Digital Leadership Must-Haves for 2025: A CDO’s Picks
A Q&A with Ed Wozencroft
For many years we’ve watched the increasing impact of digital information technologies on our higher education systems. Top-level leadership has overwhelmingly recognized this important factor in strategic discussions and institutional planning, such that the higher education CIO is now more commonly seen “at the table” as a valuable input to strategic initiatives.
And we’re seeing the emergence of a relatively new role: the chief digital officer; the CDO [sometimes called the CDIO]. The New Jersey Institute of Technology named Ed Wozencroft as their first-ever CDO in March of 2023. (Wozencroft also serves as NJIT’s vice president for digital strategy and CIO).
Now that he’s more than a year and a half into his official chief digital officer role, we’ve asked Wozencroft to reflect on his areas of concentration: What work must digital information leaders “own”? And given the prominence of digital leadership roles, what will those “must-have” concentrations be for digital leaders working in higher education in 2025?
Mary Grush: What are your picks as “must-haves” for digital information leaders working in higher education in 2025? I’m not asking for a comprehensive list of everything they should be involved in — but please comment on the areas you feel will be the most necessary foci for successful digital leaders this coming year.
Human-Centered Digital Transformation
Ed Wozencroft: My first pick is a call to action and a reminder to continue to focus on the human-centered aspects of digital transformation. Now more than ever, that’s incredibly important, especially given the current perceptions of AI. Our students — and future members of the workforce — are nervous about AI: “Will AI displace me? Will I be able to get a job? In four years will AI have replaced the thing I’m now studying?”
Even at a polytechnic, students are more leery of this than perhaps many would think. Students understand that AI
can be assistive, but they’re very worried about it replacing them, and about it replacing their classroom and faculty interactive experience. They worry about our societal lack of maturity around AI and what the career landscape might look like for them 4, 10, or 20 years out.
At NJIT, we’re committed to improving registration, class scheduling, and advisory services based on human-centered design principles, and, leveraging AI, we’re focused on giving the student a far more personalized learning experience than they’ve ever had. And several course components allow them to explore, safely, the parameters and ethics of AI in instructional settings.
Grush: I’m sure students’ worries over AI point to a very relevant example of why human-centered digital transformation is a critical piece of effective digital leadership. Readers should check out the Q&A we did together for Campus Technology (April 2024), “Toward a Human-Centered Digital Ecosystem: NJIT” for a deeper dive.
What’s your second pick for the “must-haves” list?
Ethical AI Integration
Wozencroft: My second pick, parlaying into the first, is AI integration with ethical guardrails. That means making sure that as AI continues to emerge and change, we’re thinking about the ethics of it and understanding privacy concerns, algorithmic bias, transparency issues, and questions of equitable deployment. It’s something that I’ve been in a lot of conversations with CIOs about, and it’s only getting more important.
Many times a CIO or a CDO will find themselves on the responding end of an inquiry about why someone’s data was used in an inappropriate way. AI has the propensity to make that conversation tenfold times more difficult for us.
