"Don’t get me wrong, at the end of the day you need your technology skills, but you need to have business acumen to really show your value to the organization."

PAUL CZARAPATA
Vice President & CIO
Kentucky Community & Technical College System(KCTCS)

Paul is the Vice President/CIO for Kentucky Community & Technical College System (KCTCS) comprised of 16 colleges and 75 locations across the Commonwealth of Kentucky. Paul came to KCTCS in 1999 after working for PeopleSoft, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory  (Fermilab), and three small software consulting firms. Paul is blessed to have a talented group of people with great ideas and the intestinal fortitude to see them through.

Challenges in technology to meet enterprise needs in 2013 and expectations.
We have begun to tackle the mobile apps for our students by partnering with a third party, but this will be an iterative process as we gradually add more and more features and functionalities. Predictive analytics will be a bigger challenge for us, we certainly have the data, but we need the technology and predictive modeling built to get us there. I do not have the depth of staff to pull that off so I will be looking to partner my way there, at least in the beginning. The real trick will be to throw fabric across all of these disparate sources so we can get one view of KCTCS. Some compelling higher education focused start-ups are beginning to offer these types of solutions in the cloud, and I am cautiously optimistic they may be a fit sooner rather than later.

The areas in business environment where solutions do not yet exist or not up to the mark, and which if existed, would've made job easier.
We are really struggling finding the right resources through our traditional HR channels and unfortunately we do not have a recruiting function internally. Using full rate consultants to augment staff can serve as a Band Aid but is not sustainable over an extended period of time. We’re plugging our open positions slowly but surely, but it is getting extremely difficult to find good technical talent in our market.

My roles and responsibilities as a CIO
Even though I worked for 4 years here as CTO, I am still a relatively new CIO here at KCTCS. I am fortunate to have a forward-thinking boss, who values technology and understands the strategic impact it can have. I talk to many CIO’s and quite a few of them simply need to brush up on their marketing skills to promote themselves. Specifically what they are accomplishing, how decisions are being made to fund and implement technology (governance), and why IT is important to the organization.

Technology Trends Impacting Enterprise Business Environment
This goes back to my point on analytics and that is how we start leveraging Big Data concepts and tie together our disparate systems across the enterprise to make decisions with the best data available. We need to purge off inactive data, sew together these disparate systems, and figure out a way to get rich information quickly to the right people in order to make decisions. I think the biggest hurdle I see is getting the talent in place to pull this off, so I’m looking for good partners to kick-start us.

Lessons I learned as a CIO that can help you  
I think the best lesson I was ever taught was from the first CIO I worked for out of school. His advice was to make sure that I did more listening than talking when first meeting with external departments and to know the business inside out. Empathy and understanding go a long way when trying to find technology based solutions. Don’t get me wrong, at the end of the day you need your technology skills, but you need to have business acumen to really show your value to the organization.