All posts by Cole Camplese

About Cole Camplese

Vice President for Technology & CIO

Strengthening Our Data Strategy: D2I Transitioning to Enterprise Technology

At The University of Texas at Austin, we understand that data is essential for making informed decisions and driving innovation. I’m thrilled to announce that Data to Insights (D2I) will officially start reporting to the Vice President of Technology and Chief Information Officer on May 1, 2025.

This transition will enhance collaboration, align practices, and strengthen our commitment to providing top-notch data solutions for our faculty, staff, and students. By integrating D2I under the VP’s portfolio alongside Enterprise Technology, we’re aiming for a more unified and scalable approach to data governance, analytics, and tech services across the university.

Brian Roberts, Vice Provost for Data to Insights, will take on a special advisor role to the Office fo the CIO during the transition as we continue planning for D2I’s long-term future. Kathryn Flowers will join the CIO senior leadership team will lead the D2I team as the Executive Director, ensuring smooth leadership and execution of D2I’s mission.

Enterprise Technology April 2025 Org chart.

Rest assured, this transition won’t cause any immediate changes to D2I’s ongoing projects or services. I am confident that our teams will work closely to make this change seamless and enhance our ability to deliver value to the university community.

Enterprise Technology and D2I will be partnering with the CFO’s Office, the Provost’s Office, and the COO’s Office to assess and realign the university’s data analytics goals in support of institutional priorities, with an emphasis on scaling adoption of and best practices in interaction with the Data Hub. Over the next six months, these teams will collaborate to develop a comprehensive data analytics strategy, reliant on the centralized Data Hub, to be presented to university leadership, with the aim of implementing it by the FY26–27 fiscal year. This effort will include extensive stakeholder engagement, including interviews and cross-functional collaboration across multiple groups, to ensure the strategy is informed, aligned, and positioned to drive meaningful impact across the university.

Thank you for your continued support as we take this important step in aligning our technology and data strategy with the university’s broader goals. If you have any questions or feedback, please feel free to reach out.

Agent Agency

AI, Thoughts, ,

Last week was an eye-opening one on a few levels. I spent time with CIO colleagues from various schools around the Country and State at the Dell Higher Education Advisory Board meeting. The first thing I will say is that spending time with people I know and respect in our field is always a powerful opportunity to learn and measure how we are approaching our common problems of practice. The other thing I will say is that it is becoming even more clear that people outside of higher education don’t seem to fully understand what the role of a CIO or IT in general looks like in our context. It isn’t that our corporate partners don’t have a sense of what we think about, but there is a whole other side to what we do that seems to be hidden from them.

As a CIO of an R1 university, I do think about teaching and learning quite a bit, but it isn’t what the job is fully about. We spend a lot of our time working toward making every single aspect of campus life more effective, delightful, and efficient. That means, that while teaching, learning, and research are core areas of focus, we also spend a great deal of time working across various businesses to drive impact and outcomes. Universities are small cities with everything from power generation, police forces, critical systems, and everything in between to be concerned about. What we need as higher education CIOs are stories and examples of how our multi-national corporate colleagues run their lines of businesses that we can translate.

The Dell team talked a lot about the rise and potential of agentic AI. While many of the examples were focused on the educational sphere — curriculum creation, assessment, study partners, etc — things got much more interesting when a few of us pulled our colleagues aside and told them we were just as interested in how they and their clients are using them across local and state government, corporate sectors, retail, finance, construction, and others. Once they started to show us real life examples of how they are applying these types of strategies in those contexts, my mind was racing with ideas of how we could alter their corporate solutions and apply it to the higher education landscape.

Agentic AI, refers to AI systems capable of autonomous decision-making and actions, can be a game-changer in various aspects of university operations. Imagine AI-driven systems that can self-manage administrative tasks, optimize resource allocation, and even create automated decision support systems. Agents can analyze vast amounts of data to identify patterns and make informed decisions, freeing up human resources to focus on more strategic and creative endeavors.

I personally believe that one of the most promising applications of agentic AI in universities is in the realm of administrative efficiency. AI can streamline university communications, fund-raising, energy management, construction, housing and dining, and financial management. For instance, AI-driven systems can autonomously manage and optimize campus-wide energy usage, significantly reducing costs and improving sustainability. Similarly, AI can automate and enhance the efficiency of student housing allocation, ensuring that space is utilized optimally, and students’ preferences are considered. I firmly believe that once we make the move into this arena, we will be applying agentic AI in ways that can reduce the personal load associated with many of the ongoing administrative challenges we deal with every single day. In your ongoing learning with AI, what are you seeing as the primary opportunities to bring agentic AI into our own operations?

That Escalated Quickly

Thoughts, UTET,

As I reach the end of my first year here at the University of Texas, I am filled with gratitude and pride for the incredible progress we’ve made together. When I first stepped into this role, I was immediately struck by the talent, dedication, and innovative spirit that defines our university community. It has been a privilege to work alongside so many of you who are committed to supporting UT’s mission of excellence in education, research, and service.

Over the course of the past year, I have had the pleasure of meeting people from all over the 40 acres. I came here with that as a goal, to better understand the people I am in service to and the context I am doing that in. We collectively have so much going on and deal with new things each day. This year has seen leadership changes, strategic alignment, great conversations, progress on key initiatives, and a whole lot of really hard work. It has truly escalated quickly.

I arrived with what appeared to be a simple set of priorities. I never expected it to be easy; UT is way too big and complicated for anything to be done quickly and easily. However, the things that have been hard are also the things that seem to matter the most — focusing on our finances, focusing on our organizational alignment, focusing on our services, and focusing on our customers — all required some degree of change and adjustment on lots of peoples’ part. Did I accomplish everything I hoped I would in the first year? No.

Should I be disappointed in that? I am going to also answer that with a no. I am not one to set goals and fail, but the work we have done in the foundational areas of our organization are the ones that ultimately really matter going forward. In my organizational roadmap, I wanted to establish a new leadership team, ensure the financial health of the organization, launch a new digital presence, review our service portfolio, and finalize a new organizational structure that brings the three new units together into a single portfolio under the office of the CIO. We did amazing work in getting nearly all of that done in the last year. Wow.

I also wanted to raise awareness of our overall IT modernization needs campus-wide. I expressed pathways to do that over five distinct areas — student experience, infrastructure and systems, enterprise platforms, customer experience, and teaching and learning. We’ve invested new effort in each of these areas, with many of them paying dividends. We created the Student Experience Council that brings together business leaders across the student experience to identify what are the best-in-class digital approaches we should be using to delight students. We’ve continued to enhance our network and modernize portions of it in a systematic and impactful way. We are assisting Dell Medical in the implementation of Workday Finance and Epic, with plans forming to invest in new ERP capabilities for campus as well. We have launched an AI program that will directly impact customer experience, efficiency, teaching, learning, and research. We even hosted the SEC CIO group to help get a sense of where we stand relative to peers. All while making sure the core services campus relies on are resilient and robust.

The place where I need to focus more energy on is in the advancement of several common good services that support the whole community. We have done a lot of planning with various units and the ITLC. This coming year, we will leverage our investment in our own foundation to help make an even bigger impact across campus and in the larger IT community.

We have so much planned for the next few years and it is exciting as ever to be a Longhorn. I am thrilled to be here and to have made so many good friends along the way. Friends that I know are also committed to the long-term success of this great university. Thank you all for making my first year better than I hoped.

Living the Digital Transformation We Preach

AI, Digital Dexterity, SLT, Thoughts, UTET, , ,

As the IT leaders at UT Austin, we spend a lot of time talking about digital transformation. We encourage campus to embrace modern tools, work smarter, and take advantage of the technology investments we’ve made. But here’s the real question, are we practicing what we preach? If we want to lead the university into a more digital, connected, and efficient future, we need to start with ourselves. We need to live in the environment we’re asking others to adopt, not dismiss it, not just support it, but fully commit to it.

Right now, we’re operating in a fragmented digital world. Some teams use Slack, others use Teams. Files are scattered across OneDrive, SharePoint, Box, Wikis, and more. Some meetings are on Zoom, others on Teams. We are juggling platforms when we could be harnessing the power of our enterprise-supported ecosystem and putting Copilot to work for us.

When groups on campus reach out for help improving their digital workflows, we should be the experts they turn to. But how can we do that if we aren’t fully invested ourselves? If we don’t know Teams inside and out, how can we teach others to maximize it? If we’re not using OneDrive and SharePoint to store our work, how can we expect others to move away from Box? This isn’t just about efficiency, it’s about leadership. The best way to drive change across campus is to lean into the change. And imagine the stories we can share with the community as we do!

Here’s our challenge, we need to standardize our own workflows before we can credibly push others to do the same.

  • Teams over Slack. All our internal communications should happen on Teams—chats, channels, file sharing, and collaboration. We can’t ask campus to make the switch if we haven’t fully embraced it.
  • OneDrive & SharePoint over Box. Moving documents to a single, integrated storage platform makes collaboration easier and security more resilient. I am not talking about engineering new workflows that support campus operations, I am primarily concerned with our internal workflows.
  • Teams Meetings over Zoom. We already have a robust, enterprise-supported meeting platform in Teams. It integrates with our calendars, our files, and our workflows. Let’s stop defaulting to Zoom when Teams can do the job. I completely understand that incoming meetings are often up to the organizer, but once we can start to show value in the automation that Copilot in Teams meetings provide, we have a reason for other groups on campus to make the change.
  • Microsoft Forms over Qualtrics. I am honestly tired of responding to basic questions using our most powerful enterprise survey tool. MS Forms should be used for all lightweight data collection.
  • AI & Automation with Copilot. Microsoft Copilot is already here, and it should be changing the way we work. But we won’t understand its full impact unless we actively use it. How can AI streamline our daily tasks? What reports, emails, and meetings can we automate? The only way to know is to test, learn, and apply. The SLT has decided that we are providing M365 Copilot to the entire organization.

I want to be clear, every time we use tools outside our enterprise systems, we create more work, more risk, and more fragmentation. We make it harder to secure data, harder to collaborate, and harder to support the very systems we advocate for. If we want campus to streamline their tech stack, we have to start with our own teams. That means cutting out redundant tools and fully investing in M365, not just because we’re told to, but because it makes our work more effective.

Digital transformation isn’t just about technology, it’s a cultural shift. It’s about building habits that make work easier, faster, and more connected. But culture change starts with us. I am asking us to set the example.

I want us to create a comprehensive plan for making this the new normal within Enterprise Technology. I know who some of the people are who can help lead this, but I am actively looking for people who can help and will take some responsibility in leading this.

OpenAI generated image showing people working together in a UT themed room.

Image created by OpenAI.