Meet the Education Sector Executive Services Leadership Team

Author(s): Mark Roman, Loretta Early, Carlos Thomas, Stephen O'Connor, Bradley Bowness

Meet your dedicated global Education sector leadership team

Our goal is to improve your IT organization and your IT staff.

Mark Roman is the Managing Partner for Education and works with members throughout higher education and K-12 sectors around the world. As a global Managing Partner, he is responsible for the delivery of Info-Tech services to members and the alignment of research with the education sector's needs. Prior to joining Info-Tech, Mark was an accomplished higher education Chief Information Officer with extensive experience leading large-scale information systems departments, and he has a consistent record of implementing significant and innovative digital transformations. He is an inspiring leader who has transformed information systems departments to deliver leading-edge solutions and to elevate the value of IT for the entire organization. Mark has served on several boards in the education sector and has also run a successful IT strategy consulting firm specializing in education clients.

Loretta Early brings to Info-Tech Research Group an award-winning track record for leading organizational transformation to establish IT’s role and contributions as a trusted advisor in optimizing value, increasing agility and resiliency, mitigating risks, and advancing the mission-driven aspirations and growth of the organization. She has served Higher Education for more than 25 years in a variety of executive IT leadership roles at liberal arts and large public and private Carnegie R1 institutions, including William and Mary, The University of Oklahoma, and The George Washington University. Loretta is a graduate from the University of Virginia. She is passionate about serving the higher education industry and has been integrally involved in many aspects of campus life.

Carlos Thomas is an accomplished IT leader who has held senior leadership positions in higher education, government, and manufacturing, including 21 years of instruction in higher education. He has successfully led and delivered strategic initiatives that include digital transformation in higher education, business intelligence alignment with IT in municipal government, and IT governance during a corporate M&A initiative. Prior to joining Info-Tech, Carlos held positions as CIO, Vice President for IT, IT Auditor World-Wide, and Executive Fellow, where he implemented IT governance policies, achieved digital transformation of business processes, and worked with stakeholders to develop a strategic data roadmap that aligned IT goals with internal stakeholders’ data needs for enterprise-wide business analytics implementation.

Stephen O’Connor is a strategic IT leader who builds trusted relationships with a focus on providing advice and deliverables customized to our clients’ leaders’ needs. Stephen provides value that is both noticeable and measurable at the executive and board level. Prior to Info-Tech Research Group, Stephen had a 30-year career across numerous sectors, with a recent emphasis on higher education, including over four years as Chief Information Officer at Capilano University and subsequent consulting to Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. With decades in executive IT management for private and public organizations in London, Vancouver, Victoria, Atlanta, and Zurich, Stephen has successfully applied his leadership, project, strategic, and transformation skills to numerous global organizations including JP Morgan, Richemont, Allied Domecq, IBM, and Western Union.

Bradley Bowness is an accomplished IT leader with over 25 years of information systems and strategic leadership experience in the public and private sector. He has successfully led and delivered a diverse scope of strategic planning, process engineering, and information technology transformations. Prior to joining Info-Tech, Bradley held positions as CIO, Executive Director, and Senior Consultant, and he has led multiple strategies of large public and private sector entities and acted as Strategist and Enterprise Digital Architect on the adoption of digital transformation solutions within the airline industry, public insurance, multi-national human services providers, and higher education.

How we help our members succeed

The Education industry team provides practical, actionable research and advice that guides Business and Technology leaders on how to accelerate the delivery of their key initiatives by leveraging Info-Tech’s core products:

Custom
Key Initiative Plans

In-Depth Research Centers

Comprehensive, Connected Blueprints

Actionable Diagnostic-Driven Insights

Consulting Quality Deliverables

The Education team builds and maintains a custom, evergreen plan for how to leverage our research and advisory services to accelerate the delivery of your key initiatives.

Provide members with one stop for all the blueprints related to key IT practice areas and topics to help you go even deeper on initiatives that matter to you.

Leverage unlimited independent and analyst-guided access to our detailed, step-by-step guides and production-ready templates that accelerate the delivery of your key initiatives.

Our diagnostics team produces industry benchmark backed assessments of your organization to help you to target the right initiatives and assess improvements
over time.

We do more than talk, we roll up our sleeves and create consulting quality deliverables for all our advisory, executive, concierge, workshops, and consulting services.

When you look beyond Info-Tech's mantra of better research you’ll quickly see exactly what we mean. Every publication is a practical, research-backed guide supported by actionable advice on how to overcome the challenges technology leaders face today. In a time when the universities, colleges, and K-12 school districts cannot afford to go slow, informed decision making at speed is critical. The Education team combines a deep knowledge of how you can leverage Info-Tech’s practical, actionable approach to research and advisory services with extensive experience as technology leaders in K-12 and higher education. Our mission is to help you rapidly make data-driven decisions backed by robust research that empowers you to deliver exceptional IT services through technology.

Our perspective on the current state of global digital education

Our mission is driven by the need for continuous innovation in Education programs and service delivery. This is critical to recovery from the global pandemic and weathering ongoing economic uncertainty. The pandemic drove unprecedented demand for digital services, and faculty, students, and staff now expect more and better from IT. We see the need for IT leaders in Education to adopt an Exponential IT Mindset. We’re here to help them embrace radical transformation in IT’s mission, governance, and autonomation of core functional and IT capabilities and change how we partner with the community, vendors, and education leaders. Four major priorities have emerged in our work with IT leaders:

Unlock Exponential IT Capabilities in Higher Education

Understand the IT Implications for the Enrollment Cliff

The decline in enrollment threatens closure of the institution. IT must align itself with institutional efforts to increase its competitive advantage.

Understand the IT Implications for the Enrollment Cliff

Adapt Governance to Align Educational Technology With Faculty Needs

IT must integrate with institutional bodies through governance to ensure success. Involve all relevant stakeholders who will be impacted by the outcomes of educational technology, including institutional leadership, faculty, local IT, and students.

Adapt Governance to Align Educational Technology With Faculty Needs

Build Business-Aligned Privacy Programs for Higher Education Institutions

Students are wary of privacy risks and value privacy protections. So should the leaders at the education institutions. Embed privacy-by-design principles into your business processes and data lifecycle to protect valuable personal data for students and faculty.

Build Business-Aligned Privacy Programs for Higher Education Institutions

Understand the Implications of Generative AI in Education

AI has the potential to transform the classroom just as calculators, the internet, and digital assets changed the way we taught and learned in the past. Educators may have no choice but to embrace generative AI and leverage its strengths to enhance learning and development.
Understand the Implications of Generative AI in Education

Unlock Exponential IT Capabilities in K-12

Build an Information Security Strategy for K-12 Schools

Many K-12 schools struggle to decide how best to prioritize their scarce information security resources and lean budgets.

The need to move from a reactive approach to security toward a strategic planning approach is clear. The path to getting there is less clear.

Build an Information Security Strategy for K-12 Schools

Address the Digital Divide in K-12 Education

As technology becomes a necessity in education, the burden of equity in K-12 education is increasingly a challenge for IT leaders. This research discusses the issue of providing devices and internet connectivity to maintain equity among students.

Address the Digital Divide in K-12 Education

The Future of K-12 Education

When facing disruptions, schools and districts need to focus on strengthening their core business capabilities and embracing technology advancements to bolster business resilience. Read our trends report to understand the changing IT landscape in K-12 education and discover what technology expectations need to be budgeted for and met by CIOs.

The Future of K-12 Education

Develop and Mature an Esports Program in Education

Many education professionals both inside and outside of IT are unfamiliar with the esports space and have difficulty addressing the opportunity in a systematic fashion. By leveraging a maturity model, an esports program can provide benefits to institutions of education while minimizing the drawbacks of esports and mitigating organizational challenges.


Develop and Mature an Esports Program in Education

Our Take

The global Education team is here to help our members in higher education and K-12 create exceptional social, environmental, and economic outcomes for the places where we live, work, and play. Our team is supported by the best leaders in Education research in the world and is led by:

Patrick Spencer, Public Sector Research Practice Lead

Patrick is driven by a passion for quality and creating a product that helps leaders overcome the real problems they are facing in the Education sector. His team is always looking for input from IT leaders to drive better research.

You can help by joining our research board!

Mark Maby, Research Director, Education Industry Practice

Mark Maby is a Research Director for the Education Industry Practice at Info-Tech Research Group. As a Research Director, Mark has had the opportunity to conduct targeted research and to work directly with clients on premises.

Mark’s research has focused on technology trends, IT governance, and the selection of new systems in the education space. In his onsite client engagements, Mark has worked on the development of strategies at the level of both IT and enterprise architecture.

Prior to entering IT, Mark had a long career in academics and education, with a BA from the University of Toronto, an MA in Education from McGill, and a PhD in Applied Linguistics from Cardiff University.


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