As part of Industry Insider — California’s ongoing efforts to educate readers on state agencies, their IT plans and initiatives, here’s the latest in our periodic series of interviews with departmental IT leaders.
Tom Andriola is vice chancellor for information, technology and data in the Office of Data and Information Technology; and chief digital officer at the University of California, Irvine (UCI), roles he has had since October 2019. He is also a member of the board of directors of OCHIN, a nonprofit health-care innovation center, where he has been since May 2017; and was director of the board of directors at The Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California (CENIC) from October 2013-December 2020. Prior to his current role at UCI, Andriola was vice president and CIO for the University of California System from September 2013-September 2019.
He has a Bachelor of Science in systems engineering from The George Washington University; a Master of Science in engineering management from the University of South Florida; and is a graduate of the Stanford Executive Program at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business.
Industry Insider — California: As vice chancellor for information, technology and data, and as chief digital officer at your organization, how do you describe your roles? How have these roles and responsibilities changed or evolved in recent years?
Andriola: It’s not multiple roles, but it’s different titles around the things that I do, (how) the title is recognized by different types of organizations. The vision when we created the role was, the leadership here at Irvine saw the strategic nature of technology and how it was changing a research university. And they really wanted someone at the cabinet level who could see through that lens ... and make sure the right questions are being asked to drive the conversations. When I came in, and I was with another part of the university, I said, ‘Look, it’s not just technology, but it’s really data.’ And so, that’s how the title came to have both information, technology and data in it. A very simple way that I explain when people say, ‘Well, what’s digital?’ It’s like ... it’s the technology, which to me is just a data generation mechanism. But the value proposition really comes through data. And a simple example is, you know, you go and you get an MRI. The technology is the scanner, but what the radiologist reads and makes a diagnosis on is the image. That’s the data. You have to put technology and data together, and we created a role where I have responsibilities for both the technology and the data in terms of how we strategically think about it, build it into our strategies and use it. That’s how the role came in. If we were a private-sector organization, you wouldn’t use a title like vice chancellor. You’d use a chief digital officer title, right? That’s how we created both titles, so people would know what I do. It was the role they wanted to recruit, something that was a little more than a traditional CIO. I was at another part of the university and actually knew the leadership pretty well. At the same time, I was also kind of giving them like, ‘Look, this is where I think the role is going.’ And so, I like to call it a co-creation of the role. They saw a strategic gap in how the types of perspectives that were in their cabinet conversation. I brought a certain skill set, having both public- and private-sector experience on how technology can transform the way to think about how an organization works, like, think about strategic differentiators. And so, it just kind of matched up and got here, and I have had a lot of fun kind of making it happen. Because technology and data underpin everything that you do, everything from the way students get educated to the way you run the campus, to the way you care for patients ... and I sit in multiple cabinets across UCI so that I can bring that perspective and then I can connect things across lines. There are certain topics that we really need to be very coordinated on, like cybersecurity is a topic (where) you can’t have individual strategies. You have to have kind of a horizontal view of it. But there are also emerging technologies that, for example, how are digital humans being integrated into interactions and experiences? Where one side of our university is working with it, but the other side is now just getting exposed to it. So that cross-pollination is a role that I play for us.
Industry Insider — California: Does your organization have a strategic plan, and may we hyperlink to it? How big a role do you personally play in writing that strategic plan?
Andriola: Yes, we do have a strategic plan. It’s built on four pillars: growth that makes a difference; elevating the student experience; being a great partner; and new pathways to a brilliant future, which is a lot about how we push the boundaries of research. That plan was built in 2016. We are going through a process right now of refreshing that plan, and I’m a part of that committee so I can bring my unique set of experiences and perspectives to that. And what I’ll say is that, while the plan has been drafted, it’s out for a round of review and comment right now. What you’re going to see is really an enabling theme that runs across everything that we do, where we think about what does it mean for technology to transform the way that we run the enterprise? What does it mean to be data-driven in how we think about helping our students succeed? And so, I would say that all four pillars have a strong component of ‘how is the enabling capabilities of technology and data going to make us a preeminent institution?’ Whether it’s around education, whether it’s around research, whether it’s around patient care or our public service to the society at large.
Industry Insider — California: What big IT initiatives or projects are coming up? What sorts of developing opportunities and RFPs should we be watching for in the next six to 12 months?
Andriola: I’m famous for saying there’s no such thing as an IT initiative, right? There are business initiatives that IT is an enabling component of. I always have to start there. What I would say is, some of the big things that I’m excited about, that I'm contributing into and partnering up with my business and functional and academic colleagues on, are we have an initiative called Data-Driven Student Success, to become one of the preeminent universities in North America that really understands how to use data to help each and every student succeed. By more and more of how we interact with them and how they interact with us being captured in some digital signal. That will connect tremendously to really thinking about how do we use technology and data to elevate the student experience. I think what employers are looking for today is not just graduates with a degree, but graduates who can talk about the range of things that they learn and competencies that they’ve mastered, and a set of experiences that they’ve gotten while they were a student, that make them the employee that you want working for you. And so, we think about elevating that experience to be not just about what happens in the classroom, but looking across every point of interaction. And how is technology being utilized now in math, right? For the clubs that I'm involved in as a student. We have a major initiative in our health-care space called the Institute for Precision Health, which was announced earlier this year, where we have a very, very strong data analytics platform where we’re doing what’s called multimodal data analytics. Which is, it’s not just about looking at the electronic health record, but medical images and genomic data and maybe microbiome data and data from your Fitbit or Apple Watch. And how do we really understand the patient journey at an individualized level and really help each patient move along their health journey that they define, or maybe even stopping them from becoming a patient in the first place? And it’s a very data-infused strategy that is underneath all of that. The one that’s not announced yet that we’re talking about ... is, we’re going to make here at UCI a big play in the sustainability and climate space. They’ve got my voice in there talking about how do we build a data strategy underneath it. We call our data strategies The Collaboratories at UCI, which is essentially how do we bring data together from different places, both that we have generated, that our partners are generated? And how do we put that data to work to advance the science of a domain, to put into practice in a living laboratory mentality, the way we do things here at UCI? And then how do we use it as a way to partner with the outside world? You don’t do anything alone in today's world. It takes public-private partnership to move the needle on societal challenges, and data is the play that multiple parties come to work with to try to create something new. Our Collaboratories at UCI is an initiative out of my office that underpins several of our strategies. The new one that’s coming is in sustainability and climate.
Industry Insider — California: In your opinion, what should local government be doing more of in technology?
Andriola: I think one of the things that’s happening more and more, and the pandemic really pushed us all to do more of and to get more comfortable with as end users, is the concept of the digital front door. Make it easier for me to find what I’m looking for to get to the service using digital technologies before I’m forced into a process, stand in a line, that type of thing, right? I think the more local government provides those types of easy access points — we tend to call it ‘digital front door’ — I think that’s good. That’s good for society because there is a growing population of people who are comfortable with that. And as you know, as more devices are out there in the home ... why can’t Alexa just say, ‘Hey, Alexa, I’m going to the mall. Tell me ... how many parking spots are available?’ That’s just a connection, right? That’s already there; when I drive there, I look at ... there’s four slots on Level One and 16 on Level Two. I could ask Alexa that and Alexa could tell me that before I left. That's just a matter of a different way of thinking about when I can access that data. So, I think local government doing more of that. The other thing with local government, I’d say, and we talk about this at the university, is they shouldn’t try to do everything themselves. Reach out to other community partners, the regional business community and say, ‘Where can we work together?’ That’s one of the reasons why we have such kind of an open data mentality here at the university is, we want to combine our data with other organizations. They have a piece of the puzzle, we have a piece of the puzzle, we put the data together and we let the subject matter experts from both organizations attack the problem, we’re going to find breakthrough opportunities. I think it’s reducing the friction to interact and partnering with the others in your region.
Industry Insider — California: How do you define “digital transformation?” How far along is your organization in that process, and how will you know when it’s finished?
Andriola: When we talk about digital transformation, we always lead with ‘It’s about technology,’ how to rethink what we do and then manage the changes that it creates in our organization. I’m going to flip this around. Digital transformation is really about taking advantage of the technology that we have available to us today. Which is different from what we had 10 years ago and 20 years ago. But really, what it’s about, it’s really about unleashing human potential. Digital transformation, for me, is, it’s about how do we empower each and every individual to be the most that they can be, in the context of our organization? I’ve got a phrase I use sometimes, ‘Powered by people, enabled by digital,’ because I like to think about this as being people-led first. The technology is just a tool at the end of the day. Yep. Twenty-five years ago, it was the Internet that came into it, and it became mobile technology in our hands. Right now, we’re talking about lots of different types of automation and intelligence coming into tools that we use. Technology will always give us the next step. It ultimately comes back to how do we make a person’s job easier, better, faster, do it more at scale and understand the, how it impacts people? If you think about what's going on around all the buzz around AI, the technology is there, it works for a lot of things, but what we’re grappling with is the impact on people that is associated with it. Whether it’s changing the way that I’ll interact to get something done, whether it’s what I did today is now going to be taken over through a conversational bot, what does that mean? Do I no longer have a position? So I think we need to lead digital transformation with the human element first and recognize that the technology is just able to do something different than we did yesterday.
Industry Insider — California: What is your estimated IT budget versus the university’s overall budget; and how many employees do you have?
Andriola: It’s harder to give this number because there’s so many positions that are on the line between the two, or it’s technology people that are in the business function that may not be easily accountable because their job description doesn’t say. The rough estimate I’ll give you is that our overall budget is in the 5 percent to 6 percent total revenues for the university, which is pretty typical for a university like us. And then we count roughly about 900 information technology professionals across UCI. And that’s all aspects. That’s across the campus as well as the medical center, including all of our different schools and institutes. But it is getting harder and harder to count and part of our strategy is to not think of the IT organization as a central thing, but really as being infiltrated throughout the universities and then horizontally linking the community together for cross-pollination and learning and expansion of concepts that start in one place and then get expanded onto another. Our whole elevating a student experience program ... it started in a small pocket of our campus and we’re now expanding and rolling it out based on the platform that they built. They didn’t originally start out to be something campuswide, but what we saw was a foundation that we could build upon so that we could deploy an enterprisewide strategy versus 30 small little unit strategies. That’s my job, is to make sure that not only are we leveraging technology, but we’re doing it in the most cost-effective manner, which is important for any organization.
Industry Insider — California: How do you prefer to be contacted by vendors, including via social media such as LinkedIn? How might vendors best educate themselves before meeting with you?
Andriola: I’m easy to find; I think it’s pretty easy to build the book on me if you really just go out there and Google me, I’m active in social media. I would say that it’s pretty easy if somebody really wants to be educated and come in there. When you’re at my level, I would say that I don’t take a lot of requests in. I work more on requests out. I know what our strategies are here for the institution. I know the type of organizations and spaces that we need to be, let's say, looking after. I have access to the resources, things like Gartner and CB Insights, that give me the assessment of who are the players in this space, who’s gotten to scale, who’s got a great vision, who’s got an ability to execute? I would say that while people try with a lot of inbound to me, I would say the way that people really get me is when it starts with an outbound for me because I’m looking to figure out who might be the right partner for us to work with.
Industry Insider — California: In your tenure in this position, which project or achievement are you most proud of?
Andriola: My things I’m most proud of are things that we’re doing around people first. We’ve had a lot of emphasis on our focus on people and talent. It’s been about retaining people, obviously, through the pandemic, making a community to keep people on. But also to continue to grow people. Coming from a business world and understanding that it’s six times more expensive to acquire a new customer than to make sure a current customer is happy, it’s amazing how most organizations don’t really think about that in the same way, about their employees. And so, we’ve actually made a concerted effort to do retention programs to keep our talented people here, to build a scaffolding around them such that people can grow their careers and can move laterally, in between positions and say, ‘I used to be an application developer, but I want to become a cloud architect.’ And we have a way of giving people, ‘Here’s kind of the new skills you’re going to have to develop if that's where you want to go with your career next.’ Making those type of investments, a program called Evolve that we’re very excited about. We do a lot as a university and a health system that does a lot to, let’s say, bring better equity solutions to the world. We have a very robust portfolio under the IT function here around what we call inclusive excellence. Most people call it diversity equity inclusion. Here, we call it inclusive excellence, but it really is about understanding the climate that we create and can people do their best work here? Do they feel safe? Do they feel open and accepted and respected when they speak up? We have all sorts of things to vet about implicit bias training to help us understand the biases that we all bring into situations and conversations. The technology field has always had a challenge with respect to gender equality, ethnic equality. And so, we have programs, for example, like our Women in IT chapter, where we really try to build a community and (build) an allyship to bring better equity and have, actually, specific programs for development of women leaders — something we call the LEAP program. And we do a lot around making sure that from a fair wage and parity perspective, we look at those numbers every year to say, ‘Can we see disparities?’ And even within our workforce, for what we pay people to do, we look at it through different lenses. So I’m really excited about what we do around people, which is our commitment to have great people to invest and grow people and grow tomorrow’s leaders. That we build a place where people want to work, whatever background that might be coming from. And then, obviously, the other things, the initiatives, I’m really excited and proud of what we’ve done around launching The Collaboratories at UCI. Around student success, around precision health; our third one coming soon around climate and sustainability. In that, these things go from being something that started in my office around how do we use technology and data to build a strategic pillar and a differentiating strategy that we can talk to people about? They evolved and become new institutes, for example. Where the data and technology component is embedded into the strategy of the institute. We had a lot of fun stuff going on, a lot of opportunity. Like I said, the pandemic accelerated a lot of opportunities where people’s minds were open. We tried a lot of things in the pandemic that we are recalibrating to make sure that they fit into the long term. And really creating this opportunity to reimagine what it means to be a research university in 2030 or 2050. These are exciting conversations, really working toward the future.
Industry Insider — California: What has surprised you most this year in government technology?
Andriola: If anything surprised me, I think it’s the challenges of — we have a lot of enabling technologies and the challenge is kind of the challenge we always have, which is how do you implement it in a way that makes sense for the organization? How do you get the people part right so that it sticks? And so, I think that’s what, when I try to get out and talk to colleagues, whether they’re within our industry spaces or in different industries, I like to talk to people from different industries to have a comparison of perspectives and challenges. I think it’s all about, we’ve got enough technology to really do things better, meet the next challenge, but can we get it in place, and can we get people comfortable and working in the new way? It comes back to the same old organizational change management challenges.
Industry Insider — California: What do you read to stay abreast of developments in the govtech/SLED sector?
Andriola: A lot of industry journals and articles and that type of thing. I feel like I read for ... education, for health care, for general public sector, and then for the technology space, right? The number of things that are in my inbox that I kind of flag as interesting is, it’s a lot. There’s a lot more I’d like to read than I ever get to. And then the other things I look at from a standpoint more of a research, stand back, trending, is things like Gartner, CB Insights. What gives me kind of the traditional technologist’s perspective and in CB Insights it’s, where’s the money flowing? Because a lot of what you want to understand, at least what I’ve learned in technology is, what are the people who are trying to get returns, what are they investing their money into? And those things are interesting. They also track what’s going on in the large corporations for those that have corporate venture funds. So those are the things, a lot of industry leading and a little bit of industry trending.
Industry Insider — California: What are your hobbies and what do you enjoy reading?
Andriola: My hobbies really are enjoying my marriage and enjoying my family. We live close to the beach and so that gives a lot of great lifestyle opportunities. But of course, my career, I travel quite a bit, so there are times when you just really appreciate what you have. And so that’s what I would say my hobbies are, more than playing golf or tennis or pickleball, which is the latest rage. And in reading, I’m not much of a casual reader. There’s so much reading that comes along with a role like mine that ... I don’t read casually very much. But I do like to pop on the television; I’m really big into documentaries. I recently saw one on the life of Betty White, which I thought was fascinating. And I love things to talk about, kind of the combination of history and culture. I love stories about the people that built the United States. Or the history of Europe and all the different wars and lines changing over time that have led to what is the European Union today. I would say that those are the types of things I love to, when I do kind of step away from the normal thing that, spend time in just learning a little bit about the way why the world is the way it is.
Editor’s note: This interview has been lightly edited for style and brevity.
Industry Insider One-on-One: University IT Official on Value of People, Data
