Julie Ouska, CIO of the Colorado Community College System | CCCS, joins CIO Leadership Live from Foundry’s CIO100 event

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Welcome to CIO Leadership Live. I'm Lee Rennick, Executive Director of CIO communities for CIO.com. And we're here today at the CIO Symposium and 100 and I'm thrilled to be interviewing Julie Ouska, CIO of the Colorado Community System | CCCS.
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Julie, please introduce yourself and tell us about your current role. Sure. I'm Julie Ouska, I'm the vice chancellor and chief information officer for the Colorado Community College System. And we are the largest higher education system in Colorado. We have teach approximately 115,000 students a year. We have 13 colleges throughout the, Colorado state of Colorado and probably 35+ campuses throughout the state of Colorado.
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And we run all of the enterprise technology for all 13 of the colleges at the system office. That is, a really large role. So I appreciate you joining us here today and being at the conference. We really have created the series to support the CIO and tech leader in their tech and leadership journey. So I usually ask this question to everybody.
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Could you tell us a little bit about your own career journey and maybe some any leadership or tips along the way that you could share? Sure. I didn't start out to be a CIO or even in technology. My initial degree was in hire, is in education with a fine arts, and I was actually a studio potter for about ten years, and I substitute taught in public schools.
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And although I loved being a potter and I really enjoyed that aspect, there wasn't a lot of money in it, and Colorado was going through a bit of a recession, and I decided to go back to work, and I went to work at the University of Northern Colorado in their registration center, and we would register the students for their classes on punched cards, no less.
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Oh, but I used to watch the computer programmers come up and work on the software system, and I thought that they were earning a lot more money and having a lot more fun than I was. And so I went back to school, and that kind of started my career in technology. I started as a application programmer, moved into kind of a business analyst and then into management.
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So I put my coding pencil away many, many years ago. But I'm thinking it's probably was very helpful in this whole role into management, just understanding the basics of where technology has originated from. I think it really did help, you know, my, my liberal arts background, I think taught me a lot of problem solving, critical thinking skills, communication skills, all of which I think are critically important for leadership in technology.
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You know, people don't want to hear techie talk. They really want to know what your technology accomplishes, how it helps your customers or your students or your employees and and that isn't a technology discussion. It's much more of a business discussion. Well, I appreciate you sharing that. And congratulations on the CIO 100 Award. Thank you so much.
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I was really inspired by it. We had a chance to chat about it. And it's really a way of connecting students, faculty and the business together through technology. So could you tell me a little bit about the project? Sure. Our chancellor, Joe Garcia, after being our chancellor for about five years, and getting input from colleges and, and others, decided to restructure how we were doing online education, and it was currently split between the colleges
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and, kind of consortium called CCC Online.
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And he wanted to move all the instruction back to the colleges. This was for academic oversight, for accreditation purposes. And he he just wanted he felt that that was really where instruction should reside. But he wanted to keep all of the good things that CCC Online had had, which was building master course templates using strategic enrollment management principles, being, very student focused.
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And so our job was to build the technology that supported that strategy using, not only our existing student information services, and also building what we affectionately called the sectionizer, that would take all the students that registered for particular online class and put them, distribute them into proper sized teaching sections. And we did our best to keep everything the way normally was for students, faculty and staff.
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So our goal was to do no harm and to keep it as simple and straightforward and scalable as we possibly could. Yeah, you really, when we talked earlier, had the student in mind, but not only the student but the business, and just making that seamless integration of how you were improving sort of the back end technology. And I don't know, we don't call it that anymore.
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But that aspect of improving it, the keeping things the same. So the customer was really it was a wonderful project team. We pulled together not only people from my staff, but people from the old CCC Online. People from the colleges, several really amazing registrars who know that inside and out of the student information system and were so helpful as helping us figure out the best way to do this without really doing a lot of customizations, or even much in the way of modifications or any anything to our ERP system.
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So we took what it already did and kind of leveraged that so we could keep track of all these students. Fantastic. Okay, so we had a really interesting call, and we talked about working with vendors and just selecting vendors and looking at the strategy around that. And I really it was really insightful for me to hear about how you approached building that strategy to work with vendors versus building your own tech stack.
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Many CIOs I talk about really struggle with this, this overall approach to what road to take, because sometimes the vendor stuff is one size fits all. And then they're like put should we do that and then build something else? So if you could explain that and just talk about that, I would be so grateful. It was a painful process, and it probably took us a year to even think it through.
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Initially I was very uncomfortable building it ourselves because I worry about staff leaving or support issues, documentation, all those kind of things. We worked with the vendor of our student information system, and they were doing something similar, of course, sharing models, but they were doing it very differently. It was kind of outside of the framework of the SIS.
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It required students to do things differently, right? It required them to ask the other college to transfer their credits. It was very invasive, and even though we spent hours talking to them about our business needs, it was not a match. We also talked to several consultants. One had built the California Virtual College. Again, it was just not not our strategy, not our business needs.
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And as we kind of pulled our team together and talked about it more, we came up with ways that again, we could do it by using the function of the student information system, adding the sectionizer separately, but then doing all the banner integration into it that allows the system to actually work the way it always had. It allowed students to do everything at their home college, register, and then they took the course from whatever colleges were teaching those courses.
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So yeah, it really worked out well. And there was so much other change associated with this initiative. People change and structural change of organizations that we actually really wanted the technology to be as stable and normal as we could possibly keep it. People didn't need that change to, on top of everything else. Yeah. Well, so you really had to evaluate those other like what the vendors might offer, what you thought you could build out, and then look at how that would affect your overall customer base or the people that are using it.
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Yeah. Yeah. So it worked out well. We were really pleased. Congratulations. And it just sounded amazing and something that I know a lot of CIOs face. It's like how to approach that aspect of it. Well, and we got pressure of to, you know, oh, you need to go use a vendor and it's like, well yeah, you know, we'll go live with them the rest of our lives if we do that.
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And again, I don't think I think our business needs we're very, very specific. And the more we thought about that, we thought, no, I think I think we can make this work and do it ourselves. But it was a big decision, very big decision. Well, congratulations. You know, kind of staked my career on that. Well, it sounds like it worked out very well.
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So it takes a lot of leadership might and also your past experience and the segue as well into the next question, because I really do work very hard and we work very hard to support diversity in technology and really speak to women who are trying to make a change and support diversity in our sector. According to a report by the world Bank, women make up less than a third of the world's workforce.
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The full workforce in technology related fields. So in in STEM, 35% of women make up STEM. In the US, and women held 35% of tech jobs. In Canada, it's even worse. And in Britain it's even worse. So I, I work with, a charity, an organization called Hacker Gal, getting more younger girls into a safe space to learn about technology and not just coding, but all the other things.
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And you mentioned that you're you mentor and you're very much involved in ensuring that there is diversity in the workspace, especially in the tech space. So maybe you could tell us a little bit about that. Sure. I work with actually two organizations. And they do we work we do mentoring for kind of up and coming CIOs or people wanting to move more into leadership roles.
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So the kind of mentoring I do is very much leadership oriented. And I always have, when one group only mentors women, so I always work with them and then the other one, it kind of depends on who I get us as a mentee. But, I've always learned from those experience, I hope the I really enjoy them.
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I hope the people I work with learn from it, but certainly with women it can be very difficult to manage a career and, growth and, you know, growth in your career, your family, your obligations. And, and many women stop out, you know, when they have a family and and that's the end of it. Yeah. You know, I'm really fortunate that I have, a nice mix of both men and women in my department.
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I have about 64 employees. And my job, you know, is also to mentor them and to ensure their success, you know, because if they're successful, then my department is successful, and we're doing what we need to do for our organization. So I think it's, you know, it's fun to do the very specific mentoring. But I also, you know, believe as a leader I have an obligation to my own staff and my organization to really help my staff grow.
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I think that's fantastic. And it sounds like it's very intentional for you to give, to share and give back and allow others to learn from your own experiences, which is so needed, right? Representation in our sectors is so needed. Yeah, I was reminded a little bit when I walked into this conference. How male dominated it still is.
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Yes. Exactly a good reminder. So listen out there. Everyone who's hiring right now make sure no matter what that CV says, that you ensure that you're bringing in a diverse roster of of, potential team members. I think that's so important, too, because there's a lot of research around how women may not apply for a job because they think they're not as qualified.
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But in fact, you know, we're encouraging them to apply. Anyway, as you said, there are skills other than just learning how to code or technology that you need to be in this space right now. Yeah. And and I like people with diverse skill sets. I don't want people, especially my direct reports who just agree with me.
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I need people who will think a little bit differently, who may problem solve differently, who may look at something and say, well, what about this? What about that? That was so much so important with the team I had to do the project that we're getting the award for, because people brought their expertise to the table. Right? We had some really tough conversations, but everyone was heard.
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Everyone contributed. And as a result, you know, we were successful. Well, congratulations and thank you so much for sitting in on the CIO Leadership Live today, I appreciate it so much. Thank you. I really appreciate being invited. This was just delightful. Thank you.
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