Episode
Higher Ed Technology Change Management and Digital Transformation
- Podcast
- Changing Higher Ed
- Published
- Apr 21, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 2259
- Processing state
not_requested- Canonical source
- https://changinghighered.libsyn.com/p308-mike-toguchi-draft
Actions
POST https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/changing-higher-ed-205463/episodes/higher-ed-technology-change-management-and-digital-transformation/transcription-requests
Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode.GET https://stenobird.com/podcast/changing-higher-ed-205463/higher-ed-technology-change-management-and-digital-transformation.md
Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource.
Summary
Higher education's track record with technology change is uneven for a reason, and the reason is rarely the technology. It is whether leadership treats change management as a discipline that runs from planning through sustainment, or as a rollout activity bolted on at the end. In this episode of the Changing Higher Ed® podcast, Dr. Drumm McNaughton speaks with Mike Toguchi , Chief Strategy Officer at Tectonic , about why technology projects in higher education succeed or fail on the strength of leadership behavior rather than tooling. Drawing on 23 years working with universities, nonprofits, and foundations, including Stanford and UC Davis, Toguchi explains how the institutions producing durable digital transformation engineer trust, governance, and adoption into the project from day one. He shares why faculty resistance is empirically calibrated rather than culturally driven, why pilots should be sized for honest failure rather than confirmation of decisions already made, and why boards need to fund and govern transformation as an operating model rather than a discrete project. Throughout the conversation, McNaughton draws on his own consulting experience to surface common failure patterns, including the double-process trap that destroys trust by leaving legacy systems running alongside new ones. This conversation is especially relevant for presidents, board members, CIOs, and senior leaders responsible for digital initiatives that span multiple departments and require sustained adoption across faculty, staff, and student-facing operations. Topics Covered: • Why change management belongs in the planning phase, not at rollout • The "trust as infrastructure" framework and how to design for it • Scalability versus departmental fiefdoms in institutional technology system…