How AI Dashboards Can Strengthen Higher Education Board Governance:

Changing Higher Ed podcast 277 with host Dr. Drumm McNaughton and guest Marc Huffman

Transcript: Changing Higher Ed podcast 277  – with host Dr. Drumm McNaughton and guest Marc Huffman

Introduction to Changing Higher Ed^®

Welcome to Changing Higher Ed^®, a podcast dedicated to helping higher education leaders improve their institutions. With your host, Dr. Drumm McNaughton, CEO of The Change Leader, a consultancy that helps higher ed leaders holistically transform their institutions. Learn more at changinghighered.com. And now, here’s your host, Drumm McNaughton.

[00:00:20] Guest Introduction

Drumm McNaughton: Thank you, David.

My guest today is Mark Huffman, CEO of onboard and escribe. Mark has over 25 years’ experience in the software industry, including deep leadership experience and expertise in running organizations and being on their boards. Before joining onboard, he was CEO of BlackLine, a leading cloud-based software platform for automating financial close accounting and compliance processes.

And before that, held key executive roles at Oracle NetSuite. Why Mark? Well, AI is reinventing everything and Mark’s experience in software and in boards is the nexus of where we’re going. And he joins me today to talk about board governance, its challenges in higher ed institutions, and how AI is helping trustees to better fulfill their fiduciary duties and how boards can become higher functioning and better stewards of institutions.

Drumm: Marc, welcome to the program.

Marc: Great to be here. Thank you very much.

Drumm: It’s my pleasure. I’m looking forward to a great conversation today. You folks at Onboard are doing some amazing things. Of course, we all know AI is changing the way higher ed works. It’s changing the way everything works, but especially where you guys are focused on board work. I really want to explore that because it’s opening up all new possibilities for trustees.

[00:00:52] Guest Background and Career Journey

Drumm: Before we get into that though, give us a little bit about your background, if you would. How did you get into this kind of stuff?

Marc: I was fortunate to grow up at the right time, in the right place in the world and got into technology.

30 years ago, or so. And through that built a career in sales and Marketing and then eventually executive leadership for companies like Oracle, NetSuite. I was an officer of that business, really involved at the board level there, became the CEO of a public company called BlackLine Systems. Was on the board as a member of the management team.

There was an independent board member at a public company in the commerce space called Channel Advisor out of Raleigh, North Carolina. And then most recently I joined. Onboard just out of a real appreciation for the need and value in governance overall. So, I’ve, for the past six months, been running and operating our software platform called Onboard that focuses on governance needs.

Board portals, agenda management for small, mid-size organizations, and some fairly large institutions with a particular expertise and concentration of customers in higher education.

Drumm: That’s a very fascinating background.

[00:02:22] Challenges in Higher Education Governance

Drumm: You’ve clearly got the chops to be able to look at what’s going on boards right now because it’s challenging, isn’t it?

Marc: It’s challenging, generally speaking before you consider and throw in the nature of how fast the world is evolving around artificial intelligence. And then if you go a click deeper and you specify what’s going on, on universities or higher education institution, campuses and boards and trustees, it is the epicenter of governance needs at the moment.

Drumm: And I fully agree with that. I would also add that sitting on a higher ed board is probably one of, if not the most challenging board assignment anybody can have

Marc: without questions. The nature of the governance discussions in some ways are very similar to what’s going on in commercial businesses or other organizations.

And then you have. The added spotlight being shown on things more acute, like DEI like trust in institutions overall and the political environment or the willingness of an organization to allow the political environment to be a part of the campus discussion, which flows into free speech. Really, really challenging times.

For those types of organizations.

Drumm: And of course we’re seeing that with what’s going on with Harvard, with Columbia, and many other institutions vis-a-vis against the Trump administration. Before we start getting into all those issues, because we could spend a full hour just talking about issues.

[00:04:08] What is OnBoard 

Drumm: Tell us a little bit about Onboard. What is it that you guys do?

Marc: We manage a platform that is specifically tailored. And very easy use for organizations to manage all of their governance needs in one safe and secure place. We help plan agendas for both core meetings, subcommittees, even management and operating.

Meetings. We help people organize the chaos that is the materials that get prepared for those meetings, making sure those materials are sound, have the ability for trustees or board members to prepare in advance in a much easier and thoughtful way. We manage follow-up items like voting. Tasks that come out of that.

We help manage terms; we can help with assessments a whole host of additional services. And on top of that given the 6,000 plus organizations that we help with that work, we have a sort of certain expertise in a couple of key areas where we serve a lot of very similar boards. So we have a, an opinion about what is.

Affecting them and a lot of experience with them that we can sell boards, set up the best way to run and operate the platforms that support governance.

Drumm: I’m curious, what is the largest board book you’ve ever seen?

Marc: I can’t remember the exact data, but it was, I knew of it because it came to my attention because it wasn’t supported because it came with, a whole host of very intricate drawings and designs and things that balloon the size of it. So, we had to find a way from a system standpoint. To break it into logical pieces because no other platform in the world would actually consider taking a document of that size and making use of it in the digital world.

Drumm: The biggest one I’ve ever seen was 500 pages.

Marc: This was significantly larger. I figured is pages and size, given the amount of detail of architectural drawings, et cetera.

Drumm: That kind of brings me back to the challenges that board members have that board book and I’ve been secretaries of board, been responsible for putting out the board book.

You do your best to get it out the board members two weeks prior, so they have a chance to read and the operable word being, have a chance to read it. Many of them unfortunately, don’t read it ahead of time. But if you’ve got too large a board book, how does a trustee get through all that information, be able to digest it to what the salient points are?

[00:07:00] AI’s Role in Board Governance 

Drumm: I think this is where AI can be such a great tool to help

Marc: without question, and this is an area that we’re really focused on specifically. How do you, how does an organization, put more value? Time and effort and energy and focus on board discussion, board preparation, and less on material gathering, synthesizing those materials, publishing those materials.

There’s a tremendous amount of energy and overhead calories, if you will, that get spent on that, that detract from the ability of the trustee to better prepare and digest the information and show up in their best way to make use of their skills to help the organization.

Drumm: And I think that’s a critical point because higher ed institutions, the majority of them, especially public institutions, it’s like running a small city.

You’ve got multiple functions on you. You’ve got police functions, you’ve got fire functions, you’ve got dormitories, you’ve got ho, quote student hotels. You’ve got areas where work gets done.

Marc: Bars and restaurants on some occasions.

Drumm: Exactly. So you’ve got all of those challenging things to do as a trustee.

You’ve got to be able to dive down and analyze what are the critical things that are going on, and with a tool like AI to help you. To me, that’s critical.

Marc: Yes, I couldn’t agree more. I think the stride the progress that has been made in ai, and let’s be very clear. AI is something that is here and it’s here to stay.

My opinions on this have changed dramatically in the last 12 months. And tangent, bear with me, if you will if I rewound the tape of my existence by about three months just at the personal level, I would engage with a model chat, GPT to help improve some of my writing build agendas for my own meetings, outlines, et cetera.

And then I would go in and I would purposely make changes to things. So nobody had the awareness that I was using some third-party tool. Fast forward today, and I think many executives, board members or trustees who utilize these tools should be doing it with the awareness that anybody who I see not making use of these tools is falling behind significantly.

And then if I transfer that to the uniqueness of the education institution’s role in preparing students Six months ago, a year ago, people that utilized generative AI tools could be considered cheating the academic experience. I would argue that today if the institutions are not preparing the students to make use of those tools, they’re not actually preparing them for success in the real world.

Drumm: I would agree. Higher ed obviously faces a lot of challenges. Cybersecurity, which is, you’ve got AI that can work on both sides. You’ve got AI who can work to hack you, and then you’ve got AI to help you prevent that. You’ve got communication strategy, political government trust in the institution, things along these lines, but higher ed isn’t very well prepared for these things in many respects, and it’s up to trustees to ensure that administration is doing what it should be doing.

That’s where having a broad experience across a board is really important. What are you thinking on how. Boards need to be functioning and how board service is changing given these threats that we have to higher ed.

[00:11:25] Board Composition and Strategy

Marc: I think a lot of this, in many cases, it always comes back to this from a starting point. Board composition cannot be viewed as a throwaway or a political entitlement. It has to be something. That has meaningful impact on the long-term strategy, vision, and health of the institution or organization.

At these times, more important than ever. It has to be someone who has broader experiences that understands the role of the institution and preparing the student for the real world, real world governance, things that touch on these political issues in nature and a level of independence and awareness that there’s multiple constituents in this city that the university president runs that should have a voice in that governance discussion.

Not to say that voice should be the ultimate voice, but they certainly are a component of the discussion. Boards have to reach through and understand what student opinion is on their needs in the long term. Opinions and things. Faculty, very important community that they operate in.

Increasingly important amongst many other things. And so board composition, one big, big important thing. Strategy would be the next, in my opinion.

Drumm: Let me interject just a little bit on that because you’ve hit on one of the pet peeves that I have on boards. When we do work with boards, we use a board skills matrix, which incidentally is based on the strategic plan and what are the oversight needs that a board must have for particular areas.

But what I see with. Especially with public boards is you get donors to govern to governors, political campaigns, all these kind of folks on there. And one board that I can think of right off the top of my head, this was back a couple of years ago, seven member board, which is a decent number for for-profit.

That’s usually more the norm for nonprofit higher ed. It probably should be a few more than that. They had four lawyers. They had one nurse. They had a former military officer who used to be the superintendent of one of the academies and an accountant. Zero. Expertise in higher education. How can a board of trustees look at what they need to be looking at if they don’t have the proper expertise to do that?

Marc: Yes. Just can’t happen in a highly functioning environment that like we have to put ourselves in the real world. Those sort of things have happened. Are happening today, and they will happen in the future. There’s just got to be other places that are perhaps less impactful from the negative consequence to accommodate those sort of pressures on presidents and boards.

My experience tells me that’s a great place for fundraising. So below the core trustee board in someplace in the university system that’s involved in endowment fundraising or other fundraising would be a much better place to park those that are more politically minded than those that are more governance minded.

Drumm: Yes, I would fully agree. And I’m sorry for interrupting. You were about to talk strategy.

Marc: Yes, I just, the next thing after board composition is, and I’m sure you’ve seen this, there are organizations or institutions that are really crystal clear and good at strategy. Have a long plan and a vision.

Then there’s others who maybe could improve greatly in that area. And then there’s some shockingly places that it just doesn’t exist and there’s just meandering their way through. What would be governance? I think it’s, this is also, especially in higher education of critical time to have a good long range and strategic view of what the governance needs are.

And the organization’s purpose, vision, and execution engine would be like, and then being able to manage your governance process against it. And this is an area where I think.

[00:15:56] AI in Boardroom Operations 

Marc: AI in the boardroom is going to be tremendously valuable. Imagine a scenario where you’re able to codify this strategy and have it exist in your governance platform.

And as you create agendas, as you create books of materials and you cover topics, follow action items, you’re able to. Inquire with your board governance portal and ask it, how does the discussion topic relate to where we are in our strategic vision? Where are we falling behind? What subjects over a prolonged period of time are we negligent in not discussing and covering and understanding?

Those I think are things that are hard for human beings to keep track of. And we have this powerful assistant, which is not taking control or decision making out of the trustee’s hands. It’s merely supporting that decision making and reminding them repeatedly about the purpose of it. That Strategy.

Drumm: When we were talking a few days ago, you gave me just an incredible idea on how to do this. Is if all your board minutes are in there and you’ve got, five years, 10 years of board minutes that get uploaded to this, and then you can start tracking conversations, recording them, uploading them.

You can get the thread of the discussion about. Metrics, KPIs, that type of thing. Where are you meeting those metrics? And this can go all the way down to your board committees as well, without question. So yes, being able to track board conversations, committee conversations, administration, what they’re putting inputs in.

It’s if you’ve got a tool like this, there’s no excuse for something dropping through the cracks.

Marc: Well, this is one of the, I think, the biggest breakthrough areas that AI can impact board work. So, in the pen and paper world, which hopefully there’s not a lot of institutions doing that, trying to synthesize information across multiple meetings, documents minutes, agendas.

Backwards is incredibly challenging. In a today’s iteration or yesterday’s iteration of a board portal, that same thing exists. Really challenging. You’re into individual documents, those documents that has served us well, creating agendas, helping people get the materials in the directors and trustees’ hands early for preparation, allowing annotations.

But they are separate things across time that you have to go in and try to stitch together. Artificial intelligence will allow you to synthesize all of that and return trended information about those metrics that are important to you, about the topics that you cover in your strategy, comparing to the strategy and the intent that you had, and keep you on track for things very, very quickly.

And it would take an individual months and months of time to try to synthesize the past five years of discussions.

Drumm: Oh, so, so true. And it seems to me this is going to change or is changing the role of the board secretary to be able to track what’s important, get the board book together, track what’s important, bring to the chair, and whoever else needs to know.

Things that are bubbling up that haven’t been taken care of. We talked a little bit about an institution’s board governance strategy. And that’s really keeping an institution in higher ed mission aligned.

Marc: Yes. And I think that’s a very difficult thing to do these days given the amount of, let’s call them distractions, but they’re potential firestorms of distraction. So, if you’re at one of these Ivy League schools right now, you’ve got a broader governance mandate to cover and look after, and yet I’m confident that 90% of the attention and discussion, as in one or two key areas right now having the ability to keep an entire.

Diverse board of trustees, board president, the people preparing agendas and materials all on the same page and focus on the broader, bigger picture in addition to those things that will flare up, I think is really important.

Drumm: So, in keeping track of all these things. That are going on. AI is obviously a great tool.

[00:21:04] Future of AI in Governance

Drumm: It’s not delegating the decision-making authority to AI, it’s bringing to light what are the critical things that need to be done right now, as well as helping to plan out for the future what is going to be important for us to look at for the next meeting. Now, one of the guests that I just recently had on the program worked for GE.

And of course, Jack Welsh was a master at having the planning calendar for the board and GE synchronized at all times. This is something that AI can easily do, can it not?

Marc: Without question, it’s looking like we’re on the cusp of this right now it’s heavy on our roadmap to support this and I cannot wait for the day that I, just for my own internal use to run my business can align my calendar so I can review the res, the performance and results in a given quarter against my targets and plans for the year through the process I use right now called a quarterly business review, and I can prepare the material for that.

I can load it to my board portal and ask it to turn that into my board framework for discussion with the board without any further overhead or material creation. Which is a tremendous time saver for me as the operator of the business and the management team that runs the business and know that it’s perfectly aligned to the agenda and the strategy that I’ve agreed to.

With our board, that same challenge exists on every campus in North America. Right now. They have the ability to run their business because some of those are business enterprises, the revenue generating functions on a campus, some of them are educational objectives that have objectives for the year.

Assess the performance of these things, vis-a-vis what the plan was, prepare the material once. Synthesize that material for easier creation, for board discussion, allowing the board to focus on the right things at all times and not be distracted by other things.

Drumm: And that goes hand in glove with creating the board books to make sure that they are aligned with what you need to do.

That takes a tremendous amount of work Nowadays, AI can easily assist with that by generating executive summaries of materials, financial risk modeling, predictive analysis, monitoring, media sentiment. It’s almost I don’t want to say it’s unlimited. You’ve got to have human input in it, but it certainly can make the role of the board, the board chair, and the board secretary far easier.

Marc: Yes, I think the front end of the process and agenda creation and book building is going to be a tremendous time saver and efficiency gain for the people involved in that. The rest of the value is going to be seen and delivered through the trustee in being able to take large amounts of data across a variety of subject matter and summarize it to the point where there will be no valid reason why a trustee would ever show up unprepared for a meeting in a strategic discussion.

And on top of that. For those trustees who maybe want to plan and prepare dialogue, the ability to interrogate the data in advance and form with an assistant in the platform form the best way to probe and ask questions to understand and guide the discussion for the benefit of the organization.

That’s all within our reach right now.

Drumm: You. That is a very interesting point. One of the things I was thinking about was making sure that you get to what are the key things, and AI can certainly do that, but you took it a step further in helping to formulate the questions, to dig down that.

Marc: Yes. In fact, just fast forward to not probably three quarters away from us right now, the ability.

Just like you interact with, you, interact with a prompt box in chat, GPT as an example. That same thing will occur in a board management platform. And you could say, I’d like to summarize the pending Q2 board materials for X, Y, Z university trustees. Great. There’s your summary taking what could be that 500-page book and turning it into five or less.

You could then follow in the question and say, what are the three most important subjects that we should be focusing our attention on based on what you know about our strategy and past meetings. And it’ll return you an answer and now you know where you should be spending your, making sure that if nothing else, this is the area that I want to have the best dialogue and understand the best to help participate in the dialogue with.

Drumm: Those are incredibly important points. The other thing you alluded to is the communications. Obviously, your relationship between the president and the board chair is probably the most critical relationship that an institution has. The best boards operate with transparency and structure. You’ve got communications challenges.

I’ve seen them with multiple institutions where instead of having a spoke and wheel communications model with the board in the middle going out to all constituencies, it’s more of an hourglass model where you’ve got the board, everything filters through the president and down that way. How does AI help with something like that?

Marc: Just broadly, and you and I talked about this last time we connected the voice of all of the constituents needs to be heard, I think in the university boardroom somehow some way and not pass through a filter in the hourglass. I think that AI allows the trustees with the support of the president the ability to take and gather feedback from a broad variety of sources and voices.

Think faculty surveys, student surveys, community surveys, and distill that information very succinctly for boards to understand. And that passes it through an independent method that doesn’t get co-opted perhaps by board president or someone else who’s the controlling the message. I think it’s really critical that that occurs, and I think AI allows for that much greater than any other platform we’ve seen in the past

Drumm: I don’t care whether you’re the worst or the best president you’re going to try and be as transparent as you can. But we all have our natural filters that we look through. So, it’s not an attempt to co-opt or anything like that? Well, in some cases it may be. And that those are the presidents that won’t be for long.

Marc: They exist.

On every one of these campuses, somebody’s teaching the concept of confirmation bias. Yes. And that is an innocent bias. But nonetheless, a bias that can be bypassed.

Drumm: Yes. So, what should boards be doing right now when it comes to AI? When it comes to digital literacy?

Marc: I think it’s important given how fast things are changing that there’s an openness. And an understanding influencing that gets developed at the board level about the power and risks, which allow for the flourishing of AI, but also allows for the things that, from a data security and privacy standpoint to catch up.

Those two things need to get into harmony. So, establishing AI use policies for governance, I think is. Pretty important to be doing. Ethics also plays a part in it. I think having an ethics sort of review or committee on AI overall governance and ethics be important. I think that training trustees to get make the most out of the tools available to them and bringing them into a digital literacy and AI literacy framework would be really, really important.

And then I think it’s important that it becomes part of the governance question. Are we delivering against the strategy top to bottom, but at the end, somewhere in there, the efficiency of the operation of the university. We should be questioning the use of AI in there to see if we’re getting the best gain of efficiencies, we can from an internal use.

And then secondly, I think it’s real important that trustees be the people asking the questions of, are we preparing tomorrow’s workforce and leaders to be successful in their community and in the world commerce, government service, whatever it is. Because unfortunately AI will be a part of the equation in the future.

Drumm: No doubt. I have one question I don’t have any clue on, and there’s a lot of questions I don’t have a clue on, but I’ve got one particularly with AI right now. Can AI monitor your strategies, including, your metrics, but also monitor the outside indicators to tell you if your strategies are working or not?

Marc: That’s a data issue and a risk issue in my opinion. So, in the framework of a closed board governance portal. Which is what we intend to offer to people. AI can come and take and say, I understand your strategy, I understand the metrics you’re driving to, and I can help you understand whether or not you’re meeting those metrics within the walls of the institution in this board.

Of course, once the closed system, once we decide we’re going to include someone else or third-party data and we compare it, yes, that can be done subject to. That data existing. Which it will probably take an organization or commercial effort or something else to participate in that. Once that data exists, yes. Subject to your ability to bring data in and out of the system based on your governance requirements and compare and contrast.

Drumm: So, where I think, and you tell me if my logic doesn’t make sense at this point. You’ve got an institution who has, they’re trying to transition to workforce development work from just straight academic degrees.

Are they being successful with their strategies? One of the inputs that they could use is BLS Data Bureau labor statistics Data to find out if in fact they’re pursuing the right degrees, if they can. And that’s publicly available data. So, if you’re looking at that, I would think that AI could help you.

So, this is another thing that boards could be looking at. And administration should be looking at

Marc: It’s doable right now, it’s doable today without question sure, but organizations like AGB as an example could potentially take institution data and create a benchmarking index more broadly.

And that’s what I was referring to about your willingness to move data out of your closed system to participate in something that could be pursued for the common good of higher education and there’s a lot of questions to be ironed out. There’s a lot of interest in that, but it moves very slowly what you’re referring to about statistical data that exists in the public domain right now.

Very doable.

Drumm: Yes.

Marc: Excellent.

Drumm: Marc, this has been an incredible conversation. Thank you. I love technology stuff. I’m, a closet geek. What can I say? But I also love governance, and you’re doing a great job in bringing all this together. Thank you.

Marc: Yes, thank you Dr. Drum. This has been fun.

I’m, Yes, I just have a passion for this, and guys like you and I, these new technology trends, which are moving very fast. Being involved in it is the Fountain of youth. I really love it.

Drumm: I understand I know you’ve been doing this for a number of years, but I, based on the way I can see your camera, you probably started while you were about eight, so that, that’s a good thing.

[00:34:43] Three Takeaways for University Presidents and Boards 

Drumm: So, three takeaways for university presidents and boards. What should they be paying attention to right now and in the future for AI and how helping your governance process?

Marc: I think the big takeaways, understanding that you’re at the epicenter of challenges in the world of governance. I can’t think of a governance environment across the entire domain. That may be a bigger challenge with all of the things we’ve talked about before. I think it’s important that you have the fundamentals in board composition.

I think it’s also a fundamental to have good board strategic. Planning and understanding what strategy is and what you’re trying to accomplish and then being forward-leaning in terms of the governance strategy by including AI to support that. Keeping yourself on track. There are tremendous efficiencies to be gained across the universities, but I think the bigger picture managing the.

Epicenter of board challenges right now in higher education with the use of strategy and measuring yourself against that with the use of AI is something that’s an imperative to me.

Drumm: Those are great takeaways. Thank you. What’s next for you, Marc?

Marc: We’re going to continue to pour our effort into building a great business that’s focused on governance and very AI leaning.

I would caution anybody listening, there’s a tremendous amount of buzz around the subject of artificial intelligence. It’s not to be feared. It’s moving at a tremendous pace. Become fluent. Understand what good use of AI can look like. And become as proficient as you can with it. In our world, that’s good governance, that’s governance specific AI, and its closed loop systems like we’ve talked about.

And we’re going to invest heavily in those things. And there will be a point not near in the future where we won’t even actually be talking about. Artificial intelligence, it’ll just be the way that the systems that support governance will work.

Drumm: Exactly. Marc, thank you. This has been a great conversation. I certainly hope that you’ve gotten a lot out of it.

I certainly have. Dr. Drum has been real fun. Thank you. Thank you, sir. Look forward to the next time.