University CIOs And The Pandemic | Billion-Dollar Data Loans | Facebook’s CIO Atish Banerjea

Plus: Proactive Vs. Reactive Companies And Distributed Work

Hello, and welcome to this week’s newsletter.

My wife and I received an email this week from the head of our youngest son’s high school in the San Francisco Bay Area. Our son is about to go into his final academic year before heading off to college. But according to the note, the new semester looks like it could start off in the same way that the prior one ended—with pupils taking virtual classes from home.

Universities are also having to decide whether or not to let students come back in person. It’s a choice made all the more difficult by the fact that Covid-19 cases are spiking again in some areas. In a recent post, Forbes CIO Network contributor Paige Francis, who is the CIO of the University of Tulsa, makes several suggestions for steps higher-ed tech leaders will need to take to cope with a highly uncertain outlook for on-campus versus remote tuition.

Among them is the need to reinforce underlying tech infrastructure, and to make sure that it can support both completely virtual courses and “hyflex” ones that are a mixture of virtual and face-to-face learning. Investing in technology will be an essential expense, but it will be required at a time when many others are also piling up as universities make their campuses safe for students who do return. CIOs will need to make a clear case for signing the necessary checks, hopefully to a receptive academic audience.

The silver lining in this dark pandemic cloud is that changes being driven out of necessity will create a lasting foundation for the digital transformation of education. Forced to embrace online teaching, previously tech-phobic academics are now seeing the benefits of virtual instruction and getting comfortable with the technology involved. Students will rightly not want to miss out on the campus experience, but various forms of hybrid tuition are likely to flourish and they will have an opportunity to tap into even more opportunities.

All this will mean tech leaders in higher education will have a great deal more to do in future. But it should be a refreshing change from the days when the biggest priority on the “to-do list” was working out how to stop Netflix-bingeing students from overloading university Wi-Fi networks. (Full disclosure: I strongly suspect my youngest is going to add to that particular problem!)

Thanks for reading and do please send me your tips, thoughts, questions and ideas for future issues at mgiles@forbes.com. You can also follow me on Twitter and on LinkedIn.

Technology & Innovation

Cybersecurity #1: Covid-19 related research has become a target for cyberattacks. U.S. authorities have accused Chinese hackers of trying to steal coronavirus-related data as part of a decade-long intrusion campaign. Meanwhile, the Russian government publicly denied reports in the U.K. that hackers working for it had tried to access vaccine research.

Cybersecurity #2: As security experts continue to analyze Twitter’s recent breach, they are highlighting the internal risks that can lead to accounts being compromised. In an age when many top executives are active on social media, this is a significant wakeup call.

Collaboration tools: Tension is rising in the market for online collaboration services. Slack has filed a legal complaint with the European Commission alleging that Microsoft’s practice of bundling Microsoft Teams with its Microsoft 365 cloud offering is anti-competitive.

Leadership & Strategy

Privacy: Staying on the subject of data, a European court recently struck down an agreement that has let U.S. companies process and use privacy-related data from European Union countries. The ruling has significant implications for CIOs and chief information security officers, who will need to focus on “operational adequacy schemes” that can help shield companies from liability.

Leadership: CIOs who put far more effort into managing than leading will miss out on big opportunities to help evolve their companies. Here’s a timely reminder of how to strike the right balance between directing staff and helping to shape strategy and build support for your ideas.

Talent & Careers

Recruitment: Interviewing candidates over video is now quite common, which makes it all the more important to set expectations clearly at the beginning of a conversation. Here’s a very clear recommendation for how to kick things off.

Culture: Making sure that there’s plenty of collaboration between your team members—and more broadly between IT and the rest of the business—is a key to CIO success. That means thinking actively about how to boost their “collaboration quotients.”

"In the design, product management and software engineering space, we have people going back and forth fairly regularly."

Atish Banerjea

CIO of Facebook

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