Episode 1: Meet Tony Pauley

Voiceover: Hello, welcome to Warwick Voices. Bringing you news, views and conversation directly from your colleagues across the University of Warwick.

In this episode, we're getting to know Tony Pauley who works in the Information and Digital Group as our Chief Information Digital Officer. Tony is developing Warwick's digital transformation programme, so, we took some time to learn more about his background, what excites him about his work, and what his ambitions are for this large-scale and complex project.

Tony: My name is Tony Pauley, I'm the Chief Information Digital Officer at university of Warwick.

Ken: Very nice to talk to you today. Tony, just at the start here be good to understand something of your background. So going right back to the start, where are you from originally?

Tony: So originally I’m from Huntington, West Virginia, which is in the middle of nowhere, rural U.S. But for high school, I moved to Florida and went to an international baccalaureate school in Florida. Then I went to University of Florida - staying in the sunshine, trying to stay warm. It's a bit different from here, lots more blue!

Ken: And you're interested in I.T and technology, did that develop at that early stage at high school, or was it something that that happened later on?

Tony: Well, talk about a meander, I think it developed over time. But in high school, for the International Baccalaureate programmes you pick three focus topics and three subsidiary topics. My three focus topics were computer science, maths and physics. So, a bit numerate as it were, and then my subsidiary topics were English, Spanish and Psychology. But I really focused on the computer science, working on computer science engineering degree.

The way that you come in with credits in the US is very different from the UK. I was coming in as a second year student but couldn't get any the second year courses because I didn't have seniority. So I got a bit frustrated on the computer science side and ended up switching over to maths. I've got two majors – one in mathematics and one in statistics. Then when I got out of uni, my very first job was going back into computer programming. So I got a software engineering job right out of uni.

Ken: And was that also in Florida?

Tony: It was - I was working in Coconut Grove, Miami - it's a beautiful place to be.

Really based a bit on the mathematics and statistics side of things, I got a job as a software developer at an actuarial firm doing actuarial software for pension schemes. It was when Pentium computers first came out, back when things were really slow. All our software was done on desktop computers and my job ended up morphing into an architectural role where we were optimising the software, trying to speed it up because everything was far too slow. I spent all my time trying to move files to the centre of hard drives and all kinds of crazy things to just speed things up because it was taking far too long to do the calculations; taking days and weeks. It was an interesting role and amazingly technical, far more technical than probably anything I ever did after that.

Ken: And can you tell us what attracted you to that particular organisation and a bit about them?

Tony: Sure. So it's probably a theme: I tend to get involved in companies when they're right on the cusp of a major change. So when I was at that organisation, we were moving from some old-school basic programming language to stuff that people recognise nowadays as C sharp but before it was C sharp. It was bleeding edge – for a lot of things that were we doing: computers had just gotten fast enough to do some of the things that we really needed to do, so we were trying to take advantage of that. But it was quite insane! There was nothing to go by. We were completely reinventing the company and taking a bit of a punt at the time to see if we could make it work.

Ken: And how would you describe the nature of the role at the organisation Tony?

Tony: It was more tech at the time, I was a bit of a geek - I'm still a bit of a geek. I ended up going straight from a software development role into a pretty heavily architectural role. And you'll see that theme I think, later in some of the things we're trying to do here.

Ken: And so that was from a relatively early age, very early start of your career. Can you just give us a potted summary between when you left that role? They were in Florida until the role that you have now at Warwick?

Tony: So I was sitting on the fence between actuarial science and software. I got my degree in maths but I was studying actuarial science as well. Then I moved into one of the most prestigious consulting companies at the time, called Towers Perrin - which is an actuarial firm and I started doing mostly consulting but a bit of software for them. I was there for a long time and became a credentialed actuary on the pensions side of things.

Then I moved to their competitor, a company called Mercer which was their biggest global competitor. At the time, the biggest actuarial firm in the world - I think it probably still is. At Mercer, I moved more back into the IT side of things, and moved around a bit. But eventually I landed in a role where we were doing something quite similar to what we're trying to do now at the University: standardise as much as you can but allow for the flexibility that people need. I was there for a long time, did a pretty amazing project to pull that off. It took a long time (probably worth talking about it in more detail at some point).

But I ended up in doing a lot of work in the UK, in a different role at Mercer, where we were building software to automate investment trades for big pension schemes. That went on for a couple of years, and it was one of those fun things where you've got everything highly technical, and amazingly automated. Then you’ve still got to generate faxes to make the banks work - which is kind of amazing.

So, when that project wrapped up, I was looking for something interesting to do; there was there wasn't much on the horizon at Mercer at the time. And so I came to UK to start a mortgage bank, but a really strange mortgage bank at the time, trying to revolutionise mortgages; mortgages that didn't have interest rates. I think we have the record for the most money ever raised, as a start-up in the UK. Did that for about five years, and between then and now really spent a lot of time working as a consultant, advising different kinds of companies, some unions, some other companies, lots of start-ups, on how to get their IT working, how to get investments as a founder of a company, how to be a CEO, how to be a CTO. And so did that for a number of years. And then I landed in a consulting role here and started helping with what the university was going through at the time.

Ken: So just to clarify, you were doing, you were working as a consultant within the University of Warwick prior to the role you have now?

Tony: Yeah, and it's a similar thing that has happened to me a couple of times - my clients have turned into employers. In a prior role with another client company called Mintec (which was a family run data operation, selling the price of food, food ingredients, to supermarkets and food manufacturers), I was helping them do a digital transformation, move all their stuff off some pretty old legacy software, and to move things onto the web and make it more modern. That went so well, the owner of the company hired me to take on the CEO role. And so I did that for a bit and then took a break, did a bit more consulting. And then with the University, it was a client that took on a role to help analyse some results that they’d done on IT security audit, and as we went through that realised it was probably a good opportunity to come in and help solve some of the issues we're seeing.

Ken: We're recording this at the start of March 2021. So including the consulting role, Tony, how long have you been at the university?

Tony: It's been a whirlwind tour. The consulting post started November 2019. I started working full time in a consulting capacity in December the same year. I came on as an interim in March and took the full time role on April.

Ken: So at this time, as we're recording that's nearly 12 months?

Tony: Yes, so in the role, as it were, almost there. One year into the full time gig - seems like three days, but in some ways it seems like 30 years!

Ken: So what was it that attracted you to work for the University on a permanent basis?

Tony: So it's the rare combination of things. When you go through opportunities that are interesting, it's usually a very complex problem to solve. Combined with the organisational appetite to get it done, and the financial resources to pay for it all. And it looked as if we've got all those three necessary ingredients to do something pretty interesting. And that doesn't come together all the time - you know, often people have ambitions to do things but they don't have the funds to do the work. Or they don't have quite the capital to pull it off, or you don't get exactly the executive buy in that you need.

And then it's just - you look around the University, it’s a really great place to be around. I mean, when you go around, it's a really interesting place and people are amazing. And the things we're doing here at the University are amazing. To be able to be part of that, and pull off some of the digital transformation-type things we're trying to pull off… It's just the right intervention. It's so rare a combination of ingredients. When you see that, if you have a chance – at least I do – I try to raise my hand. It was a pretty obvious opportunity. And so I spoke up and asked if they were interested.

Ken: So you've spoken about digital transformation - can you talk about that more specifically, as it relates to the University?

Tony: There's a couple of different things, in different areas. One area that we’re looking at is how well do we support academics and research? And how do we make the university achieve the things that it’s best known for? As we look at that I think there's a very few universities - if any- really pull that off very well.

And so it's how do you provide an easy to use environment for researchers to just do their job, you know, they want to come in and do the research and go home, they don't want to be laden with all the regulatory hassles that they're required to do. And there's a lot of it, just goes up every year, the amount of extra burden that's put on academics to things they have to do besides the things that they want to do. I think it's really our role to make all that go away, when they should be able to come in and do their work, they don't need to know about all these regulations, they don't need to know about all the computer technical nonsense, and how to protect themselves from hackers and all that.

So, we're trying to build this environment for researchers, academics, people inside the centre to just have an easy place to work. And it's largely that. I mean if we look at just the tools that we use to get the job done, it's a bit too difficult to work, I think it's a bit clunky, around the university. It's sometimes a bit frustrating, I think, to do things that seem like they should be simple, but take quite a long time. There's ample opportunity for us to streamline quite a lot of that and make it a much simpler place to work, a much nicer place to work. It's a really simple goal, I just want it to be a place a really nice place to work, a really nice place to do research, and for students to learn. I think there's a lot of things we can do to really raise the bar.

Ken: So you said, you said, there were a couple of areas and the one you've described there around support for academics, particularly for research and teaching. And so, so what's the other area of focus?

Tony: There's a backbone to all organisations from an IT perspective. And so if you look at what holds it all together – there’s an example I just came up with today talking to folks: if you look at the Forbidden City in China, the main building has got this interesting roof joint that swivels - it shifts in every direction. And it's super flexible. And that joint allows the building to move when there's an earthquake, and it keeps it from collapsing. And if you look at really, really rigid buildings, when there's an earthquake, they always collapse. And we're a really rigid building. If you look at the infrastructure that we've built, it's designed to work the way it was set up when it was set up. It's not really anticipating any change. That’s okay, as long as things stay the way they are. And I think we've gone through a number of years where things haven't changed that dramatically. And so that's okay.

We're now entering a phase where things are changing really rapidly, really, just dramatically, really fast. And so if you look through that pace of change that we're going through, we've got to have an infrastructure that can bend, when it needs to bend, and bend quite regularly. We're really not set up for that. So it's trying to find a way to get that adaptable infrastructure in place to allow us to react, when things change. So, if Clearing moves to a different time in the year, can we just flip a switch and make that work. At the moment, just small things like that can cause quite a lot of disruption.

Ken: For colleagues working in academic departments would they have seen some of these changes taking place already?

Tony: At the head of department level and the administrator level, yes, what you will have seen is that there's a lot more support for us to reach out and try to find out how to help you. From a systems perspective, we haven't quite gotten there yet. We're just really trying to work through what we need to do and how we need to do it. Some of those changes are coming in, you know, COVID caused us to do a few years of transformation work in a few months. I think everybody's seen that, but was it because of us or was that because of COVID? It's probably more because of COVID than because of us. But we've managed to get that done. What we're now trying to do is think how do you burn that into place. How do you how do you keep carrying on... How do you leverage change so that we can continue to move at that pace without disrupting people too much?

Ken: So that's interesting. So like you say, your head of department, there's a level people are aware of what's going on, support levels are in there and you're saying there's work on the systems. I think invariably these types of processes in such large complex organisations do take time. What sort of timescales would you would you communicate to people around the changes that are taking place?

Tony: There's a lot to do. And some of this stuff's quite complex. So just give an example, if we look at the core system for student records, it's a programme called SITS, we want to move on to a newer version of SITS and to potentially move out into their cloud environment. They've quoted two years as probably the fastest we can do to go to that one system change. Across all the things that we know we need to do, and to just get to a really good foundation that’ll allow us to do the things that we ought to do and have the capabilities that we want: it's a four or five year project. I think that’s probably the easiest way to put it, I'd be surprised if we get it done much faster than that. But that gets us to the point where we can start to turn on some really interesting things. And it enables us to do a lot of things that we're not able to do at the moment. And notice changes might go on for years - or at least I hope they'll go on for years.

Ken: So I have two questions now. So there's a lot of work going on. First of all, then, is there some way that people can go, where colleagues can go and have a have a look and read and find out what you're doing? And then can you just go into you know, just explain a bit more about how you're, how you're scoping out the project? And what are the sorts of things that you're focusing on?

Tony: From a reading perspective, we've got a site that we built [last year], and we're in the process of rebuilding that and broadening out to cover the rest of the Group. We're really in the early stages. We've got a huge piece of work that we're doing at the moment with Microsoft, for example, to just understand our environment, to understand how people work, to understand how much data flows around. But also to look at things that you wouldn't think that we might be looking at, like our carbon footprint. How much carbon are we consuming from an energy perspective? And how might we go about releasing that, so we have a much less environmental impact? And so that analysis is going on with Microsoft at the moment. It'll finish May/June, and we'll have that that that piece of information.

But there's loads of groups that are working around the University on different angles of coming out of COVID, for example, coming out of lockdown, how do we go back to work? What are the requirements of going back to work? What equipment do people have? What does a meeting look like? If 20% of the people stay at home and work from home regularly, how do we pull them into meetings so that the meetings still function properly? And what tech is needed to support if we get some students to teach in the classroom, and some of the students are remote? How do we kit out the rooms to make sure that we've got the right facilities to make that an enjoyable experience?

So there's a lot of working groups meeting at the moment to talk through those things. And usually we go through committee after committee and it takes months, if not years, to figure out the answers. But we don't have that much time, we need to do this in the next couple of months and get it get it set up. And so it's a really fast paced, change environment, to work through how we how we deliver that and keep delivering all the other things that we're trying to do.

Ken: Tell me about working in a university, you obviously got experience of working in the sector previously, but also in other sectors. How easy is it to do the sort of transformation inside a university?

Tony: In a word, difficult. Universities are complex beasts and the University of Warwick is a very large, complex space. And so if we look at what we need to do if you're in a, say, the two previous companies I worked with – one was a consulting company and everything was top down, right? So highly centralised, top down, and doing things there was quite easy. Because there's only one way of doing it. And when I went to their competitor, it's completely decentralised and everybody did their own thing. When you're going through there trying to get anything done was amazingly complicated.

The University is more like the latter. It's a very decentralised place. So lots of stuff to do, how do we pull all of that together? But the difference I think between the University, and a large corporate is just the sheer variety. And so when you look through the every layer that you need to design, you've got infinite numbers of variables in each stage. It's a complete and total different level of complication, I think, than what you see in a corporate environment. It was a bit shocking, frankly, how complex the problem is because of the variety of needs. We've got every possible kind of user, you can imagine: students, staff, student staff, volunteers, third party partners, collaborations with other universities, people that buy from us, it's every possible arrangement. And it's just that scale of variety that makes it so complicated. You’ve got to think through all those permutations whenever you build anything and make sure that we've covered them all off. And that can't be underestimated; how much complication that adds to the size of the ask in what we're trying to do.

Ken: When you're looking at this, this type of project, the complexity of it, and the length of time involved, how is that broken down?

Tony: Sure. So we've been having quite a lot of meetings at the Executive level and the Council level to talk through how might we go about doing what we want to do. We've got a number of things that just aren't quite as stable as we'd like them to be. There are some burning platforms that we need to deal with - some of it's been exacerbated because of COVID, so there are some security things that we know, we need to deal with; some regulatory things that we know we need to deal with, some operational and efficiency things that we need to deal with. So we talk about that as our stabilisation phase. We need to stabilise the environment and get it to a place where it's okay.

The next phase that we really want to get into is what we call foundation building. These are the things that you would expect to see if you were coming in from outside, and you wanted to go build something really interesting. You would kind of expect these foundation pieces to be in place already, in a leading institution. And we are generally a leading institution, but we're missing a lot of the key technical foundation pieces that you would see in a modern organisation. So it's getting to more cloud provision services, looking at things in a more loosely coupled way, using a lot of modern technologies that you that we don't necessarily use as much as we should. Getting data warehouses and data lakes and all these buzzwords around so that we have that key infrastructure that supports proper digital transformation.

So, stabilisation first, foundation building second, then we get into the point of proper digital transformation and doing all the really interesting things that people talk about. When you talk about digital campuses and smart cities and all these big, broad, ambition-type projects, that bring us into a place where we I don't think we can imagine what the University looks like at the moment. But we need those foundation pieces to exist to enable us to think bigger, and to really lead the way for other universities in the future.

Ken: So you talked about the three phases, let's take a broader view and use that cliche question really, what does success look like, in a few years? What are some of the things that you want to see happen over that period of time?

Tony: Quite simply - I've tried to bring the same thing everywhere, it just needs to be much easier place to work and a much easier place to learn. And so when we go through, if you've been here for a while, I think you'll wake up one day and just realise 'wow, this is just so much easier'.

But probably on a bit more of a serious note, we're getting into a post COVID world that’s really an interesting one. I think it's opened our eyes. And we're asking questions I don't think we would have asked that long ago. So you get into researchers working in multiple places and it not mattering where you work or where you learn and that we've got an infrastructure to support that, and just makes those collaborations, that makes learning, that makes working, easy, right? That's really my job.

If you're in a technology role, your job is to make the life of the people that you're supporting easy. Sounds really simple. But that's what we're trying to get done. There's a buzz word that we're starting to use inside our group, which again, goes back to that building in the Forbidden City I was talking about, we've started using this phrase 'architecting for ambiguity' - it's something that I've been doing my whole career. And it's for when you know that you're going to have to solve a problem, and you've got to build a lot of things that will be able to support that problem, but you don't really know what the definition of the problem is yet.

So it's like if you're going to go build a house, you know, you're going to have to build a foundation so you can go ahead and start digging before you've necessarily got all the blueprints done because you know, you're gonna have to dig a hole. We run a lot of that same need around the University at the moment: we're trying to work through how do we put the things in place that will enable us to to deliver the change that we need, to deliver the results that we need. But before people are actually able to articulate it.

So really going back to my industry days in pensions, the IT shop had to be on top of the industry such that we could anticipate business needs three years in advance. And if we weren't, if we didn't know what the business was going to need three years before they said they needed it, then we were too late, and we missed the market. So we had the best people in the world in the IT team, in order to be able to make those predictions. We were predicting where the market was going to go through us before it went there. That's kind of thinking we need inside our group, within the University - is where does the University think it's going to be three years from now? I don't think it's really quite able to articulate that yet. But we're starting to figure out what we think it ought to be. Which might be a dangerous game, but that's what we have to do, because it takes a long time to build these things.

Ken: And just as we draw to a close, I know you wanted to talk about diversity in the context of the Information and Digital Group that you lead, the IDG.

Tony: Yeah, it's just a particular gap, I think. Some of it's geography, some of it's industry, or just speciality professions. But the group as a whole isn't as diverse as it probably ought to be - definitely not as diverse as it ought to be. And so we're putting quite a lot of focus at the moment on what we might be able to do about that. And to provide opportunities for people that otherwise might not get them. And so it's looking at every angle, but really, I think probably one of the more interesting ones, as far as University is concerned is what kind of programmes can we put in place within the departments within schools, where we can provide opportunities for the students to really get good experience within the IT department in particular. So that we can bring in just different kinds of talent than we're used to having.

One of our strengths is that we have people that stay for a long time, but it's also one of our weaknesses. To some extent, we don't we don't have enough movement through the Group to really get different points of view. So it's trying to work out how we bring in some different experiences, and just different points of view into the Group.

What we've been trying to do is assemble a team, with their main focus on what I call client relationship management. It’s about teaching the team that the people we work for and with are clients and giving them that kid-glove experience. So when you go to the help desk we make sure that you're getting a concierge-type experience; someone's taking care of you and walking you through the process. And we've been doing that, in a really short period of time and getting the right leadership in place to think that way. The relationship that we're starting to have with the academic departments is vastly different than it was, even six months ago. And we're starting to be seen, I think as a true partner and a place to go for excellent support.

And it's working so well that you're starting to see people in other departments trying to join the team. It was really interesting interviewing someone recently, I said to them, you know, “Why are you here?” and they said “Well, I see what you guys are doing, and I just really want to be a part of that”. And that just made my day. It just shows that what we are doing is being well received and it's making a difference around the University and that people are wanting to join and come along for the ride. And that's exactly the environment that we're trying to build. So I think it's definitely starting to work. There's a lot more to go. But those kinds of indicators are the best you can ask for.