Estimated reading time: 2 minutes
Kevin Morooney, vice president of trust and identity and NET+
Over the course of several decades, information technology in higher education has ascended from a single campus mainframe to the university boardroom. EdTech: Focus on Higher Education recently interviewed Internet2 vice president of trust and identity and NET+ programs, Kevin Morooney, to discuss how the role of technology professionals has evolved, particularly over the past year due to the pandemic, and how IT professionals are playing a more strategic leadership role in higher education today.
“Acceleration, by definition, is the rate at which change changes,” Morooney says. “The rate at which information technology is changing is not really even conceivable by humans. We can’t completely wrap our minds around it.”
“One of the key skills of a good IT professional is understanding what people are working with and what they’re trying to express,” Morooney says. “Your users don’t know what you know. You need to be kind and you need to have the skills of a good therapist. Let them talk about their needs and get everything on the table. Then, you can take what you’ve learned from them and repackage it in a way that might help them make sense of how to leverage all of these capabilities.”