The business value of IT: How CIOs drive competitiveness

CIOs can't just chase the latest technology and expect to be competitive. Instead, they must cut friction and zero in on customer outcomes.

For Chris Campbell, CIO of DeVry University, competitiveness depends on tying investments directly to customer outcomes rather than chasing abstract innovation. He emphasizes the CIO's role as a cross-functional connector who can align leaders around competing priorities to keep the organization moving forward. Above all, Campbell believes strong business context -- not tools alone -- gives CIOs their greatest advantage in a fast-evolving tech landscape.

In the following interview, Campbell offers practical insights on how CIOs can balance innovation, cost and culture while leading IT's effect on organizational competitiveness.

Editor's note: The following transcript was edited for length and clarity.

What does competitiveness look like At DeVry, and how does IT support that?

Chris Campbell: For us, competitiveness really isn't about technology, specifically. It's about moving more quickly with less friction and a strong focus on how we get to market. It's about removing friction from our students' day-to-day lives.

How can CIOs cut friction and cost behind the scenes while still improving the student experience?

Campbell: We don't really think about it in terms of cost-cutting, per se. Of course, we're always looking to optimize our efficiencies -- that's table stakes. However, we're really focused on putting the right platforms in place to evolve the student experience while driving the appropriate levels of efficiency.

How has technology improved strategic decision-making at DeVry?

Campbell: Well, technology is changing every day. We have long been proponents of advanced analytics and AI. We've recently released our AI commitments to our students and the industry at large. So, we eat our own dog food, so to speak.

We believe that every role will require AI fluency. Technology fluency comes first, and we did that long ago. Now we're focused on AI fluency. So, the combination of analytics and recent improvements in AI use has helped us make better business decisions more quickly.

However, we do believe that human-in-the-loop is critical. All this technology really helps us amplify what our folks are doing to help our students.

Do you engage in benchmarking to see what competitor institutions are doing or what tools they're using?

Campbell: We do look, but that's subjective. All you get is anecdotal information, generally. I do chat with peers, and we talk a little bit about where we're at and how we're using the tools.

One of the biggest challenges for higher education is cultural.

I think you'll continue to see that one of the biggest challenges for higher education is cultural. There's such a concern about academic integrity, for example, that the blockers tend to come up very quickly.

So, we spend a lot of time in that space. We put our AI commitments out there on our website. We are in front of that with our faculty training. We're helping the rest of the organization understand why we have to open our arms up to AI in the classroom. And this isn't our first rodeo. We've done this with other technologies.

What is the most important trade show on your calendar?

Campbell: I like Gartner's leadership series. Those events are smaller, a little more intimate and not so vendor focused. However, I balance that with Dreamforce, because our tech stack is based that way. At Dreamforce, I can hear from like-minded customers. We don't necessarily operate as a traditional university, so I can get a sense of how folks across industries are using the same tech we're using.

How do you evaluate where AI can offer value versus where it's mostly hype?

Campbell: We're still mostly on the deterministic side. We believe we need firm guardrails and governance for how AI is used. However, we must expose our learners to all the various aspects. Figuring out how to do that really requires the right partnerships.

We tend to go with industry leaders, such as Google, Microsoft and Salesforce, when we're looking at tools to expose to customers. It turns out those are some of the same tools we think about when we're doing internal work.

Can you share specific AI use cases your team has implemented?

Campbell: We're using AI on a few fronts, and they're all about student success and support. We have a generative AI (GenAI) bot based on Agentforce by Salesforce, which is the platform we use. We have that on our student portal, and it can answer questions and serve our students' needs.

Most of our students are full-time working adults, and they do most of their studying after hours. Our advisors and faculty are logging off as they log in, so we must put tools like these GenAI chatbots in place so they're available 24/7.

A partner use case to that is that we use GenAI to monitor and audit the conversations. We're in a highly regulated industry, and so we're using GenAI to examine all transcripts -- human to human, human to computer, computer to computer. They're all monitored and audited, and then we flag any concerns, challenges or issues through our internal sources.

We also use cross-functional leadership. For instance, we have something called AI Lab -- a governance group that monitors, green lights or cancels a variety of AI initiatives that we chase.

How do you balance cost control with the need to modernize and innovate?

Campbell: It's all about the outcomes. We have three or four key KPIs that we use around our learner outcomes. These include learner success in the classroom and success in their career. If you frame your investments, work, maintenance -- all that you do -- in those student outcomes, it makes those decisions very easy.

It's much less about cutting costs than it is about ensuring those outcomes continue to improve. Then, of course, governance to hold the line flat on your efficiency. That's how a school like DeVry University is able to have industry-leading outcomes in student persistence and graduation when, for six years, we've maintained flat tuition for our customers.

What tech capabilities do you think can best help organizations stand out over the next few years?

Campbell: It will be about doubling down on data, analytics and AI. We will probably soon see a bit of a pivot where people use AI to prepare for AI. Right now, there's a lot of churn around data and the question 'Is your data ready for AI?' The problem is, to be competitive, you can't wait to get your data right. You must pick your use case, vet your data set, then move, monitor and evolve it.

I think we're starting to use a bit of the generative tools to prep our data, evaluate it and see how we can improve it before we light up our agents. We're having some success. I think there'll be more in that area.

The other thing is, we've said for a long time that CIOs need to know the business -- in my case, the university and how it operates. That does not go away. For all that AI is bringing to the table, the superpower will still be the context of your business. Those colleagues and folks who know everything about your business and customers -- they're the ones who can help a company use AI to drive significant value.

What operational or cultural barriers most often slow down technology-driven change?

Campbell: Often, it's just everybody's priorities. Everybody has a different perspective. Everybody understands their piece of the business, but they don't always think about what the cross impact is or could be. That's the CIOs job -- to draw those parallels, connect those dots and help folks understand that we all have one goal and we need to align on how to get it done.

Nobody would ever say they don't want to improve or they don't want to service your customers better, but we all have pressures in the moment. The CIO's role is becoming even more about looking forward and across to help stitch that together.

AI does not replace judgment. It just changes where judgment is applied.

What advice would you give other CIOs trying to make their organizations more competitive with limited resources?

Campbell: Every technology decision is a tradeoff, and pretending otherwise just slows everybody down. So, having those conversations is important. Additionally, keep in mind that AI does not replace judgment. It just changes where judgment is applied.

Is there anything else related to market competitiveness that you think is important?

Campbell: The CIO role is expanding because the digital decisions of the past are business decisions today. There's no getting around it, because almost every company is a digital company. Look in your project management office and try to find projects that don't require some piece of the tech stack to be adjusted or cleaned up. Cross-functional communications, governance and leadership is critical. The entire leadership team needs to understand how to use technology.

My job is really to turn complexity into momentum. I need to be able to make sense of the complexity, and to tie it to the outcomes we need as an organization.

Tim Murphy is a site editor and writer for the IT Strategy team at TechTarget.