Q：As the CIO of City U, how do you think about this job and why did you accept this position?

Prof. Wagner：I’ve been in City University for over 20 years. For many years, I knew what was missing to enable City University to move forward. I always feel that if I take this role, I can make a positive change for the institution. So that’s why I accepted this position. It is my challenge and also my opportunity to make City U a better organization. But no doubt being CIO is also a big responsibility, so I considered this decision carefully.

Q：As the CIO, you must be very busy. How do you balance your academic work with this position？

Prof. Wagner：No doubt, I’m very busy. I should point out that before I took this role, I already had several other roles in the university. I am the Associate Provost, which means I spend much time looking out the quality assurance for the university. Because of this, my personal research takes a smaller role. So I try my best to find areas of research that combine my work with my academic interests. I am first the manager in the organization, and then the university research faculty.

Q：What characters do you think are important for a successful CIO?

Prof. Wagner：It’s interesting you ask that. It is clear that you should have a good understanding of technology because it is a position to deal with information. But you also should have a deep understanding of what the university does and especially how academic things work, and what their needs are. That’s why our president wants very much the CIO to be a professor, since the university’s interests as an academic institution will much better align with the IT.  So clearly, I have to understand business and I have to understand IT. Many of the issues, especially in the large organization are about people, e.g. to hire people, to get our clients understand our job, to convince people to give their data, etc. Much of my work is really about people management. I really need to understand people very well, and it requires quite some level of emotional intelligence, EQ.

Q：What kind of problems do you have in the process of building a team？

Prof. Wagner: Right now, the IT sector is in short supply of people, especially in the academic IT. Many people who report to me are retiring. I really need to find the replacement. Also the sector is very competitive, sometimes we have to raise the salary to attract and keep the best people. The other issue that comes to people I think is keeping colleagues motivated and keeping them up-to-date because technology changes so quickly.

Q：Do you prefer to promote people within the institution or from outside of the institution?

Prof. Wagner：I do both now. If I recruit inside, that is very motivational. When a senior manager retired, a manager will become the senior manager, a junior manager will become the manager and so on. In this case, I will have many promotions for people with one person leaving and recruiting from inside. It’s a very happy promotion pipeline. If a senior manager leaves, I replace him or her with another senior manager from outside. That means nothing happens inside and my internal people will be much less excited. So, I have to balance. Sometimes, I want to recruit someone in this promotion way, sometimes I get people from outside for new ideas and approaches.

Q：What kind of strategy do you use to improve their professional growth

Prof. Wagner：For example, we have interdisciplinary teams. I ask my colleagues to form groups from different offices, such as application development office, computer services office, and my office. Some groups may be asked to look at new technologies, others may be asked specifically to consider how do we deal with security issues, or how to improve user experience. They share ideas from different perspectives. By this way, they can learn from different disciplinary areas.

Q：Who are involved in strategic design for information services and technology in City U? Are deans / directors from academic departments involved in strategic design? What are their roles?

Prof. Wagner: To be successful as a CIO, I need to make a strong bond with stakeholders. Our IT is governed by the ISGC, Information Service Governance Committee. They discuss what the strategic direction is, what initiatives we should take at the important project level. Several vice presidents are members. The vice president of administration, the vice president of student affairs and the vice president of research and technology are all members of this committee. They will be my supporters. And I still keep my role as the provost officer, so I get supports from provosts as well. I have also very close relationships with the deans. So in a word, I must have supports from the senior managers, from deans and from as many as department heads as possible.

Q：Why did the City U launch the “Web Redesign Project”? How is this project going?

Prof. Wagner：In the past, like ten years ago or twelve years ago, many academic departments have their own web pages. In this case, everybody would do their own things and just made webpages with very simple tools like html. But that time has passed and our understandings of what a university website does has changed.  We know it does branding, information communication, knowledge sharing, transaction process, and sometimes even e-commerce. For example, when you have a conference, and people will need to register and pay with the credit card and this is a kind of e-commerce. Our web is not what it was before, just telling others “hello, here we are”, instead it is much more. We need very good branding tools, very maintainable webpages, and we need the analytics so that we know where people go to in our website. And those have to be done systematically. Therefore, we launched Web Redesign Project and implemented a web content management (WCM) platform to manage the websites. The departments still provide the content, but they don’t need to worry about the web server, the web applications and the coding. The new project will make our websites much easier to manage, much consistent in presentation and in the end we get messages much better and much faster.

Q：How do you think about the development of data science?

Prof. Wagner：I think data science is quite important. I believe we can learn a lot from a deep look at our data and our organization. For instance, data science can help us to know how to make faculty more successful, how to make students more successful and how to make our organization more successful. But that requires for multiple skills. Normally, people who understand statistics don’t understand institution. Here they can do both. That’s really a rare skill combination. Date Science is not only about data analysis and data representation, but also using something like data dashboard to make data predication.

Q：What suggestions do you have for new CIOs in the mainland of China?

Prof. Wagner：As a CIO, you may face many challenges. In City U, we possess different functions. The VP administration and the HR, they all ask for their own systems. But they may focus less on the need for data integration. By creating a common data architecture, we can do that. Only if we have data integration, with sharing date between different offices, can we do good data science and build better applications in the future.

Q：Most importantly, I must think of the data architecture for the organization.

Prof. Wagner：When I came, I knew I must create an organizational data organization. That’s what I am working on. The best way to this, I think, is to start thinking about what are core business processes for the university. That’s for any future CIO. You need to think about data architecture and think about your core business processes. Then use your human social capital and understand your work relation with your colleagues, convince them to share the data. Once you achieve that, they will see how wonderful it is in the data use across the organization. This is my advice for a future CIO.