Profiles in IT: Jamey Hansen

Jamey Hansen, Chief Strategic Innovation Officer at the College of Liberal Arts, is excited about the University community coming together to support the IT Strategic Plan in our everyday work. Learn more about his vision for creating strategists who make big impacts through their work every day.

Interviewer: Tell us about your role at the College of Liberal Arts. How does your role as Chief Strategic Innovation Officer for LATIS shape the way people use technology at CLA?

Jamey Hansen: LATIS is innovation services for the College of Liberal Arts. Our partnership with OIT allows us to support high-level work for researchers and academic needs like system and server administration and technology. 

Some of our team never consider themselves IT at all: they are PhDs in anthropology, psychology, and other fields—they are there for the research and they just happen to work in a unit that is sometimes referred to as the IT team. CLA is highly distributed and each department has a different approach, so we work to develop one-on-one relationships with faculty and graduate students to understand their needs. Our team builds trust and confidence so that they can rely on us and move forward with new technologies.

My role is keeping that group together as they focus on research support, academic technology, and guiding strategic program changes using technology. LATIS and other technology professionals get to see behind the curtain and really understand how people and things connect across the University — our approach has been to turn these connections into a strategic asset to help move CLA forward. The relational connection to faculty, staff, and even some undergraduate students, that knowledge helps us move the college forward with processes, programs, strategic planning, facilitation, and technology changes.

Learn more about Jamey’s role and experience.

Interviewer: What was your path to becoming the Chief Strategic Innovation Officer? How did your other experiences shape your approach today?

Jamey Hansen: I thought I was going to be a teacher, but over time, I realized I wanted to make teaching better. I have a drive towards improvement. I’ve always ended up in technology, and I bring a background in education, early grad work in instructional technology, and then I started here in CLA and evolved into a leadership role.

One of the things that helped me get better was the Management of Technology program here at the University. It pushed me to think about technology innovation and introduced me to a cohort of other people at the University learning about technology management. Additionally, the Art of Hosting work that we did centered on how to bring people together to work on the hard things. That has been core to our work. CLA is one of the most complex environments around how decisions are made — how do you work through that and build a community that can work through change? It taught me how to navigate non-linear, iterative processes and was key to my development. The third thing that helped me develop was the IT Leadership Program (ITLP). Back in 2011 and 2012, we had deep leadership development programs that were key to my early development. 

Interviewer: What is the Three-Year IT Strategic Plan and why is it important to people at the University?

Jamey Hansen: The Three-Year IT Strategic Plan will fit within the University’s Elevate Extraordinary 2030 plan. We are starting with two key questions: who are we trying to support and what is it they need to get done?

How does IT enable our stakeholders to be successful? The plan will lay out these things and show how IT is going to get that done, including the needed capabilities IT will need to accomplish what our users need. And it’s not just supposed to be a written document, it is for everyone to think about in their work, be adaptable, and focus on what people need right now.

Of course, things will continue to change and evolve. As I am leading LATIS and participating in these strategic plan efforts, I am thinking about how we can develop strategists. People that can think about their individual, day-to-day decisions and how they relate to what our users need. As priorities change, how do we follow them appropriately and with awareness? A strategic plan shapes how we decide what to do and what not to do.

The strategic plan needs to be adaptable, centered on the who and why, and incorporate people at all levels to be a part of it.

Interviewer: How does technology play a role in the University's future? 

Jamey Hansen: Enablement is central. It’s a fact: the University can’t run without IT. Not just because everything is digital, but everything has an IT aspect to it now.

The world is changing the game. AI, for example, is changing the game and disrupting what we know. In some ways, it’s a continuation of what we’ve been using technology for over the past decades, and in other ways it’s reshaping how we do our work.

IT doesn’t have the answers for what we should do with new technologies, but we have to be a key partner in helping the University figure it out. Not just by examining what new technologies can do, but by helping people use them and apply them to their work. We are learning new technologies ourselves! We are informed experts on how to connect people with tools and support them along the way.

Interviewer: How can interested people get involved and share their feedback during the planning process?

Jamey Hansen: Everyone is welcome. Events are ongoing, and it can be career-advancing just to raise your hand and participate in strategic conversations. Look out for more communications or contact [email protected] to get involved. You can also reach out to me directly. 

We have completed the survey and received over 400 responses that provided lots of great feedback. Later this month, we are turning the corner from seeking open-ended feedback to reporting back what we’ve heard and asking for reactions to specific ideas.

We want to honor every comment that comes in. A strategic plan isn’t a transactional thing where you give us information and we make a decision — when everyone thinks strategically, it creates more opportunities for you to create impact in your own area, especially around culture and building connections.