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1. Looking to the future with Lev
Gonick, Part 5 - Going digital with
trust, wallets and transformation
Editor’s note: This is the fifth and final installment of a five-part series from
ASU CIO Lev Gonick, featuring three key trends: digital trust, digital wallets
and digital transformation. Read the previous installments now for more from
Lev on the ten trends leading higher education in 2021.
Trend #8: Digital trust

2. The German sociologist Jurgen Habermas’ concept of “legitimation crisis”
refers to periods when “the ‘organizational principle’ of a society does not
permit the resolution of problems that are critical for its continued existence.”
One of the central challenges of the digital age is the power of the state, as
well as powerful private interests to use digital technologies to surveil
individuals, groups and whole societies. The fantasy of total information
awareness justifying invasions of every artifact of our digital beings in the
name of protecting us against “fill in the blank.” It is now one of the permanent
vectors of intersection of Silicon Valley interests and those of a surveillance
state.
Equally problematic is the extent to which those same artifacts — in the form
of cached data, searches, social media, texts and email — have been
effectively monetized to sell back to private interests, who in turn generate
predictive algorithms to prompt consumer or political behaviors. The insatiable
capacity of so-called value-neutral technical machinations, on a massive
scale, to induce predictable behaviors is the second major permanent vector
of the digital age. Together, surveillance and this manipulation are now
understood to be creating a legitimation crisis placing democracy and civil
society at a growing risk.
Universities are subjected to both of these seemingly insurmountable logics,
as well as producing and contributing to the legitimation crisis. In the name of
discovery, collaboration and experimentation, universities have long
sought to balance the ethos of open knowledge creation with the real
vulnerabilities and significant plane of attack reflected in the traditional
information security environment on our campuses.
There is no shortage of bad actors out there. Some are state actors, some
spies engaged in industrial and intellectual property espionage and others are
trouble and mischief making simply because they can. Concepts like zero trust
are quickly invading the architectures of information security because the only
way to assume that you can secure the enterprise is to assume that you can
trust no one and no machine.
At the same time, the digital surveillance economy finds some of its origins in
universities. Twenty years ago, when the idea of monetizing massive amounts
of small data was just an idea, we university technology leaders fell over each
other to give away our email systems to startups. After all, we could and did
shed a growing insatiable demand on fiscal and technical resources by
“partnering” with them. The price was consenting to forms of algorithmic

3. development on the substantial collection of data flowing into and out of the
client systems in our domains.
Our engagement not only enabled a relatively inexpensive petrie dish for
algorithmic development, it also signaled to the rest of the market that if flag-
bearer universities were engaged in outsourcing their email, adding our
impremateur advanced the credibility of giving away our right to a more secure
and private exchange of information in the name of short-term economic
expediency.
The two decades of growing sophistication in developing a planful,
manipulative digital economy in which we give away all manner of digital
information only to have it sold back to us is not the result of any intentional
plan on the part of university CIOs. Rather, both surveillance and manipulation
are now deepy encrusted logics that are as pervasive as they are pernicious
in the devolution of the underpinning of a now largely figmented and nostalgic
memory of a century of civility, tolerance and a fair share of naivete. The
legitimation crisis is manifest in the growing challenge of anything resembling
the capacity to re-architect and reconstruct a social compact.
This is where the concept of digital trust needs to start. Digital trust is about
an approach to rethinking and redesigning trust in the digital age. This is
a daring and likely audacious project that has both philosophical
underpinnings and a critically important set of programmatic and pragmatic
activities that follow. The only way out of a legitimation crisis is to begin with
an understanding that the existing crisis, as deep and pervasive as it is, was
socially constructed. While others call for corrective regulatory and policy
remediations to the surveillance state, there is also a role for university
technology leaders.
Principles like privacy by design are beginning to find root across the software
ecosystem. Universities should be quick to both adopt and lead the
further exploration of the challenge. We now incorporate security into our
development and operations of continuous integration deployment workflows.
The time is ripe, and well overdue, for universities to also architect and deploy
automatic engineered workflows to insert privacy, anonymity and
confidentiality by design rubrics into our code development. As we advance
the maturation of our data governance work on campus, it is important to
develop new rubrics that build on protecting student and personal information
to also address frameworks for the ethical use of data.

4. The experience of managing COVID-19 on campus has helped to shed light
on the body of data being collected in our data warehouses that need to be
thoughtfully updated to assure ethical use, articulated in a way to reframe a
new social compact in the digital age. At the same time, the technology
leadership at universities and colleges across the country have a responsibility
for socializing the contradictions of the surveillance state and the value of
digital trust leadership, not only for our institutions, but as models for the rest
of society.
The ASU Example - Bringing in digital trust experts
[caption align="center"]
Dr. Donna Kidwell, ASU's Chief Information Security and Digital Trust Officer
[/caption]
A call for a new executive role for information security and digital trust was
fulfilled in 2020. With the naming of Dr. Donna Kidwell as ASU’s Chief
Information and Digital Trust Officer, UTO and ASU is ahead of the curve in
considering a crucial part of our digital age in a formal way.
Trend #9: Distributed ledger technologies & digital wallet
Through a set of complicated twists and turns, the notion that institutions
should ensure that learners are encouraged to take an active role in creating
the learning process, and that the assessment of students reflects this
approach, is no longer a radical idea. From constructivist educators to
libertarian thinkers, from regulatory authorities to philanthropic investors, the
idea of what might be called learner agency is not particularly controversial
anymore. The only deep resistance to this consensus is within the workings of
the university itself.
Clark Kerr, former Chancellor of the University of California system and the
architect of the California master plan for higher education, made a strong
point more than 60 years ago. He said that from the year 1520, some 85

5. Western institutions “still exist[ed] in recognizable forms, with similar functions
and with unbroken histories.” Seventy of those enduring entities were
universities, usually in the same locations with “governance carried on in
much the same ways,” with “professors and students doing much the same
things…subject to little major technological change,” and animated by “the
eternal themes of teaching, scholarship and service, in one combination or
another.”
The university was second for endurance only to the Roman Catholic Church,
the parliaments of the Isle of Man, Iceland and Great Britain, and a few Swiss
cantons. However, if we wanted to classify the institutions with whom we have
enjoyed a 500-year history of hierarchical continuity, they would not be
learner-centered.
Among the few major technical changes in the past 20 years is the
cryptographic revolution securing chains on a block, starting with Haber
and Stornetta. Thirteen years ago, developers working under the pseudonym
of Satoshi Nakamoto released a whitepaper of a massively distributed ledger
system capable of recording and setting up a verification protocol that is all the
rage in the world of cryptocurrencies.
Most cryptocurrencies use an app in the form of a digital wallet to store and
retrieve their verified digital assets. The idea of disintermediating traditional
financial institutions and the power they have long held continues to be one of
the most interesting battles of possibly tectonic proportion in the global
political economy in more than 300 years.
Over the past several years, pioneers and visionaries in education have
posited that in order to realize the century-old vision of education informed by
learner agency, we need to launch our own project of tectonic-shifting
possibility. The working hypothesis is that scalable distributed ledger
technologies and an education digital wallet can be established to
greatly advance learner agency. A higher education digital wallet can allow
learners to both store and retrieve artifacts of learning that have been verified
to be shared along the blockchain. This form of a trust network could well be
an important part of an approach to advance digital trust in a broader political
environment.

6. As we have documented elsewhere, there are key technical and learner
agency principles that can, and have been, encoded in early work on
blockchains and digital wallets for education. As the technical work
progresses, the challenges and institutional resistors are as predictable as
they are difficult to defeat. Within the institution there are no shortage of those
representing university structures who assert that they are facing existential
threats to their raison d’etre. Between institutions, there are classic debates
underway as to whether data assertions from one set of credit-generating
institutions can withstand rigorous scrutiny of being equivalent for another
institution’s use. Of course, these and other conversations have little if
anything to do with being leading exemplars of advancing learner agency and
student-centered learning.
There is a high probability that most of these legacy forms of institutional
resistance will either be resolved by enlightened self-interest of the institutions
or by external disruptors validated by the market. Employers have traditionally
found value in the assertion of the colleges and universities that we are a
reliable arbiter and evaluator of learning, competencies and skills associated
with degrees and courses of study.
In the digital age, that set of assertions will be tested and challenged. For
those who truly believe in learner agency, the breadth of evidence of learning
artifacts extends well beyond grades, courses and majors. We owe it to our
learners to let them take greater responsibility and agency for their education
journeys while they have their primary and hopefully lifelong relationships with
institutions.
There is a rich and diverse set of learning artifacts that learners bring to their
college experience. During their time with us, we invite learners to a journey of
discovery and knowledge creation that we hope will be of subsequent value to
them as they weave between work experiences and continuous learning
experiences. All of these artifacts of learning can be represented in a digital
wallet and written to the chain of those interested in sharing.

7. Among the artifacts in the wallet will be the official transcript of the institution,
pristine, controlled and verified only by the university itself. The prospect of the
wallet being able to also capture evidence of competencies, skills and a
learner’s digital portfolio of learning is a highly desirable way to empower
learners. At the same time, this assures that our institutions remain
relevant into the next 500 years.
The ASU Example - Crafting a blockchain network
In 2020, the Trusted Learner Network (TLN) received funding as part of $12
million of grants for expansion of access for learners. Products and network
collaborations for the TLN are launching in 2021.
Trend #10: Digital transformation and alignment
Looking back at the past year, most university CIOs will likely reflect that the
global pandemic brought themselves and IT to the attention of executives at
the university in a way unlike anything else before.
Looking forward, we must ask ourselves what lessons will inform our future as
IT professionals and our contributions to our respective universities and
colleges? One technology management impulse will be to fall back to old
playbooks. For many universities, there has been an overall executive
directive to manage the pandemic as best as can be accomplished and then
begin a glidepath to returning back to “normal” in a post-COVID world. At ASU
in general, and certainly in the university technology enterprise operation, we
have taken a very different approach.
Our goal has been to co-design and introduce a rapidly reconfigurable
model for the IT enterprise of the future. If there is an institutional
imperative to return to the status quo ante, there is likely little to no motivation
to rethink and redesign IT service delivery into the future. At ASU, the
executive directive has been to be intentional in leveraging the many
complexities of the pandemic to position the institution, post-2021 and beyond,
to achieve our bold charter in ways unthinkable before 2020. ASU’s aspiration
remains becoming the foundational model for a New American Public
Enterprise University in service to the nation.

8. At the very moment that many universities are contracting their core lines of
business, ASU continues to lead through often contrarian leadership. In
addition to expanding traditional research and scholarship in robust ways,
ASU has embarked on an ambitious new Learning Enterprise. Leveraging all
of ASU’s assets, the goal of the Learning Enterprise is to foster and grow
universal access to social and economic opportunity at every stage of a
person’s life. Among its goals, the Learning Enterprise will engage one million
learners over the next ten years. Some of those individuals will find pathways
into the pursuit of degrees and others will find their lives enhanced, no matter
their age or circumstance, by partaking in learning opportunities at the
university.
Over the past year, and as we prepare to position ourselves for the next
five years, IT alignment has never been a more propitious goal. Rather
than looking in the rearview mirror, the university has embraced, at this very
moment, the prospect of an acceleration of the digital transformation journey
we are on. The principal architect is ASU’s President Michael Crow, who has
enjoyed an uncharacteristically long tenure of many senior leaders that he has
selected and led. An unrepentant optimist and risk taking visionary, President
Crow is also a student of technology and its role in shaping and being shaped
by social, economic and political forces. Under Crow, the contribution of the
professional technology talent within the institution has been recognized as a
major creative and generative asset to the future aspiration and evolution of
the ASU public enterprise model.
The central organizational hypothesis leading the IT organizational
transformation underway is that the traditional, hierarchical and function-based
IT model must be re-designed in order to meet the aspirations of the ASU
public enterprise model. Put slightly less generously, our old way of thinking
and organizing was largely both unaligned and likely unalignable to the
aspirational goals of the university going forward.

9. We aspired to be more agile, and yet being held captive to enterprise system
organization charts and a 50-year-old mainframe way of thinking were clearly
rate-limiting. Through an intentional and radically inclusive planning process,
individuals and teams recommended new ways of articulating our core values,
our leadership principles and ways of organizing. Our current new
organizational model was not the brainchild of the CIO. My challenge to the
team was to think creatively about new and untested models in higher
education for organizing our talents to be both better aligned to the fast
moving public enterprise university and, at the same time, rapidly
reconfigurable to attend to changes in the technology world. This was to
additionally engender the development of chapters of technology practices
that could advance and continuously avail our team members with
opportunities to learn and contribute.
Central to our understanding and the prospects of an enduring sustainable
model into the future is the role of culture and storytelling. Our culture-in-the-
making stories and, more importantly, the stories reflecting our service and
support of our students, faculty, researchers and the communities that we
have committed to serving are hugely important.
Trusting the process and the team has resulted in a grand experiment in
redesigning the University Technology Office into an enterprise
technology office in the making. This is based on organizational cores of
rapidly reconfigurable pools of talent advancing service delivery, products,
projects, analytics, decision support and engineering. Rather than
impenetrable and hardened new functional models, we are experimenting with
porous and cross-matrixed teams. Beyond chapters, and the professional
practices within those chapters involving architects, coaches, champions,
principal domain specialists and product owners, we also have a generative
set of guilds inviting individuals from across the university to explore areas of
common technical, cultural and community interests.
Even before the pandemic, we knew that in order to chart the future of higher
education, ASU had to constantly promote change within its own environment.
With this focus on developing a culture of rapid innovation, there are likely
lessons to be learned and shared with IT colleagues leading their own
organizations and universities in 2021 and beyond.
The ASU Example - Setting UTO’s goals