Digital Management Should-Haves for 2025: A CDO’s Picks
A Q&A with Ed Wozencroft
For a few years we have watched the rising affect of digital info applied sciences on our larger training programs. Prime-level management has overwhelmingly acknowledged this essential think about strategic discussions and institutional planning, such that the upper training CIO is now extra generally seen “on the desk” as a invaluable enter to strategic initiatives.
And we’re seeing the emergence of a comparatively new position: the chief digital officer; the CDO [sometimes called the CDIO]. The New Jersey Institute of Know-how named Ed Wozencroft as their first-ever CDO in March of 2023. (Wozencroft additionally serves as NJIT’s vp for digital technique and CIO).
Now that he is greater than a 12 months and a half into his official chief digital officer position, we have requested Wozencroft to mirror on his areas of focus: What work should digital info leaders “personal”? And given the prominence of digital management roles, what is going to these “must-have” concentrations be for digital leaders working in larger training in 2025?
Mary Grush: What are your picks as “must-haves” for digital info leaders working in larger training in 2025? I am not asking for a complete record of every thing they need to be concerned in — however please touch upon the areas you’re feeling would be the most crucial foci for profitable digital leaders this coming 12 months.
Human-Centered Digital Transformation
Ed Wozencroft: My first choose is a name to motion and a reminder to proceed to give attention to the human-centered facets of digital transformation. Now greater than ever, that is extremely essential, particularly given the present perceptions of AI. Our college students — and future members of the workforce — are nervous about AI: “Will AI displace me? Will I be capable to get a job? In 4 years will AI have changed the factor I am now finding out?”
Even at a polytechnic, college students are extra leery of this than maybe many would suppose. College students perceive that AI
might be assistive, however they’re very anxious about it changing them, and about it changing their classroom and school interactive expertise. They fear about our societal lack of maturity round AI and what the profession panorama may appear to be for them 4, 10, or 20 years out.
At NJIT, we’re dedicated to bettering registration, class scheduling, and advisory companies based mostly on human-centered design rules, and, leveraging AI, we’re targeted on giving the scholar a much more personalised studying expertise than they’ve ever had. And several other course elements permit them to discover, safely, the parameters and ethics of AI in educational settings.
Grush: I am positive college students’ worries over AI level to a really related instance of why human-centered digital transformation is a vital piece of efficient digital management. Readers ought to take a look at the Q&A we did collectively for Campus Know-how (April 2024), “Toward a Human-Centered Digital Ecosystem: NJIT” for a deeper dive.
What’s your second choose for the “must-haves” record?
Moral AI Integration
Wozencroft: My second choose, parlaying into the primary, is AI integration with moral guardrails. Meaning ensuring that as AI continues to emerge and alter, we’re occupied with the ethics of it and understanding privateness considerations, algorithmic bias, transparency points, and questions of equitable deployment. It is one thing that I have been in a whole lot of conversations with CIOs about, and it is solely getting extra essential.
Many occasions a CIO or a CDO will discover themselves on the responding finish of an inquiry about why somebody’s knowledge was utilized in an inappropriate means. AI has the propensity to make that dialog tenfold occasions tougher for us.
