With technology increasingly distributed and accessible by people throughout organizations, the role of IT has become an enabling and leading function. The modern tech officer has to not only understand how the technology landscape is shifting but also orchestrate initiatives across a broad range of stakeholders. This means creating environments where staff can experiment, empowering teams to move quickly, and building deep relationships to understand business needs. In this interview, Klara Jelinkova, vice president and University CIO at Harvard University, speaks with McKinsey senior partner and convener of McKinsey’s Women in Tech conference, Gayatri Shenai, about why a CIO needs to be like an “octopus” in working with a wide range of stakeholders, and the importance of radical transparency around total costs to enable technology to support Harvard’s mission. What follows is an edited version of the conversation.
This interview is part of a series developed around McKinsey’s Women in Tech event, which spotlights trailblazing women who are not only breaking barriers but also reshaping the tech landscape.
Enabling the mission of the university through technology
Gayatri Shenai: Klara, what are the three most critical technology capabilities you need to deliver value to the university?
Klara Jelinkova: In the context of IT in higher education, value means enabling the mission of the university—academic excellence, research innovation, and societal impact—through technology. We often think of this in terms of innovation, but this also means core technology systems to enable Harvard’s daily activities.
For us, three important capabilities to deliver this value are developing a secure and stable infrastructure to enable innovation; a strong data platform to capture, manage, and responsibly leverage data insights; and an integrated digital infrastructure for research and learning. Let me take these one at a time.
One, a cornerstone of our innovation infrastructure is a structured emerging-technology program built to support innovative ideas from staff in a low-cost way. This gives teams a place to develop, test, and prove their ideas.
Two, having a robust data platform is foundational. We have invested in building up our data infrastructure to enable advanced analytics and in data governance frameworks, which include data security, privacy, and ethics. We’ve been using these frameworks to think through the data implications of new technologies like AI.
Then three, we are building a scalable AI-ready infrastructure to support both advanced research and personalized education. This includes expanding computational and data support for regulated research and GPU-based computing.
Developing these capabilities was a big cocreation effort with partners at Harvard. None of the three could work as an IT-driven initiative alone. That’s where orchestration comes in. You have to think and act like a partner with a wide range of people. Sometimes it’s with the provost’s office, sometimes it’s with one or more of the schools, and sometimes it’s with outside groups. An example of this is our partnership with the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and six peer institutions on a hydropowered research data center.
You have to think and act like a partner with a wide range of people.
Everywhere all at once as a partner to the university
Gayatri Shenai: What’s your approach to partnering with the various stakeholders you need to make technology work best?
Klara Jelinkova: You have to be an octopus. What that means is you have to be everywhere with everyone making sure that IT is delivering value and is able to articulate the value from their perspective. This relationship building and nurturing is core to making IT successful.
We weigh in on data privacy, accessibility, compliance, security—that’s our “hard power.” Everything else is “soft power,” where you’re working with and helping to influence people. It’s reflected in a management principle I believe in: If you have to tell people what to do, you’ve already lost.
A new dawn for the technology officer
“Soft power” is actually much more powerful because it’s based on collaboration and helping people better use technology to deliver the outcomes they need. An important part of that process is talking to our business partners, being inquisitive, and figuring out what they’re thinking about. That level of understanding helps you offer them a solution before they ask for it.
This reality reflects the shift in IT, which was really about service management early in my career and is now more about strategic coleadership with business partners. That change includes the shift from tech delivery to connecting IT investments directly to outcomes in research, teaching, and administration.
In line with this shift is the move from centralized control to empowered teams. A big part of my role is empowering our business partners and IT teams to work together by helping articulate what the real value and mission is that we’re driving toward. This is really an orchestration skill.
‘Soft power’ is actually much more powerful because it’s based on collaboration and helping people better use technology to deliver the outcomes they need.
Building room to experiment and learn
Gayatri Shenai: How do you support innovation?
Klara Jelinkova: Through our structured innovation programs, we provide an environment where teams can try out ideas and move quickly to eliminate those that don’t work. Ideas come from all levels of the organization. We quantify the problem, and then we apply tech to solve it.
We give all staff-led pilot projects six months to experiment. If the projects succeed, we can fund them from an investment pool to scale. With how tech has evolved—and how we’re set up—you don’t need lots of money and a huge team to do experiments.
About 40 percent of our start-ups succeed enough to make it to the next round. What’s more important to focus on, however, is the 60 percent failure rate. That’s our target rate, in fact. You need room for failures, or you can’t experiment and learn. We celebrate failures for this reason. But it’s hard on our tech teams, because they are invested in the effort and have nursed it along. This is also hard in a long-lived organization like Harvard, where risk taking is not easy.
About 40 percent of our start-ups succeed enough to make it to the next round.
Pilot with a scaling mindset
Gayatri Shenai: How do you involve your business partners in the innovation process?
Klara Jelinkova: We partner directly with business stakeholders to define value and have them review pilot projects to help us decide whether to commit to them or to discontinue them. In 2022, in our first emerging-technology innovation program, a team of staff began building a sandbox to experiment with generative AI. We were one of the first universities ready to do this, and it has helped us move faster and become a leader in AI in higher education. We got started with very little money, then scaled from there to create a tool that is now in daily use by people across the university.
In our innovation programs, staff members make a pitch, such as “With this new tech, we can save X hours on task Y.” We pair them with advisors and connect them with various technologies, including big tech and open source, to help realize their vision. We put different tech through the paces and see which ones could deliver outcomes. There’s a learning cycle. We pilot at small scale. If it delivers value, it continues; if it does not , it concludes.
We pilot at small scale. If it delivers value, it continues; if it does not, it concludes.
Decisions based on a model of the total costs
Gayatri Shenai: What does your financial operating model look like, and how does it work in practice?
Klara Jelinkova: As Harvard’s central IT provider, we provide services to both the central administration and the schools. For those services, we provide total-cost modeling that includes life cycle costs, risk mitigation, and institutional impact.
For services we charge to the schools, we have a committee, which includes the CFO, that essentially reviews the bill. We have agreements in place, and any changes have to go through committee as well.
I subscribe to radical transparency. We show things as they are and the costs for all the lines of business. As part of this process, we provide information for different internal clients showing clearly what services they’ve consumed. This transparency applies to us as well. Every two years, we get external input from a visiting committee of experts from across the higher education and technology industries. It’s like a full physical. We provide information on all aspects of IT at Harvard, they listen, and then they provide a report analyzing how we’re doing. It’s very helpful.
