← CTRL-ALT-LEAD with David Hinson
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- [00:11]
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This town ain't my home. Set us only for a while.
- [00:15]
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I'm David Henson and I serve as campus CIO for Bolden Networks for Higher Education. Welcome to Control Alt Lead. We're trying to solve 2026 people problems with 2016 staffing models. Campuses have piled up more systems, more cybersecurity obligations, more cloud services, more vendors, more compliance requirements, more expectations from students and faculty, and a lot more risk and oh yeah, AI too. And we haven't added more people to handle it, just more vacancies on our org charts. So today I want to talk about managed services. Not as an outsourcing debate, but as a fundamental survival strategy. I've sat through a lot of cabinet meetings where this got framed as should we outsource? Yes or no? That's the wrong question. The question I ask now, and the one I'd push any CIO to ask, is where should our scarce internal talent actually create value? One thing I've learned leading our Executive Advisory services team for Bolden Networks is that every IT department is convinced it's a special case. And in a lot of ways they're right. Because every campus has its own culture, its own politics, its own history, its own budget fights. But strip that away and I keep running into the same problems, campus after campus. One networking engineer supporting 600 switches. A security analyst who's also somehow the compliance officer. A sysadmin who became the identity management expert only because nobody else ever touched Active Directory and lived to talk about it. Rebuilding the week's production priorities on a Friday afternoon because two people quit on Thursday. Sound familiar? None of these teams are short on talent. They're just carrying more operational weight than their staffing model was ever built to hold. Here's the mistake I see happening over and over and over again. A position opens up. The instinct is we need to post this and hire. Sometimes, sure, but not always. A vacancy doesn't have to turn into another line on the org chart. Sometimes it should turn into a contract. A partnership, a fractional role that gets you expertise without the full time overhead. The real question is whether the work is strategic or operational. Strategic work usually needs someone who knows your institution, your history, your politics, and your relationships. Operational work, however, usually just needs to happen reliably, on schedule, correctly. You don't necessarily need the same person or the same headcount model for both. There used to be an assumption that every institution needed a full time executive running every major function. That assumption doesn't hold up under the new normal of today. Say you're a regional private university with 1800 students, do you need a full time Chief Information Security Officer? Maybe. Or maybe what you actually need is CISO level thinking 20 hours a month instead of 40 hours a week. Someone who builds the strategy, reviews policy, runs the tabletop, exercises, briefs the board, sits with the auditors, walks you through incident response, mentors the staff you already have. That's a different value proposition than paying full time salary and benefits for expertise that sits idle between major projects. It's about putting the right amount of expertise against your actual need. No more, no less. Same logic applies further down your org chart. Do you need another network engineer or do you just need someone available at 2am when the core switch dies? Do you need another database administrator or simply guaranteed expertise the moment your production database throws an error? The smarter purchase is almost always the outcome and not the headcount. So when should you seriously consider managed services or a strategic partner? Rather than posting up another position with hr, I'd point to a handful of signals. First, chronic vacancies. If you've been trying to fill the same CyberSecurity role for eight months with no bites, that's not bad luck. That's data screaming at you about your market and your uncompetitive comp structure. Second, burnout. When your best people spend every day just keeping the lights on, innovation stops cold. Good people don't quit because they're busy. They quit because they're worn out. Third, after hours dependence. If every major outage comes down to one person answering their cell during dinner, you don't have a resilient team. You have a single point of failure with a phone number. Fourth, compliance pressure. None of it is getting simpler. If your team is learning the rules from a midnight CLAUDE prompt the week before an audit, it's definitely time to rethink the model. And fifth, project stagnation. If every strategic initiative keeps sliding because operational fires win every single week, your staffing model is doing exactly what it was built to do. It's just that it was built for a world and a reality that no longer exists. There's actually one more trigger point that doesn't come up enough. Succession. Ask yourself if your network engineer retired tomorrow, what breaks on Monday? If your ERP administrator takes another job next month, how many systems stop moving forward? If your CIO announced retirement today, how much institutional knowledge walks out the door with them? If those questions make you uncomfortable, it should, because it's telling you something real now. What does success actually look like here? I don't measure a managed services engagement by how much work disappeared. I measure it by what my internal team finally has time and space to perform. Fewer emergencies. Projects that finish on schedule. Documented processes instead of tribal knowledge locked in one person's head. Staff who take a vacation and actually stay off email spending a cabinet meeting talking about student success instead of explaining why the printers went down. Again. That's what I'm looking for. Peace of mind Effective managed services relationships are actually quite boring. Tickets just get resolved, patches get installed. Backups actually work and are regularly tested. Networks simply stay up. Security controls mature reliably in the background. Documentation gets better rather than worse. Nobody throws a party because authentication worked as designed. But if it doesn't work, everybody notices and will let you know about it. Because that's the job. Being invisible when it's going well. The concern I hear most in these conversations is some version of if we bring in a partner, don't we lose control? Only if you pick the wrong partner. A good partnership doesn't take over your culture. It works inside it. Your institution still sets strategy and still owns the relationships with faculty and students and the board. The partner just brings capacity and specialized skills that would take you years and a lot of luck to build internally. I tell CIOs to think of it as extending the bench, not replacing the roster. Every good athletic program has depth. Higher ed IT needs the same thing. So here's where I'll leave it with you, gentle listener. The goal isn't building a technology empire within your institution. It isn't even doing everything yourself. I say this as someone who spent years thinking it was the goal is reliable technology that actually moves the institution's mission forward. If another hire gets you there, hire them. If a fractional executive gets you there, bring one in. If a managed services partner gets you there faster and with less risk, don't let old assumptions talk you out of it. Budgets are only getting leaner, complexity keeps climbing, and expectations aren't going anywhere. At least not anytime soon. The IT organizations that hold up under that pressure won't be the ones with the biggest staff. They'll be the ones that know exactly which capabilities to own and which ones they're smart enough to share. Thanks for listening. I'll see you soon.
- [10:04]
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Better late than never.
- [10:09]
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This week's episode uses an AI voice clone trained upon hours of my natural speaking voice. While the voice you hear today is cloned, the words, thoughts, and ideas here are 100% my own.