together. So we're taking our time, and we're working across functions to make sure that we do it correctly. And we have all the data that we want, we know we'll miss some things, and we'll have to do some add backs. But we want the majority of our student experience to be accurately reflected in our identity system so that we can give them the accurate access that they need across campus.
Dave Kieffer: Great. I want to pull on that thread that Jonathan just raised a little bit around the balance of ease of access and security, because both of them are paramount right now for IT leaders across the industry. You know, so many issues in cybersecurity are occurring on a regular basis. But we're also trying to make sure that everybody can get what they need easily. And maybe Fred, you can jump in with how are you balancing those two things as you move forward in this journey?
Fred Rocha: You know, I think that's an excellent point. One of the challenges I faced when I first landed at coasts just about four years ago, was it seemed that we had just such an abundance of product that we were using, all of which did you know bits and pieces of what we were trying to do that we really had to take that first step back and ask ourselves what was it we were trying to accomplish? But then how are we going to measure whether we were successful in delivering that service. And for us, we really started to go on our listening tour, if you will, to ask our users where those challenges and difficulties were. And you know, we've often talked about digital infrastructure has always been the last mile at being the hardest to actually implement, I think it's actually probably closer to the last 100 feet. And what I mean by that is that we were listening to our students who were saying I don't understand, and the comparison they always had was Amazon. You know, not only does Amazon anticipate what I need, by showing me some things that they think are relevant, and that might be of interest to me. But if I need something I can go in and basically sign up for something and get immediate access, I can indicate that there's an interest in somebody will follow up with me, why can't you be more like Amazon? And you know, that's an easy question to ask not necessarily an easy answer to give, because, of course, we don't have the resources of Amazon. But that isn't a satisfactory explanation. What we really found is that if we would simplify the tool stack that we were using, and we were leveraging what was truly possible, and almost adopt that just in time inventory model to the way in which we deliver services, if you can pre stage that, you know, every student is going to need access to these particular applications or these services. If you understand that based on their major based on their program of study. There's certain things that need to be provided, you can go a long way to ensuring that you're able to stand that up for them at the time of literally at the time of application. And then again at the time of registration. I think the other component to that is then to have the Self Service tools that allow them to do those password resets or allow them to in essence to do that first line of self-healing when they're having technical challenge, we really have a problem if something is so severe that it took getting to humans to actually respond. That should be my tier three response, if you will, I needed to have every service that could be done for the user, under the control of the user when they needed that service done. When we adopted that mindset, it really did open up our eyes to then what tools did we need to have? And then the benefit to us how we could repurpose our staff to actually think about the higher order processes and services that we wanted to provide, as opposed to, you know, worrying about password resets. So I think things like that are critical to our pathway for success and how we ensure that that experience, and that the toolset is able to do exactly what we need it to do.
Dave Kieffer: Right, that makes a lot of sense. Brad, do you want to chime in on this balance between access and security?
Brad Yoder: Sure. And my thought kind of comes back to the various audiences, Jonathan described a certain kind of audience variety of audiences that that he's got at a community college here in Colorado, our audience also includes concurrent enrollment, high school students, and that audience has a little bit different need in accessibility and access, as well. But I also concur with the usability question. Why isn't this like Amazon, we face people at different ends of the spectrum at a community college coming in, and their ability to manage their identities manage technology in general. So from the high school student, maybe even to some of our employees still struggle, a little bit older employees, maybe struggle with it. So having tools that can cross that spectrum in terms of usability, but still giving us the confidence that we're providing that security is paramount. And then I would also add that, yes, a standardized tool, like Okta, that does not require a whole team of people to manage is important to us as well.
Dave Kieffer: Great. Thanks, Brad. Steven, do you want to chime in on this topic?
Steven Ferguson: Certainly. You know, security is always Top of Mind, it is critical, right? We don't want people being inadvertently given access to resources, we also want to provide an opportunity for people to stay as secure as possible and limiting the number of passwords, they have to remember, reuse all that multifactor. All the other things that make it kind of reassuring for us, as technologists and keepers of the data and protectors of the data do can serve as barriers get access for other folks, right. So the fewer amount of times we get to have them interact with the technology to get access is a good thing. It's a single sign on portals and all that had been very important because it allows us to check more of the security boxes, while still keeping folks secure and giving them those minimal touch points. Another thought and really idea around comprehensive identity for us has been that while giving someone inadvertent access is, you know, super important to prevent, we don't want people to not have access to things they should. And that's where the automation tools come in, and that provisioning. We've all had a help desk. And yet, there's an email that goes out and says, hey, you know, we just hired this new person. And you look at the distribution list, there's like 80 people on it, so that this new person gets all the things they're supposed to have in the automate that not only makes the new employees life easier, or new students live easier. It makes everyone that was on that email chain before, way more efficient. And we're only like one person being out of the office for a week on vacation and nobody covering for them from somebody not having access to something they need to be successful. As a student, someone has to do what they need for their education. We don't want that to happen.
Dave Kieffer: The other thing that folks don't often realize is that standardization as you move into automating that makes an anomaly detection a whole lot easier. Because there are a lot more clear, right? Because it is more standard. And so you can really move into that review and analysis in a way you couldn't do. And if you didn't expect eight of those 80 to get it done the first time and what's an anomaly. Right? They're all anomalies. So as we're wrapping up our time together, I got a couple of lightning round questions that I want to do for all of you. And so if you can give me your one biggest bullet on these two things, that would be really great. So the first one is looking backward. So as you've attempted these similar projects, what lessons learned what advice would you give your peers as they get ready to embark on a project like the ones that that you've described today, and I'm going to start with Jonathan.
Jonathan Piersol: The one word would be inclusion, you have to have your other functional areas involve because they know things and have experienced problems that sometimes they haven't even reported to you. And so you want to make sure you capture those things in your identity project.
Dave Kieffer: That's a great, great point. Brad, you wanna go next?
Brad Yoder: Just the word that comes to mind. For me, it still is COVID-related is agile, try to put yourself in a position to be agile and the ability to move and pivot as needed.
Dave Kieffer: Great. Steven?
Steven Ferguson: Communication. There's three quick rules to it. What do I know? Who needs to know? Have I told them not that I tell somebody to tell them? Did I tell them? So communicate, communicate to everybody and do it often. So don't expect anyone else to communicate it for you. You know, what I know, who needs to know, did I tell them.
Dave Kieffer: Fred?
Fred Rocha: The only thing I'd add is make sure that urgency is part of your, your presentation as well communicate why the need is now why the benefit that will occur and the change the positive change, that will resolve as whatever the initiative is, if you can build a sense of urgency around it, you'll get the backers that you need.
Dave Kieffer: Man, that is four great points for anybody. So now we're gonna look forward, as you think about what a difficult year this has been the path that you're on? What's the next big thing on your roadmap? I'll go in the same order. Jonathan, you want to start?
Jonathan Piersol: Oh, yeah, so after identity, certainly our big thing right now. But after that, I think it's moving into automation and AI.
Dave Kieffer: Cool, great stuff. Brad?
Brad Yoder: And, and ours is not just as so much around technology, if we get ourselves in a position to be able to be fluid. Our Academic Dean has talked about learning on demand, and allowing students to define their, how they want to learn different modalities, hybrid, in person remote, that kind of thing, or a combination of them. So being able to support that kind of initiative. This is fundamental infrastructure that can help support that.
Dave Kieffer: Great. Steven?
Steven Ferguson: For us, you know, there's a lot of things happen in parallel. So it's not after identity, it's also identity. And as part of that he camps initiative, and right now that CRM, keeping with that student obsession, so we're doing a system wide, comprehensive Indian CRM to help manage that relationship with students all the way from recruitment through and then beyond graduation through employment. And just having us on that standard platform, like you have mentioned the standardizations. So we're all speaking the same language, we can all help one another. But our students are seeing enhanced services.
Dave Kieffer: Great. Fred?
Fred Rocha: Be the engine and not the caboose. And what I mean by that is, we are going to look at and continue to look at every lesson we've learned over the past 1314 months. And keep what is the pearls and throw away? What is the chaff, if you will, and with that be the change that we want in the system, do it locally, prove the validity and then promote through our peers, in essence, change the way in which we operate as a system by starting at the individual level and taking what's great and the lessons we've learned at each of our institutions, and make that a value proposition that nobody can deny.
Dave Kieffer: That's great. I want to thank you all. It's a brilliant group of people. Such great advice for folks.
Ben Orencia: Thank you, Dave for moderating and as expected awesome conversation. I appreciate all of our all your panelists, taking the time out to join us to have this. It's been awesome.
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening. If you'd like more information on how Carahsoft or Okta can assist your educational institution, please visit www.carahsoft.com or email us at okta@carahsoft.com. Thanks again for listening and have a great day.