娇色导航

Speaker 2

Welcome to 娇色导航leadership Live, live from IDC Directions. I'm Lee Rennick, VP Tech Evangelist for IDC, and I'm thrilled and honored to welcome Frank Feagans, VP IT and 娇色导航at University of Texas at Dallas. Congratulations… I mean, welcome and thank you so much for being here.

I'm saying congratulations already, because you've been telling me about your amazing career, but so great to have you here today. Frank. Can you introduce yourself and tell us a bit Unknown Speaker about your role?

Absolutely So.

Frank Feagans, I spent the first three plus decades of my career on in private industry, and I went up through the it ranks, started as a developer and got into the vice president roles and and loved the roles, but I just felt like there was more than shareholder value and quarterly earnings.

It just my daughters were, one was finished with college, and one was getting in and and I decided to go look into higher ed. And I was recommended by many not to do it, but I said, You know what? I'm going to there were three reasons.

One was workforce development. When I was in corporate America, the workforce development was my team, right? Whereas in higher education, I got all these student workers that I have, I teach a class where I can, you know, I'm growing the next generation of the workforce.

So that meant a lot to me. The second was research. My parents passed away young anything that I could do with high performance computing to help advance research for maybe people's grandchildren.

And then the third was to bring it best practices from private industry, not just the technical but the leadership into into higher ed, because I'd heard it was pretty stagnant, yeah, yeah, exactly. And that's me.

I've been doing this now for 13 years in higher ed, and I I actually love the job, love what I'm doing. Well, Speaker 1 that's wonderful.

Well, you've just met, and you were telling me a bit more about your role, so I asked, you know, it's okay if we talk about that.

We were just on the main stage with Satya died from Skyworks, and he was talking about building that technology ecosystem, especially right now, when we're, you know, really transitioning technology into this generative AI and agentica and those types of things, which we'll talk about.

So you had mentioned that you right now that you work in the university sector, you're building out research. You're working with students, I guess, who are in the research space.

How important to you is it to have this aspect of potentially companies working with organizations like yours, to really help pave a way forward, perhaps with agentic AI and Gen AI in a more substantive, intentional way. Speaker 2

Yeah, it's, I mean, it's Michigan mission critical to have this partnership. Yeah, you can look at it just from the instructional end.

And the approach we're taking is we've been bringing in the corporations and the research folks to speak to the students about what they see, Gen AI, where it's going, the skills folks need their culture. Hey, these are a lot of Gen z's.

The culture is really important, and I'm glad I think I'm a Gen Z at heart, although the mirror doesn't tell me, interesting and and so that's been extremely valuable from that front but at the end of the day, it's really the bigger corporational value we have, because there isn't the quarterly earnings thing in higher ed, but there is return on investment.

Yeah, you know research is advancing your research dollars and broader impacts that come out of that.

There's enrollment and retention, of course, and there's outreach, and there's all these things that fall into play, and you can't do that without those partnerships, and genic AI is, I mean, it's the Greens feet to doing this. Quite frankly, it's not aspirational. It's something we have to do.

Speaker 1

Yeah, well, I appreciate you sharing that. And just, you know, your viewpoint on the ecosystem.

There's a company in Canada that I work with, and when Gen AI, even before that, they have my AI Council, and part of their council was the higher ed sector student researchers, part of that so that they were really understanding, I guess, perhaps that innovation and leading in a different way and researching with the education sector.

So I appreciate you sharing that. So you did mention agentic AI, we're at IDC directions. Yesterday I had the amazing opportunity to introduce some of our researchers, it's like music to my ears. I mean, I'm getting goosebumps talking about it.

It's such an amazing time right now, wondering if you could share what you're seeing in market. You're teaching AI as well, Gen AI, but what you might be seeing in market and how you think businesses might want to approach, you know, rolling out agentic AI, Speaker 2

I can share the success formula that we're following, which I think, I think is relevant pretty much anywhere really, because this is complicated. It's not easy, it's important, but it's not easy. And it starts with, it starts with the commitment. It's the shadow of the leader saying, I.

You can have a leader, and I'll use a higher ed example, and Michael Crow from Arizona State, he says, we're going to do this. Here's the money. Let's make it happen. People get in line with that big shadow, and they get it done. But that's not that common.

A lot of times it has to grow from a line of business leader in corporate America, or it comes from a line of business within higher ed, right? And you need to make sure that there's a commitment at that level.

Second, it has to be linked to the cause. And with agenda AI, you're going to find to do it right, the cause is going to morph over time, because you're going to start using AI to make what you're doing more productive.

But if you're really thinking about it, the way we heard this morning, and I agree about it is you need to really think about your business. I mean, this is, should be an evolution for what you do. Don't just do the things you do today faster.

Don't just do them with more information. Should you be doing something different or broader with it? Because it gives you that opportunity. So that's where the execution phase comes in, and you've got to have project management and funding and org changes and all that.

But the governance is critical, because AI, when you see to me, when I see AI governance under the Data Management Office or under it, I shudder about that, because it's really about the human experience.

So I'm not saying put it under HR either, but it needs to report up at the level where you're understanding the impacts to the human side of things. And humans can be the customers. They can be your employees, they can be your stakeholders. They can be your partners.

It's not about saving jobs. It's about the human element and doing it right. And in all those pieces fall into that. So you'd want the governance to be that way.

That's the model that that we're following slowly, but we're following it, and we're seeing success with it, Speaker 1 fantastic.

And you're in an industry, and we had Corey from Pearson On stage, you know, education. And so you're an industry as well. That's been, you know, there's, there have been a lot of like, write ups about how education will change potentially with the evolution.

So you must, you know, I hope so. Yeah, you must be really in a space where it's, like, exciting, but also you're having to look at the overall structure of what education could look like in the future.

As I mentioned, it would have been great to have a tutor when I was doing my MBA, because there was one course in particular I really had a hard time with so I'm waiting. I'll do a PhD. If that happens, I'll do a PhD. Well, this is great.

So, you know, we've heard a lot today from our researchers and analysts on the stage. Any key takeaways so far? Speaker 2

I really like the maturity model that's in place, and with a few tweaks, it fits really well in higher education too. You'd add a fourth horizontal around culture, because the people piece is mostly around workforce development, which is critical. Yeah, the cultures need to change too.

And cultures, from my experience at corporate America, cultures change in corporate America more flexibly in a positive way than they do in higher ed. You know, this is how we've always taught. This is how we want to do things.

And when I started teaching my class, I asked how many folks were using some form of generative AI, and you'd see a few. It's not being recorded. I you know, everyone is, yeah, exactly.

And we asked who was using a co pilot, which is the one that we provide on campus, because it's got HIPAA and purpose safeties to it.

And I think two people raise their hand that we had people using deep sicko, and it's because they have to do this underground, because they've got other professors saying you are not allowed to use this, right? And at the at the end of the day, please use it.

You need to learn to teach differently. When a calculator came out, physics became harder because half of your physics test wasn't on math, it was on physics. Yeah, and that's what all instructors need to think about. And I'm not just saying it higher ed.

I mean, anybody who's growing and training and leading staff needs to think about that way. Use it as a gift and not as a barrier. Speaker 1

I love I love that.

That is exactly how I think people should be approaching it in their day to day lives and in business uses a gift, not a barrier, but maybe understand that what it outputs isn't necessarily completely true all the time, although it is very good when I have a horse and when I post his pictures on Facebook and every writes it, it's much better usually.

So you know, my horse sounds like he's a true champion, which he is. But thank you for letting me divert to that a little bit. Okay, so a wrap. Just wrapped up the first quarter of this year.

Any thoughts on trends for the remainder of the year in technology, probably especially around the Gen, AI and agentic, Speaker 2

yeah, you know, a lot of it's what I heard today. There's going to be some stuff in my mind accelerate rapidly, though. So going back 40 plus years, my master's thesis was an AI built a brain for a master robot. We only had simulators.

I mean, we knew that the concept of large language models would be here eventually. Just didn't and we didn't know what was going to catch.

Connect the dots on the neural networks, but it turned out as transformers, so that makes sense, blah, blah, blah, but I'll tell you what, back then, we had to code sparse and sparsity was King, because you didn't have all this power of an operating system.

And we've gotten away from that. And you look what China did with deepsak, you know, they took the same hardware, and instead of having this massive, bloated operating system that they wrote the cool stuff on, they got down there deep.

And when we do that, think how much more we can get out of the same hardware, it's going to be incredible to me.

And so that's why I bring that up, because some of the things that higher that you don't get into genic AI today, a lot of it being the sensing, more of the EQ pieces, being able to actually ask probing questions back, and kind of those things will now be developed, because people up here know how to do that, but they're not going to put in a supercomputer, but the supercomputer is going to be available.

So that's going to be big. So I think we're going to see advancements faster than people think. And by gosh, you better get into Gen Aki to do that.

Yeah, the other thing, which I don't think is being considered fast enough, is around quantum because when you put these together, that makes very little makes me anxious, I mean, but that makes me anxious because we have several folks doing quantum research, and there's a chip out there, and there's going to be computers.

Probably Google will have one next year or the year after, and we the damage that that can do on the banking industry balances out the greatness it can do on the AI side of the house.

So we need people, more people thinking about that angle, that vector that's going to happen to Speaker 1

love to have another conversation with you that about that. Maybe bring in somebody who's doing some research in that area. Sure be fantastic, because I also believe that and and it could have huge benefits in healthcare too, as well, right? There could be some, I hope so.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. All right. So last question here, we're at IDC directions. You traveled here from Texas, just wondering, you know how you feel about being at events like this and just having that opportunity to connect and network. Speaker 2

Well, from a personal perspective, I'm thrilled, because said I came from corporate America to go into higher ed, and I like higher ed people, and I go to higher ed conferences, but where I get the most value is that the private more the private focus, the whole the whole world focus types of things.

And so because that's where you can really bring things back, but also you can help go the other direction. Don't just think when you think about return on investment.

Don't just think about the R being $1 right in the Ibn hours or something or another investment, there's a lot of return, and a lot of investments that are aren't so quantitative, and I can bring that back too.

So I find these fascinating, and the key to me is when it can be in smaller groups, and I can, I can hear that, and there's a lot more, like we've had this morning, where there's a variety of topics delivered in a variety of ways, and I tend to navigate myself to those types of opportunities and the big, broad ones, I don't go to them.

Speaker 1

I appreciate that so much, and I appreciate you joining us here today. Thank you so much. Frank, Unknown Speaker You're welcome.

Quite enjoyed it and look forward to the rest of the day.