The Pyramid Approach: Navigating Collaboration Across Independent School Departments

Narrator
Welcome to Talking technology with ATLIS, the show that plugs you into the important topics and trends for technology leaders all through a unique Independent School lens. We'll hear stories from technology directors and other special guests from the Independent School community and provide you were focused learning and deep-dive topics. And now please welcome your host, Christina Lewellen.

Christina Lewellen
Hello, everyone, and welcome back to talking tech with ATLIS. I'm one of your co-hosts Christina Llewellyn. I'm the Executive Director of ATLIS. So excited to be here again with my co-host. Hello, Bill. Hello, Hiram. How are you guys doing?

Hiram Cuevas
Good morning, Christina. I'm doing quite well. Looking forward to speaking with our guests today. Let's see what Bill has to say.

Christina Lewellen
Good morning, Bill.

Bill Stites
Good morning. There. Things are going well as I was telling the group earlier getting ready to send two kids off to college and then get the school year rolling. So it's a great start to think so looking forward to the talk tonight.

Christina Lewellen
I am feeling that vibe. I'm feeling it so hard. I moved to a my daughter's back to college over the weekend to different colleges, to different movements. And it's incredible how different the whole freshman energy is, versus my junior, where I kind of just chucked her stuff into the apartment and I bought her some groceries and I was out right like See you later versus the freshman is very dramatic situation. So they're a whole different vibe for our listeners, if you've not gone through that before, Bill and I will be here to guide you through the woes of taking children to college, right. So we have this morning with us, our guest is actually well experienced in moving kids to college as well. I'm really excited because our guest today is Jim bologna. And Jim is to me, he just embodies the energy and the spirit of ATLIS. Because he was around when I was hired and brought into lead the team. Jim has been a board member for ATLIS the entire time that I've been here. And I value Him so much not only as a human, but just his experience and the energy that he brings into any room that he is a part of. He cycled off the board back in July. But we're so grateful to now have him involved in this credentialing program that assists designing and just spending a day with him among his peers, as they were working on some of the different components of this new project that we're working on. It's just so apparent to me why Jim is involved in this space, why he is such an incredible contributor. And of course, why we had him on the list of folks that we wanted to talk to. And so it is my distinct pleasure to welcome you, Jim, how are you? Welcome to the podcast. Hi,

Jim Bologna
thank you so much. Thank goodness, it's a podcast. So you can't see that tear you just brought to my eye. Oh, that was such a great introduction. Thank you

Christina Lewellen
sending you virtual Kleenex or tissues.

Jim Bologna
Like can tell you it doesn't change that much as you go from moving into junior to moving in a senior. Yeah, yes. For me, it's basically we're going to put her on a plane. That's it, like all of her stuff is like taken care of. She's dealt with it. Yes.

Christina Lewellen
That's probably the easiest way to do it. So there's our tip of the day, put them on a plane, they will find their way to college. I love it. I love it. Well, Jim, let's start by asking you to tell our audience a little bit about yourself. I'm sure many people know you. But that doesn't necessarily mean that they know your origin story. So can you give our listeners a little bit of context about how your journey has evolved in this space?

Jim Bologna
Sure. Some folks know this about me, but I grew up in the northeast, near Boston, I went to college there did the traditional I'm gonna go get a job went to industry definitely was tech focused, so focused on database systems and networking as well. And then I decided it was time to continue my education and focus on an MBA and did not want to pay for that myself. So I went looking for a college or university that would hire me, so that I could do everything through there. That sort of drew me into education for the first component of it. doing it part time definitely takes a while. There's a longer term commitment that goes along there, went through all of that, got my MBA, wanted to continue education and so actually got my Project Management Professional Certificate, or accreditation at that point, and realized I was just looking for more certifications, more education, more things to do as I was rolling through so that kind of kept me looking at education and then I shipped it to a private school. Also in the Boston area and didn't networking did servers did a bunch of the techie stuff, but also Along the way, had these one or two kids that would pop up and they're like, Oh, we've you know, we don't have any computer science programs for these kids. They're super interested in, you know, networking and servers and stuff like that, can you do an independent study. And so that's kind of how I got sucked into teaching. As you know, they of course gave me like the kids who were self motivated, super interested, and just really wanted to jump into stuff. And I was hooked. From that point on, I always did indepen study or an elective class of some sort, kind of rolling forward. Also, fairly soon after I moved to that job. There was a renovation project that had finished and, you know, it's a small team at that time. And so, you know, all hands on deck when you're doing a move in and trying to get everything set up. And so I'm there, you know, plugging phones in getting computers set up for folks. And we're looking around at this renovation, the results of this renovation, which are just beautiful. But it seemed like every phone jack, every network, Jack was in the wrong place in the room, like they picked one wall, and it was the worst wall you could possibly do in that space.

Christina Lewellen
So of course, your blood pressure through the roof, you're freaking out.

Jim Bologna
Exactly. We're like, Oh, we've got to figure out how to how do we accommodate this? Some cases, we, we did have some folks who could help us rewire a little bit. But most cases, you can't really do that with a completed renovation. So I reached out to folks and said, Hey, how do we fix this? When the next cycle comes through? Because they were also were planning a brand new building at that time. And the construction team said, Wait, somebody wants to be involved with this. Okay, your iron, let's go get on the team.

Christina Lewellen
Nice. So they were open to it. They were like, yeah, come on in, we could use Yeah,

Jim Bologna
they were they basically said, you know, the architects picked those locations, and they didn't have anybody to bounce the ideas off of. So I said, okay, then that went from, I'm going to sort of consult with the team, you know, a couple of times to going to every single meeting, because it was fascinating to see the process of a building being built. And here was my project management stuff on a giant scale. We're coordinating a ton of things, and trying to balance everything with the life of the school and that process. So I very quickly I realized, like, I could bring value to that team, by also being in will say, Hey, we've got this thing coming up in the calendar, and you're planning to bring 20 Dump trucks on that day, you might not want to do that. Small details like that. You know,

Christina Lewellen
just small details. Yeah, little things like that. How long have you been with Winward? You've been with them for a while. For 20 years? Yeah. Time flies.

Jim Bologna
Yes. So while I was in, in the northeast, we did like five renovations and building projects. And then, since I've been at Windward, they were just about to kick off a small renovation, but looking at a big construction project for our center of teaching and learning. And there are Science Center. And so that was another piece that kind of drew me to coming to windward. And I think I've done six significant projects since then, new buildings, major renovations, stuff like that. So yeah, it's been a continued journey there. And it also has led me to other kinds of connections, because construction, say of our Center for Teaching and Learning really made me think about informal learning spaces and how those spaces are designed and how that impacts the day to day life of your school. And then the Science Center, I worked so closely with the science department that I actually became co chair of the science department for about five years, became the Science and Technology Department, which is fine, because now I teach computer science through the Science and Technology Department.

Christina Lewellen
Have your titles changed a lot like what was your title back then? And what is it now? It sounds like you've covered a lot of ground?

Jim Bologna
Yes, yeah. We joked that I had more titles than anybody else at the school for a big chunk of time. And so I was hired as the director of technology, but picked up, you know, co chair of science department picked up Dean of Science and Technology outreach, because there was an element of that where I was interfacing with universities. I was the co director and founder of our Center for Teaching and Learning. And now I'm the Senior Director of Innovation and Technology. That's really cool. shed a few of those things along the way. But yeah, it's one of the things that I I would say I enjoy the most about working at an independent school is that your job is never the same from year to year, your title might be the same. Usually it's not. But the job itself is radically different. There are always new challenges to take on just when you think you're comfortable know, we're going to ask you to teach this class or develop this program or Oh yeah, we had to build this building. And hey, cloud computing. Let's do that. Oh, no, wait Chechi PT and AI here we go something completely new.

Christina Lewellen
Yeah, I think my co hosts can agree with you on that. They've been Hear their fair share of evolution in this role, as well. Gentlemen, I'm going to turn it over to you for a moment. What would you like to know about Jim and his origin story?

Bill Stites
What I find really interesting, Jim, pardon the bad joke here. But the idea of like the concrete example of a construction project, but exactly, but I think it really shines a light on, you know, part of what we're going to be talking about is the, the need to have committees, groups, people come together, and really talk about the ways in which you're going to accomplish something and reach those goals and understanding we're going through the same thing right now, here at MK, we're launching an initiative at our upper school where we're looking at a new project. And we're in those meeting phases. And it's pulling those people together. And at the different levels that we're talking about, one of the things we'll touch on with what you're doing with your approach, there is this kind of pyramid approach, this triangular approach, where you've got different levels of meeting groups and the way in which those things come in. And I think everyone can relate or most people can relate to construction. And then you can break those things down into those things. So I just thought it was really interesting listening to the project management piece, which is, in the conversations I've had with other tech leaders, the number of people that have that in their background in their back pocket is more than I thought, I think it's a really interesting thing to consider. But, you know, again, kind of grounding back to where we're hoping to go today is looking at that project, and figuring out, okay, who are the groups? How do we organize the groups? How do we motivate the groups? And then how do we get the working groups together in the large and the small, to really get us to the point where we can open a door on a new project, whether that's a building or whether that's an educational program are those things so I just love that example.

Christina Lewellen
So before we go into like the right way to do it, the evil part of me just wants to ask the three of you since I have you here, what happens when you aren't collaborating across departments, like, let's say, a hypothetical school situation? Or can you tell me a horror story? Like we're about to talk about what the best practices are for building those coalitions and those teams across departments at your schools, but whether it's your school, or something that you heard about from another school? Like, what's the warning here? Like, why should people care? And what's the red flag,

Hiram Cuevas
I could certainly jump in there. When we were looking at creating our Science Center, we went and visited a couple of schools and one of the schools that we encountered had spent millions of dollars creating their brand new facility. And it was a gorgeous facility. It was outstanding. As a former science teacher, myself, I was very envious of the layout that they had created. But then the department had reminded me, conduit, they forgot to put conduit into this multimillion dollar facility. And so we're having a construction meeting on our campus. And I know, this is something Jim has, has already shared that he does often. And Bill as well. You need to be in those conversations early. And develop those relationships early with all the stakeholders on your campuses, because to put conduit in later to retrofit is so much more expensive.

Christina Lewellen
And I mean, I wish that our listeners could see yalls faces that just happened when you said that the little emoji with the head exploding. That's what I just witnessed,

Jim Bologna
oh my god, I actually can put a number to that. Which is even crazier. So the year before I got to windward, they had done a construction project that was connecting the two campuses, we essentially have a North Campus and a south campus. They are not separated by anything other than this wash that we like to call a river. But realistically, it's a drainage. But they built this wonderful like 100 foot wide section that was connecting these two campuses, and everything was supposed to all traffic was going to flow through this large bridge. And it would be it actually has become a real centerpiece for our campus. And the original plans had conduit in place to connect both sides of the campus somehow did not happen. And so eventually I had to come around to yes, we need this in place. Because we were demoing, the only other connection point that was going across a couple of years ago, I had to get our construction company to put conduit into that large bridge. So it costs literally $125,000 to run conduit from point A to point B direct shot on the outside of this bridge. But that kind of mistake took 20 years to rectify. So 20 years of working around as well. I mean that's the other component is you don't realize how much this is impacting you on a day to day basis because something didn't get done right the first time.

Christina Lewellen
A couple of years ago ATLIS did a cool study where we looked at the actual cost of not involving a technology leader in a capital improvement project. And clearly, this is exactly the kind of horror story that we were looking to sort of quantify. Because, you know, we had heard forever that this was a thing. And so to have the research around, it was incredible. I think it's still kind of mind blowing.

Hiram Cuevas
Yes, Christina, what's interesting, there is something as mundane as a parking lot, putting in a new parking lot. What folks often don't recognize is that we now have a heightened sense of security. And as a result, we need cameras in all of these locations. So if you don't have conduit to provide these cameras, with Power over Ethernet, you're going to be retrofitting. And it's very expensive to break parts cement, or asphalt or whatever it is that you're having to deal with. Conduit is cheap, put it in early and put it in everywhere, you can always leave cables dangling within your infrastructure, and then plug it in later.

Bill Stites
Oh, 100%. I agree with you wholeheartedly on those. I'm going to take my example, though, and take it in a little bit of a different direction, put it back into like the data side of things, Jim, I'm looking at this tiered approach that you've got, you know, and you've got it, just so our audience knows what we're talking about here, you know, you've got your triangle, your pyramid divided into three levels at the base, you've got your sounding board group, that's represented by a much larger group. And I'll have you explain that a little bit more in detail. And second, you got the group that's above that those strategize errs that are going to get together and I guess hash those things out a little bit more, and then the the executive group or that decision making group, and I'll take an example of something that we went through and met to be completely frank, Hiram. And I spend a lot of times when we're doing some work outside of schools, when we talk about data. And we talk about information systems. And I know one of those big X examples is, when you're making a switch in like your information system, or your Learning Management System, or whatever data system you have, you've got to really think about it in these tiers that you're talking about, because you kind of gotta get that broad based understanding of what's going on how people are using different things, you know, things that you might put together, when you're looking at like a gap analysis to understand, okay, what are we doing? What aren't we doing? What do we need to be doing better, and then moving on from that group, to a group that can kind of get a little bit more in the weeds a little bit more? You know, we found that when we made our move recently, I said recently, it seems recently, it's probably about three or four years ago. But, you know, we went from a FileMaker solution to a web hosted solution, where when we were making that switch, we were really kind of needing to involve a lot of those people. But the people that really understood the core part of the problems, the multiple problems that we were going to try to solve was really a much smaller group that could really see the forest through the trees, so to speak. And then you get to that top group, the ones that are going to say, Okay, this is what we're doing. This is why we're doing and making that case, it was a process that I think we went through, not formally, like looking at this. But as I think about, you know, more and more of the projects that we're going to be taking on here at school, I'm really curious as to how you've taken this approach, and systematize it and applied it to your school, because while this worked for us in this one case, this is kind of for me, and I think for a lot of schools, one of the hardest things to do, because the question of time, when do we have time to do this? We know we need to do this. But how do we organize? So this is really where I'm interested when I saw this, when I heard Ashley and others talking about it. You know, it's one of those things that I really I love the idea of but I really love to hear how you put it into practice.

Jim Bologna
Yeah, absolutely. And I will say, this is not revolutionary, like, hey, let's get buy in from stakeholders. The formalization. And application of this is really just, it is a process that we find incredibly helpful and full transparency, it doesn't work the same way in every situation, for sure. But it doesn't mean that you can't borrow elements of it, you don't have to necessarily formalize it. But if you've got something that is going to draw out over a significant amount of time, or is going to affect a large portion of your school, then it's really, really helpful to have it more formal. So then everybody understands this is where to go in this particular situation. I was thinking, let me sort of explain how this came about. And that might be really helpful in terms of painting the picture of the pyramid. Great idea. Six years ago, we were well, longer than that we were realizing that we had cyber practices, but we really hadn't been through a formal audit, you know, and heard some fantastic Atlus presentations around audit process and lessons learned and we realized that it was probably time for us to do our own audit and really get into the weeds with is where we were, what else needed to be done to make those adjustments. And so went through a process had a really good non education based team that came to do the audit. So really, like, they had done some schools before, but primarily focused on industry. So there was a lot of like, you know, a lot of things that they recognized didn't quite fit the mold of the school. And were really good about like, Okay, here's a piece where we would normally say this, but, you know, it's not going to quite work for you. And we came out of that process with a laundry list of things that needed to be tweaked in some way or another some things that needed to be addressed some things that needed to be formalized processes policy. So we pulled together a quick, you know, Alright, we've got some ad tech stuff, we've got some operational stuff, we've got some database stuff, let's get somebody from these groups together and start working on checking these boxes, knocking stuff off. As we were running through that, of course, we're reporting back to our senior administration, because they knew that we were going through the audit process, you know, we gave them a quick update. But then as we were starting to work on things, we also tried to roll together actually created a dashboard that let us report back sort of a quick sense of here's where we are at this particular point in time. And then it also let us have a larger conversation about, like the most important points for what we needed to do before we got to our next phase of things. And that served us for probably the first six months or so. And, you know, perfect example of where it did not is where we came to the recommendation about auto locking laptops and desktops, which essentially, you know, once you've walked away from your system, how long does it stay up and awake before it locks itself? In industry, you want that to be really quickly, if you're not working on it, you want your system to lock up so that nobody is coming in behind you and jumping on your desk and getting into whatever system you have open at that particular point in time. Little different when you're talking about somebody who's using that tech in the classroom, if your laptop is driving the primary discussion point that's happening, and you're walking around the room, you know, you don't want to be five minutes on the other side of the room when your system locks up. And the discussion question is no longer up on the screen anymore. So there were lots of folks with a lot of different opinions as to what that should be. That led us to realize we needed a much broader base for input. Because some folks felt it was really critical that it was the longest time possible. And other folks were pushing back and saying, Well, is that really the case to our faculty feel that way, about how much time they spend at their lectern at the front of the classroom. That's where we started talking about, okay, let's get together a task force that has a broader base of our constituents. You know, somebody from every department across the campus, somebody from each of our divisions, somebody that represents faculty, somebody who represents the different you know, a dean Dean's as well associate directors, directors, different business office, like everybody that is impacted in some way. Can we find somebody who can act as a representative there, and yeah, it's a fairly big group. But we have so many people that are in dual roles, as I'm sure do most schools that you can check a couple of those boxes pretty easily with one person. So you know, even though we tried to be as representative as possible across the entire campus, we still ended up with maybe 20 ish people in that group, which is a pretty big group. And it's not a Cast To 1000s. But it's large enough that you only want to get together a few times, and you really want to be organized with how you were addressing that situation. So we said, Alright, if we're gonna get this group together, we don't want to just talk about this one thing, let's look at what else is in our list of things that need input. And let's summarize those. So that working group, that's our middle tier group. And so we're the ones who kind of go through all of the detail, figure out what are the pieces that we are going to want to receive input from the broader community and frame that. So we drive the taskforce meeting and bring that to that wider group and say, here are the components that we want to discuss during this this timeframe. It's always open anybody is welcome to submit other things that they're concerned about, or they want the committee to talk about, but probably 80% of the meeting is really focused on whatever pieces need to be addressed at that particular point in time. And so once it runs through there will take back that feedback. And generally the working group will also start drafting something related to whatever that is. So we'll start a draft policy. We will summarize all the pros and cons we talked about if we came up with potential solutions, we'll do something similar for that. Put it together run it past the asynchronously past the taskforce just so they get a chance to give us some feedback. And then that will bubble up to the Executive Committee during one of those meetings where we can say, Okay, we've had that conversation with folks, here's the recommended policy. And then we'll go through, you know, answering questions and discussing impact to the campus with senior administration, before they make a final decision on it. But they can also feel comfortable that this is not just coming to them. From us, it's actually been vetted with the community, which I think is really, really helpful, especially if you're making some policy decision that can have a significant impact. You know, you don't want somebody to say, Well, I've never heard of that. Why are we suddenly doing this thing? Nobody talked to us about this. And then we can say, no, wait a second, we felt, you know, there was a whole, a whole comment period from the task force. And we definitely got as much input as possible rolling into it.

Christina Lewellen
And it probably helps that you're like going to the table with something sort of fleshed out. Yes, lots of talking can happen at independent schools, and then it bubbles up to the next group and more talking has to happen again. So in a lot of ways, you've sort of created this triangle or this pyramid where you can say, no, it's actually been worked through and that way, you're not starting with that blank slate, right?

Jim Bologna
Yes. 100%, that working group in that center tier as the workhorse tier, you know, we're meeting on a weekly basis. I mean, we're long since passed that list of items that came out of that. But you know, cybersecurity, there are always new items that come up every week. You know, there's a hacking attempts, when it's time to test phishing. It's, you know, Google just changed the workspace again, okay, how does that impact us? And you know, which pieces need to bubble down which pieces need to bubble up? So we on a weekly basis, we are trying to identify issues and trying to quantify the impacts related to that. And then yes, as you said, like framing that, I think, for both ends of the pyramid is an important part of what that working group is doing, because they have the highest degree of technical understanding and need to be able to communicate that both directions.

Hiram Cuevas
So Jim, a quick question for you regarding this pyramid approach. How did you get the attention of your senior admin team to have this approach bubble up in your area, given the competing initiatives that many of us experience at our schools,

Jim Bologna
we were fortunate in that, as I mentioned, we were having some check in meetings anyway. So there were already some calendered meetings related to this particular initiative. It wasn't initiative, the year we did the audit, because we recognize the auditor cost a certain amount of money, but also, there's a certain amount of time that comes with that. And that, quite honestly, is be cost more than the actual audit itself, you know, the amount of time that each of those are sections needed to devote to gathering information and addressing everything afterwards, you know, cost ramifications for updates to things as well, all of those things led us to identify it as an initiative, you know, as one of our yearly initiatives as we roll through. And so that helped get some attention on it. And then because we had the meetings calendar to start with, we really were framing it as this is how we think we can best serve senior administration, in terms of, you know, we want to focus the time that we have, so that we're not spending an hour talking about this one issue and not getting anywhere because we really need input from the task force type of folks.

Hiram Cuevas
So when would seven through 12? Yes. So we got schools in a variety of different permutations. You've got six through 12, just k to eight, etc. So did you have representation across all of those grade levels?

Jim Bologna
That's great question. Our seven to 12 is divided into three divisions, which I think is a little unusual. We have a middle school division, that seventh eighth, we have a prep division, that's nine and 10. And then we have a collegiate division. You know, many schools will have a middle school and Upper School. If you've got elementary kids, you probably have a lower school as well. And so we felt that it was important to have representation from each of the three divisions. So yes, 100% by grade level, we felt like the person coming to the table from our middle school division could address both seventh and eighth. They're not specific to a particular grade level, you know, but they're dealing with their entire division. And so, if you have an upper school, it might be worth having maybe a dean of students from a lower level grade and somebody from a higher level grade so that you're you're catching representation across a wider swath, mostly just because you know, ninth grade is pretty developmentally significant. I would say, not all grade levels aren't developmentally significant. But there's a pretty big transition happening, you know, between eight, nine, sometimes 10, depending on the kid. And so having somebody who really understands that if there is that kind of a focus that's happening, and what you're trying to address is important. Yes,

Bill Stites
Jim, I got a question going back to you know, and I think this is like a great example, because the cyber peace is something that we all have to deal with. It's something that we know to be true in our daily lives, whether it's for work, or whether it's for personal use, but it's also dictated, unfortunately, to some degree, by insurance, you know, you've got to do these things so that you can be compliant. So all these different things come up. And one of the things I thought was interesting that you said during your audit process, because it's something that we went through as well. And we worked with a great company, that we could really talk through these things, because they scored us differently on our audit, because of the fact that we are a school. So they were great conversations. But to some degree, you kind of mentioned you need to do that education piece, with in this case, the company that you're working with, you know, if they're used to business to get them used to what the differences are education in terms of how they're going to score you. But in general, whether it's like cyber, I mentioned the work with like a database audit, or whatever the project is, if you've got that taskforce, larger group, how do you get those people the education that they need to understand the subtleties and the nuances within the things that you're trying to tackle that they might not have? Like they might not understand, you know, why multifactor is important, or why you want to ask grow a recovery key and, and whether you want to have these timeouts, these are all things that resonated with me when you were saying with what we went through, but you know, a classroom teacher or grade level dean, dean of students, they're not going to, like really understand that. But if they're on this committee, you need them to know, because if we're going to make recommendations that fit the workflow and how the school functions, they need to understand both the technical, the legal, and then the practical. So how that works. So how did you manage that?

Jim Bologna
That's a great question. Yes, they need to have enough understanding to be able to make an informed decision. Like they don't need to be the expert, they don't need to be the legal expert on all of these components. They don't necessarily need to be the technical expert. But what they do need to know is what would this potential impact of whatever we're discussing have on their classroom, their kids, however, that rolls and they understand as we're having those discussions, that they may feel strongly about a particular topic, but there may be counterbalances to that in terms of the technicality, you may not want to have your cell phone in your pocket the whole time. But hey, multifactor, really, you know, it's a lot easier to do if you've got your cell phone. So, you know, there are folks who have personal, you know, they'll bring some personal baggage. But I think we were pretty fortunate in that, as we frame these issues. And I will say like, that's probably the most, some of the most important work that that middle tier that working group does is frame the issues in both directions, you know, we want to make sure that we've captured as much of the elements that need to be raised in this discussion, it's entirely possible that we might need to start a conversation in advance of that meeting with one or two attendees, and ask them to bring some of their concerns to the table. So you know, when in case of, say, cyber insurance, the business office is a really great partner there, they have to deal with that on a regular basis. And for them, I mean, every year, it's a moving target, it shifts a little bit new requirements, new policies that need to be put in place. And all of those have an impact on the life of the school to a certain degree. And so we want them to be raising their concerns along the way. In that particular kind of an instance, we will talk with a few folks in advance to try to make sure that we're capturing the discussion points we need to have during that meeting. And then, hey, conveniently, they're also primed a little bit to join that discussion, and weigh in, which is really helpful. So Jim,

Bill Stites
is that where the like that working group, I mean, you might think you're going to work from the ground up in this type of model, you know, from the base of the triangle up, right? So to some degree, this is like, it's almost like the working group needs to come together to help set that frame to then take to the task force to have those conversations for that then to bring that piece up to then go up to the top tier of the decision makers, which in most instances, you know, that probably falls to like the head of school or you know, the CFO or the admin teams, or that's going to come in, does that kind of frame it the way in which Qi

Jim Bologna
Yes, that's a really good way to frame it, it is, the working group is meeting on a weekly basis. And we are constantly thinking with the lens of cybersecurity, for any impact that is kind of bubbling through the system and trying to identify the things that need broader constituency, hence the, you know, that task force at the bottom level, or we need to now make a policy decision about that. And so, you know, we're filtering it in both directions and trying to frame it in the way that folks can best contribute or best to make a policy decision

Bill Stites
with regard to the frequency of these meetings and the size of these meetings. So for instance, MK we are three campuses were separated in the town of Montclair, were probably about a mile apart. For us, one of the hardest things we have to do is to scheduled meetings like this. You know, when were you mentioned, you're separated a little bit, but I'm sure it sounds like you're within walking distance, at least we're not. And for schools like an MK My question is, when did you have these meetings? And like lessons learned from COVID? You know, were any of them virtual? Like, how did you get the involvement when time is always the biggest commodity? When we're thinking about these types of committees?

Jim Bologna
Just gonna say so have you heard of this thing called Zoom? It's this newfangled. Just came up a few years ago,

Christina Lewellen
and everybody hates it now is that

Bill Stites
we're a meet school. But yeah, so I know, I've heard of that before. Yes.

Jim Bologna
That's a good point. Christine. I think that's probably the biggest struggle now is, yes, it's a struggle to get time, the task force really only needs to meet me move two to three times a year. And so it's a little easier to say, Okay, that is the time. And we calendar, the next meeting during the current meeting. So that way, we know like, everybody's looked, everybody's got it on their calendar, it's their, you know, that's what's going to come up. And what we also tell them is like, yes, we're asking for three meetings, but there are plenty of times we will cancel one of them, because we don't have anything to talk about. But we'd rather have the meeting on the calendar, and, you know, have that time set, and sometimes folks join virtually.

Christina Lewellen
And if the energy good about it, like are they happy to contribute to it? Or is it another just another meeting that they have to do?

Jim Bologna
That's a really good question. And I think it's varied, right? I mean, it depends on a lot on the topics that you're covering at that particular point in time we get to cyber insurance, you know, we tend to not quite have as many people attending that meeting, or if, you know, if there's, if virtual component people are joining, hey, you're muted, and your, your screen start what's going on there. But realistically, like, it really depends, we will always try to give an agenda in advance. So folks understand like, what is it that we're going to try to cover? And we also let folks know, you know, we are happy to re align the order, you know, reorder whatever we're talking about. So you know, if you have to bail early, you have to you gotta join late, but you really feel like this particular thing is important. We can adjust where we're going to have that conversation as much as possible. I mean, it's a conversation. So sometimes we can spend more time than we want on a particular topic. But it's more time than we had planned. And not that we want. Obviously, it's all good conversation, right. And so our primary job at that point is facilitating the discussion. And, you know, trying to keep the meeting as productive and interesting as possible for everybody.

Christina Lewellen
One of the questions that I have is around that piece of keeping people out of the weeds is, so you've got your sounding board, which is kind of your focus group, you've got your workhorse group, your working group, but then once something gets up to the decision maker group, once it climbs that pyramid into the executive committee level, the senior management level, you're meeting not as often. And in particular, you're meeting to set the policy around cyber. How do you ensure that you don't get the executive committee backsliding into the work that's already been done? Do you have to police that, Jim? Oh, or do you I mean, is that part of the hesitation is that once it gets to the top level, they still want to pick it apart a bit.

Jim Bologna
I think that it does take a little bit to build the culture. And the senior administrators need to trust that you've got a process going. So the first cycle through or second cycle through that you're trying this, you will probably get those kinds of questions like, Hey, did you think about did you guys talk about, you know, XY and Z? You know, that said, if your taskforce meeting had a robust enough conversation, you did talk about XYZ and you know, ABC on top of it, and you can bring that to the table. And so, you know, once the senior administrators feel comfortable But that you've had all of those conversations. And that, you know, especially because we go through this process of framing the policy, you know, we'll give pros and cons to senior administrators as well before, they're making a final decision related to it. But the actual wording of the policy may have, it's come to them in draft form through us, but from the task force. So we'll take the discussion components, and we'll frame a draft and then the task force can weigh in on it. And then we'll bring that to senior administrators, and they can obviously weigh in on it as well and make some tweaks or adjustments. And quite honestly, usually, the biggest discussion is around timeframe, when are we implementing this? Is this a tomorrow thing? Is this a next year thing, next school year thing? Are we How long is it going to take us to roll this kind of an implementation out and when is the best time of year to do that, you know, if you're talking about setting a yearly password change policy, you know, doing that in January is not ideal for students. But at the same time, you've also got orientations happening at the beginning of the year. And you know, there are all of these other factors. So we have like those kinds of discussions around like, when is the best time to put this in place, which is fantastic.

Hiram Cuevas
So Jim, what I find interesting is I consider your position as someone who actually is in each of these three areas. And I just wanted to confirm that you're also at least recognized perhaps at Winward as part of the decision making team, but you just happen to be essentially the liaison or the ambassadors, that is crossing each of these major milestones in order to guide the school into making an appropriate decision on behalf of the school.

Jim Bologna
Yes, and I would say one of the interesting components that came out of our first security audit or ideas was that I actually shouldn't be leading the charge, because I am also that person that's in a whole bunch of these places. And so really, what we did is we designated an information security manager. And so that Sudha at our school, and she is the person who is responsible for running everything up, and that she runs each of the meetings and each of the tiers. And I will clearly I will weigh in or, and lend my thoughts and support wherever possible. But because I often am the person who might be directing something, it's also hard for you to get that 50,000 foot view, if you are, you know, right there plugging the cable in, when loading up or in a system on whatever it is, you know, sometimes, or even just doing the planning of whatever it is, you may be a little much in the weeds at that point. So it's really helpful to have somebody who's designated as that person. And in some areas, she's more technical and more knowledgeable and other areas, I'm more technical, more knowledgeable. And that's the whole point of a team is that you've got people bring a variety of strengths as well.

Bill Stites
Jim, the one thing I love about that is that and this was part of what I went through with our, you know, when we were doing our Information Systems switch, is you'd never want these decisions, even though they may seem as if they're grounded may live in tech to be Jim's decision, or Hirens decision or Bill's decision, when you can be the guide for the conversation. But you can empower someone else to be the owner of that, it helps because it doesn't come across as seeming as if it's all driven by one person. And I think that's incredibly important. The thing that I would always use with my previous head here was that I need the juice to get the job done. You need to be able to empower me to put people in position to lead these things so that we can come together, you need to be bought in on it so that when we get to that executive piece, you know what's going on, you've kind of been involved with it, at least from this larger level. But I think being able to detach yourself from it helps you participate in those conversations in a different way, as if you're deciding to guide it. But I think that's a great point to have. I'm happy to hear you say that. That's what you're doing there. Yeah.

Christina Lewellen
Jim, as we wrap up our time together today, is there anything else that you're seeing kind of coming at technology leaders sort of things that are on the horizon, especially in independent schools? We've been through a lot. We've had a little bit of crisis fatigue going on here coming through all that we've been through in the last couple of years. So what are some of the things that you're you and your team are thinking about right now?

Jim Bologna
I mean, I think everybody is thinking about generative AI, and its impact and I'm sure you'll probably have an entire other podcast on that. So I'm just teeing that up for you right now. But with The cybersecurity lens, right? Because that's been the focus of our conversation. There are elements of generative AI that scare the crap out of me coming up, we are seeing it now, within the last four weeks, versions of the GPT model have arisen in the dark web that have zero handrails on it. Right. So if you do a search for worm GPT, that's out there. Right now, there's also xx, xx GPT. I think there were three others when I looked last night, because I forgot the name of one of them. And I was like, Oh, crap, when I looked at this last week, there were two of them. And now there's like five, that they know.

Christina Lewellen
They're multiplying like gremlins. Exactly.

Jim Bologna
So imagine something as persuasive as chat GPT, that is also empowered with the ability to do plugins to create emails, and you can feed it all sorts of information. And now it's creating that phishing campaign that you know, no longer has the bad sentence structure that makes it a little easier for you to identify, because it's master crafted by this GPT model, holy crap like that is going to change a lot of things because it will accelerate and raise the bar on the kinds of issues that we're going to be dealing with in the next year. So that's definitely one of them. I think the other one that we've had a conversation about recently, in particular, because it led to some policy discussion is around voice cloning, you know, that's something that is becoming easier and easier to do. And you really need to make sure that you're, you know, in this case, for us, it was having a conversation, that business office about any kind of monetary transfer that was initiated, you know, that you did not talk to that person in person, you need to originate the call to confirm, right, because you can't assume that that voicemail that you got was really from the head of school, because the head of schools made speeches, and their stuff is out on YouTube and on the internet. And even on our own website, you know, you've got voice samples that somebody can pull in, and can generate this kind of authentication. So you can't just say, Oh, I've got a voicemail from you know, our head of school to do this transfer. So we're going to make that happen. Maybe we should always follow a policy of doing that follow up. I think we've also raised that with our Dean's in that, you know, bullying is may take a whole different dark turn, if you can generate somebody's voice. That's scary. That's really scary. We've always had a social media policy of it is an extension of you at the school. So there is nothing that you're doing on the web, that is not part of who you are, and representing you at the school. But at the same time, how do you know, in this particular case, where the lines get blurred of like, Was that really the person was that not the person? There are a lot of questions that are going to be coming up this year. I think

Bill Stites
all good feelings are gone. Now. I like this was a great comment. I did like all these ideas. I'm like, Cool. I'm gonna take this and I got this committee to go. And now I'm just like writing this stuff down. And I'm like, Oh, God, please. I mean, seriously, no, but it's great to know about

Christina Lewellen
exactly. And it's important to kind of highlight that these are the issues that technology leaders are wrestling, it's getting to be a wickedly complex job. And that's why we're having these conversations. So hey, as we wrap up, I want to just start by saying thank you, of course, to our CO hosts today, Bill and Hiram, it's great to see you guys again. But Jim, I mean, you're incredible. Thank you so much for sharing this model with us. I think a lot of schools are really wrestling with cybersecurity and how to make it a whole school initiative. So I'm so grateful that you were willing to come in and share how you guys at Windward school are doing it. You are welcome back anytime, my friend.

Jim Bologna
Thank you so much.

Bill Stites
Thank you, Jim.

Jim Bologna
This has been a great deal of fun, highly recommend it to everybody.

Narrator
Awesome. This has been talking technology with ATLIS produced by the Association of technology leaders in independent schools. For more information about ATLIS and ATLIS membership, please visit the ATLIS.org If you enjoyed this discussion, please subscribe, leave a review and share this podcast with your colleagues in the independent school community. Thank you for listening!