EDTECH: You’ve worked with a number of institutions. What appealed to you about UC San Diego?
KELLEN: A lot of things, but most important was the quality of the executive team and the fact that there’s an outstanding level of collaboration across the university. Under Chancellor Pradeep Khosla’s superb leadership, our focus is sharp and clear, and the vision is strong. This helps quite a bit in ensuring IT can support and enhance our mission.
EDTECH: Tell me about the major redesign that you’re taking the university through.
KELLEN: It’s a comprehensive digital transformation of every single enterprise business system we have. We’re replacing our decades-old mainframe systems with modern, cloud-based software tools. We’re also building a comprehensive advanced analytics platform from scratch.
These are just the technical changes. The business changes are more of a challenge. I got the entire IT staff in my unit certified at the yellow-belt level in Lean Six Sigma, and I require all my frontline managers to achieve green-belt certification. Now, more than 2,200 UC San Diego staffers, including 400 in IT, have gone through some sort of certification, creating a great culture of measurable, continuous improvement.
EDTECH: The CIO judges noted your success in building trust among senior leaderships and facilitating a shared governance approach to institutional goals. How does this work at UC San Diego?
KELLEN: Our No. 1 mission in IT is to help business colleagues execute their strategies. We try hard to be helpful in key decisions and planning, and so far, IT has been well included in the cocreation of strategies with strong digital components. We have to have quality individuals with high acumen to continually be included.
Also, because of the ongoing complexification of information, solitary players are a thing of the past. It takes several teams working together. We work hard to develop a strong community of trusted peers, so people trust that data are being used in ways that respect the community’s principles and values. When trust increases, data democratization increases.