The Centred Approach

Mark Silis discusses operational strategy

Every institution is under increasing pressure to modernize operations, integrate emerging technologies, strengthen cybersecurity, and meet rising expectations—all while navigating financial constraints and organizational complexity. But the businesses making the greatest progress are not simply investing in technology. They are rethinking the role of partnership, operational strategy, and leadership itself.

Former MIT CIO Mark Silis shares his perspective on what it takes to build institutions that are both operationally resilient and customer-centred. Drawing from decades of experience leading large-scale digital transformation efforts at one of the nation’s most prestigious universities, Silis emphasizes a central theme: technology should never exist for its own sake. It should serve people, remove friction, and create environments where students, faculty, and staff can thrive.

"The fundamental tension is this: Human capacity for change is linear, while technology's capacity for change is exponential. Managing the gap between those two curves is much of what campus IT does day to day, and the gap is widening."

Why is it so important for IT to operate as a strategic partner across the company rather than simply a service provider, and how does that ultimately shape the client experience?

Technology today is integral to everything that happens under the roof. The traditional model—where each part of the institution owns its own digital strategy for its own systems, whether teaching and learning, HR, finance, research management, or information system—no longer works. These systems have to operate as one digital ecosystem. That demands a fundamentally different role for IT than 20 years ago, when the work was largely about offering recommendations and guidance. Today, the work is building and orchestrating an ecosystem in which every system serves the stakeholders seamlessly.

IT is not a service provider. Technology is a strategic capability—essential, not complementary—and the pandemic proved it.

How should we think differently about operational excellence so that efficiency improvements actually enhance engagement, access, and student success?

The right question about operational efficiency is: efficiency for whom? Too often, "efficiency" is just another word for cost savings, measured purely from the back-office perspective. And in my experience, even on those narrow terms, very few systems projects actually deliver. When I've asked colleagues what a project will save, or what capabilities it will provide, and whether we can hold those to measurable metrics, the honest answer is usually some version of "we just want to make it better."

Real operational efficiency has to be measured holistically from the perspective of the people running the institution, and from the perspective of the people it serves. That second perspective is the one we most often miss. Take something as simple as a facilities repair form. The more detail the back office can capture up front, the more efficient its workflow. But that efficiency is purchased by asking the person reporting the problem to fill out 50 fields across 20 categories.

How critical is collaboration between IT, operations, procurement, leadership, and external partners when trying to create a more seamless and supportive experience?

Collaboration is absolutely essential, and it starts from a simple fact: Digital is part of everything now. Every function touches the digital ecosystem in some way. You cannot build a seamless experience by treating that ecosystem as IT's problem alone. Everyone has to be part of the journey.

When I look back at the projects that genuinely worked—the ones that produced experiences worthy of the institution—what stands out isn't the technology. It's the working relationships of the teams that built them. The openness, the transparency, the willingness to ask hard questions in front of each other, and the shared posture of trying to solve problems together rather than defending turf. That's what produces the best and most satisfying solutions.

The alternative is regression. If IT designs in isolation, or any single function does, you end up with seams, the disconnected systems and disjointed experiences. The work of creating a truly supportive experience requires every part of the institution to come to the table, stay at the table, and own the outcome together.

What advice would you give leaders about building partnerships and operational strategies that remain focused on people first—not just technology first?

We're at a moment in history that feels a lot like the early days of the internet but on a completely different scale. In the nineties, when I arrived at MIT, the institution had to build Project Athena to put computing workstations in students' hands because access to technology was so uneven. Today, the technology is already in everyone's hands. That's why the AI revolution will evolve far more quickly, and reach far deeper into how we live and work than the internet revolution did.

The fundamental tension is this: Human capacity for change is linear, while technology's capacity for change is exponential. Managing the gap between those two curves is much of what campus IT does day to day, and the gap is widening.

My advice to leaders is: lean in. Don't turn away from these changes because we don't yet understand them or know how to use them, both of which may be true. Lean in anyway. Take responsible risks. Engage the debate on what we teach and how. The graphing calculator was resisted in the nineties for many of the same reasons AI is resisted in the classroom now, and it turned out to be a net benefit. It freed students to develop more intuition and tackle higher-order problems. We've always abstracted away yesterday's foundations so people can solve tomorrow's problems. AI is the next step in that pattern.

The most important shift, though, is who gets to build and what gets built. AI is putting technical capabilities into the hands of every individual. People who never wrote a line of code are now building working software, and increasingly they're building agentic systems—AI that doesn't just respond to a prompt, but acts on their behalf, navigates processes for them, and gets work done. That's a tectonic change for how an institution operates, because the community we serve is no longer just consuming what IT provides. They're active participants —designing their own experiences, their own interfaces, and their own agents to engage the institution on their behalf. That changes expectations. It changes the loop of accountability.