10 things that keep the NSW Education CIO awake at night
I had the privilege to be attending EduTech and enjoying a wide variety of sessions and conversations. Among the many thought-provoking insights, one presentation stood out – Josh Roberts, the Chief Information Officer (CIO) of NSW Education, shared the top 10 concerns that keep him awake at night. These concerns are relevant to all of us, especially those in the learning and development field, as technology increasingly plays a pivotal role in learning.
Let’s delve into the key takeaways from Josh Roberts’ presentation:
1. Cybersecurity: Ensuring robust security measures, including sign-on processes, backups, and recovery plans, is crucial. Regular testing of these security measures is a must. It’s also vital to verify that third-party providers, like Lever with our Coach M tool, have robust cybersecurity processes, controls, training, and awareness in place. I’m happy to check you through what we do at Coach M if that’s useful for you.
2. Data Privacy: Proper data controls and privacy impact statements are essential when dealing with sensitive information. This becomes even more critical when partnering with external firms.
3. Budget Constraints: Balancing operating expenditure and capital expenditure can be challenging. Organisations and governments like fixed, predictable costs, but Tech solutions often shift toward dynamic costing scales, such as cloud-based solutions. When planning projects, it’s crucial to consider what aligns with your procurement department’s preferences.
4. Equitable Access to Technology: Ensuring that all students have access to high-speed internet and devices is essential in the education sector. Connectivity is now becoming less of an issue, but access to devices is incredibly important. Similarly, consider the needs of remote employees in your workforce.
5. Integration of Technology: In education, integrating technology effectively with pedagogy is key to supporting the syllabus. In the corporate world, it’s about seamlessly incorporating learning into the workplace while ensuring that the technology solution you’re using addresses the specific needs and scale of the problem at hand.
6. Digital Maturity: Whether it’s teachers in education or employees in our organisations, investing in improving digital skills is critical.
7. Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity: Josh emphasized the importance of having a well-thought-out disaster recovery plan. It ensures the smooth continuation of operations even when key personnel are unavailable. This aspect is particularly relevant for business owners because giving people access to data and information is key and often in those scenarios you need to be mindful of managing your technical team’s well-being as well.
8. Internet of Things (IoT): The use of biotech devices in education requires thoughtful control and network segmentation. While not all of us may deal with IoT directly, it’s a growing concern in the world of education and technology.
9. Artificial Intelligence: Regardless of your approach to AI, it’s crucial to understand where your data is going. Avoid sending personally identifiable data to open-access AI engines and be mindful of accuracy and bias issues. Many organizations are adopting internal AI solutions, and exciting developments are on the horizon.
Of course, this all depends on your use case, and I think what we’ll see in the near future is many organisations have internal LLM’s available to their teams and learners. And excitingly, we are just launching our first ever generative AI version of Coach M so watch this space. I’m sure I’ll share more of that as it unfolds.
10. Immersive Technologies: Consider how immersive technologies can enhance education, particularly for individuals with disabilities. Exploring these possibilities can lead to greater inclusion and innovation. Fascinating to be considering these aspects from the educational viewpoint, and think about:
“What does it mean to me?”
“What can I learn from this?”
At Coach M, we take pride in our commitment and being across all our cybersecurity and information privacy. So please feel free to reach out to me and discuss your needs. I hope you’ve found these insights from EduTech valuable. Thanks to the EduTech team for their outstanding work in bringing together such informative sessions. Stay tuned for more updates.