Educator and tech entrepreneur shares object lessons on managing transitions

‘In the face of crisis, we have the inherent capacity to innovate’, says Prof Ernesto C Boydon

For the past 35 years, Prof Ernesto C. Boydon has been working concurrently across education and information technology, each sphere complementing the other.

When Boydon (‘Boogie’ to friends and colleagues) turned 60 last May, he retired from teaching to focus on his ICT company.

“This is actually not a total life pivot for me,” explains Boydon, founder and CEO of  Cyber Optimus, and an active blogger. “I have always been an entrepreneur and educator at the same time.”

“What’s different now is that I get to engage in a tech business that focuses on something that I love which is teaching and thus, it becomes a continuation of my passion for education even if I have already retired from a regular teaching load.”

In June this year, a month after retiring, his company launched YES! (Ynnov Education Suite), with a city university and a private college among the first users.

Boydon says his more than three decades of teaching helped him create the platform. The pandemic helped him refine it further.

As he points out, COVID-19 brought three Ds to education: disruption, disconnection and discontinuation. 

He stresses, however, that there are ways the sector can tackle these challenges.

“In the face of crisis we have the inherent capacity to innovate, to be creative,” says Boydon. “We can turn around situations, what seems to be a difficulty, to actually become an opportunity.”

Applying this to education, he states: “The role of educators in the new normal is to be effective and efficient curators of knowledge, able to craft a learning plan by clearly defining the learning outcomes, crafting lessons and activities that will optimally result in those desired outcomes, and expertly putting together a variety of learning resources curated from varied sources from all over the internet.”

“When the pandemic started, I saw the difficulty that a lot of schools were facing with the transition to a more technology-based education,” he says. “I started giving a free webinar entitled The Digital Transformation of Education.” 

“This is how I got to understand the problems of schools, administrators, and educators more. These insights help me formalise and concretise the design and philosophy that went into creating YES!.”

He says schools had three main pain points – management, digital learning and student engagement. Those three had to be served in a seamlessly integrated platform.

He observes: “Some schools only had a school management system (some call it SIS or Student Information System) while others only had a learning management system or LMS. Or if they had both, it was not integrated so that data had to be entered again into the LMS even if it is already available in the SMS or SIS. And because of the need for synchronous and asynchronous learning sessions for students because of the pandemic, the need for a virtual classroom that is integrated with the LMS also became apparent.”

His team used these insights to create YES! The result, he says, is “a robust, pedagogically sound learning management system for teachers to create their learning plans, define desired outcomes, identify competencies to be achieved, manage grades and rubrics for grading. 

“At the same time, they get a social learning platform that looks and feels very much like Facebook and thus create a level of engagement with students – and teachers alike – that is both fun, captivating, and gives an effective and rewarding learning experience.”

“We took that further by expanding our platform to be a comprehensive educational suite that seamlessly integrates our learning management system with a school management system and a virtual classroom.”

The making of a tech entrepreneur

“I was actually already an entrepreneur in 1983 when I first got into teaching,” says Boydon. He taught part-time in computer schools with short-term courses. At the same time, he was building a business, assembling IBM-PC compatible computers and supplying school laboratories with them.

“It was while I was delivering a set of computers for a laboratory at Trinity College of Quezon City that I got invited to teach in the college,” he cites. “The experience reinforced my passion for teaching and I have been a teacher since then until I retired this year. All that time I would still be running a business.”

“At one point I was even joking that the reason I was running a business is so that I can finance my teaching because being a teacher doesn’t really pay well enough to raise a family of four children,” says Boydon, who is national president of the Philippine Society of Information Technology Educators (PSITE) and director for graduate programs in IT Education – Asia Pacific College (APC).

“I have been into e-learning for the longest time,” he adds. “When I first came to learn about the internet in 1994, I was immediately fascinated with it.”

His early experiences online were cumbersome as it was still all text at that time. When he went to Japan for a project in July 1995, he appreciated the power of email to save on communication costs with his wife Queenie. 

“But it was still inconvenient because I had to connect to our Ateneo [University] server first using Telnet then go to the email client to write an email. The whole idea of HTML and the browser was already fascinating but it was still crude at the time.”

Boydon was still in Japan when Windows 95 came out. “This was when the full impact of a graphical user interface hit me,” he says. “I related it to the attraction of the website and by 1998 I started experimenting on how I can put my courses online for my students.”

Over the years, he has seen different types of learning management systems and taken note of their strengths and weaknesses.

One open source system that got his attention was Moodle. “Even at that time, it was already quite powerful and attractive to educators wanting to put their courses in an online form.”

When he joined the Asia Pacific College in 2011, he got to learn Moodle more because it was the system they were introduced to. “I was using it for my students but I realised that even if it was something that educators like me loved so much, it was not creating as much engagement in the students. Students found it boring and you had to force them to go to their online subjects,” he recalls.

“By that time, I was also into Joomla, a powerful content management system that I got to learn right from its creation in 2005. It helped me in my business at the time which was website development and hosting.

“An idea came to me of combining Joomla and Moodle and that’s when I discovered that there was such a component that did just that. I could create a more engaging interface for my students using Joomla but I was still creating my subjects and the lessons in Moodle.”

“It proved successful that in 2013, I even won an award for it, the Esther Vibal Award for Education Technology Innovation,” says Boydon. He says the award was the first-ever of its kind given by the Philippine Association for the Advancement of Science (PhilAAS). 

He continued experimenting with the system and came up with the idea of putting in a social network interface using another Joomla component called Jomsocial. This created a Facebook-like environment within Joomla.

Taking on the principles of ‘globality learning’ 

“The philosophy behind the design of our platform is anchored on my definition of what the new learning paradigm looks like. I call it ‘Globality Learning’”, says Boydon.

He says the word ‘globality’ was coined by Daniel Yergin in his 1998 book The Commanding Heights, to describe what was then known as the Information Age or The Age of the Internet. 

“The key is to take these globality characteristics and repurpose them for the positive objective of a learning environment,” says Boydon. 

Globality learning or learning in our internet age has the following characteristics, he states.

• It’s social and interactive where learning happens in social platforms where collaboration, communication, and cooperation abounds.

• Learning is delivered in micro and bite-sized portions – small, easy-to-digest nuggets of knowledge and where the understanding and retention is immediately assessed at the point-of-learning.

• Learning happens in a continuum. It doesn’t stop and is encountered by the learner in an ubiquitous and pervasive manner.

“As educators, we need not worry where we are going to get the resources to sustain that ubiquitous and pervasive nature of globality learning,” says Boydon.

“The knowledge is already all out there on the internet,” he states. “A lot of the big schools like MIT, Harvard and Stanford have put a lot of their learning resources available for everyone and for free. There are also massive open education resources from various other sources.”

Boydon says the goal is to not just equip schools with the technology to conduct digital learning. “It is about empowering them not just to survive but to thrive by teaching them revolutionary steps to make them the school of choice in the new normal.” 

The steps include ensuring schools are agile, adroit and adaptable, he states. “These are three key characteristics necessary for any business to succeed in the digital economy.”

The author, Divina Paredes, is a New Zealand-based writer interested in #CivilSociety #SpecialNeedsCommunity #SocialEnterprise #Data4Good #ICTTrends #Tech4Good #Digital Workplace & #Sustainability. Reach her via @divinap  

An interview with a data science activist

James Mansell is part of a small, but growing group of volunteers who are pushing for the responsible use of data to deliver social and economic value. What motivates him to immerse himself in this role?

Data is being hailed as the new oil. Its utilisation can spur the development of startups whose values have ballooned to billions of dollars, or uplift the bottom lines of established corporates even during tough times.

For James Mansell, data represents something else – using it responsibly to deliver both social and economic gains.

“I am a philosopher by training with a full-time job as a data science activist,” says Mansell, smiling.

The latter is an advocacy role Mansell took on, first when he was working in government , and continues as an independent adviser through the consultancy Noos which he had founded.

“I try and focus the government on being evidence-based and outcomes focused and I will talk to anybody who wants to push that agenda along,” he says. “It does not matter whether they are left, right or green.”

Mansell is part of a growing volunteer group taking on this advocacy, doing it from the corridors of government, through to not-for-profit organisations, and forums that reach both public agencies and enterprises.

In 2010, Mansell, as director of innovation and strategy at the Ministry of Social Development (MSD), pushed for increased use of shared data as part of the program to reform the welfare system. This included using advanced analytics for segmentation and risk profiling and using real time experiments or campaigns to measure return on investment on government funding for these programs.

Mansell completed an honours degree in philosophy from the Victoria University of Wellington. In 2011, Mansell was awarded the public sector’s Leadership Development Centre fellowship for his work with the MSD. He used this scholarship to complete an adaptive leadership course at Harvard University. He also attended an executive negotiation workshop ‘Bargaining for Advantage’ at The Wharton School of University of Pennsylvania and completed a course on strategy and leadership at the Centre for Creative Leadership in Colorado.

In 2013 he was appointed to the New Zealand Data Futures Forum, an independent think tank commissioned to consider how to build a safe and high trust data sharing ecosystem within New Zealand to drive value for citizens, the economy and improve government services. The forum is chaired by former Treasury Secretary and World Bank executive director John Whitehead.

Through his own consultancy, Noos, Mansell has worked with the likes of the Department of Human Services in Melbourne where he reviewed the agency’s analytics capability, work-shopped options to move towards outcomes focused on child protection.

Leaving a full-time government role has allowed him to work on this goal with more organisations. He works with central government agencies, including the Inland Revenue Department, Ministry of Education, Treasury, MSD and New Zealand Productivity Commission. He is currently on the board of Te Pūnaha Matatini, the Centre of Research Excellence (CoRE) dedicated to the study of how to transform complex data into knowledge.

Mansell traces the root of his data science advocacy to 2004, when he joined the Child, Youth and Family Services (now part of MSD).

He was told to read some cases to familiarise himself with child protection. He ended up reading three cases.

The last case was about a child living in the West Coast who was sexually abused at age two by his stepfather. Child Youth and Family were notified and the abuser was removed. The mother was grateful. But then this young boy was abused again, this time by a cousin. Again, CYF intervened and sent the cousin packing. This happened twice more with different sexual predators.

In social work jargon, this is a severe case of ‘non-protective parenting’, he states. Then the boy himself exhibited harmful sexual behaviour when he started school. The case history stopped about then, at age 12. There were also notes from a social worker who queried on what they could do for this boy without sufficient funding to help the family with care or to rehabilitate this kid.

“I read his case and that was enough,” says Mansell. “It was too traumatising.”

He thought, how the boy had been let down by “a broken system”?

“It is not that the CYF was broken, the whole system is broken,” he states.

“There are really good people on the frontline who are trying to help,” he explains. But the way they were allocating budget, and what they were accountable for were getting in the way.

“The whole system is working against them doing a good job to some extent.”

“It is heartbreaking to see money being wasted, to see things getting in the way of good intentions. At that point, I wanted to help.”

This began a journey to see what could be done, he says. Mansell ultimately ended up advocating the use of shared data and the use of analytics to help the social sector focus on outcomes and in particular, longer-term outcomes.

The case of ‘Marc Smith’

Advocating for increased use of shared data and analytics to drive value is not easy.

“A lot of people try and fail to get it used. It’s a big shift to practice and the operating model for government – not merely tacking on some data science. To drive change I learnt (after four years of failure to make progress) that one thing is try to ‘add heat’ to remove complacency within government and the state sector.”

When Mansell was with the MSD, he spoke at various forums locally and globally, and one of the cases he always brought up was that of Marc Smith.

Marc Smith (not his real name) is an actual person. Joining up the data from services he received from various government agencies reveals a life of physical and emotional trauma: He was found by CYF to have behavioural difficulties at three years of age and by age five was found to have been sexually abused. The cycle of physical and sexual abuse went on, and moved into youth offending and increasingly long periods away from parents in the care of the state. In spite of this, he progressed at school to finish with subjects at NCEA level 2. This is no mean feat given this background, says Mansell.

Marc started receiving the unemployment benefit at age 18.

“You can see the pathway of being abused several times. Of course, he had a bigger chance of offending.”

When he added Corrections data, he found that Smith had started offending as a young adult.

“I use this kind of example to raise challenging questions for the state sector,” says Mansell.

“People in various services like child protection services, Work and Income and Corrections were all accountable for little pieces of the puzzle, but no one was accountable for Marc Smith.”

“Marc is not alone. There are thousands of people in New Zealand who have this kind of profile,” he says.

“The top few thousand New Zealanders with a similar profile to Marc Smith have on average over $300,000 invested and still [result in] very poor social outcomes – long-term unemployment and offending. Most of this investment is late and by that time improving outcomes is very costly and of limited success.”

This was the idea of the MSD CEO, he states.“It is putting a burning bridge in front of ministers and agencies. ‘Hey, look, here are 10,000 people. They cost us $5 billion dollars. They cross all of our agencies. What are we going to do about them because they are going through a pathway like Marc Smith?’”

He asks whether Marc Smith’s life would have turned out differently if only a few thousand dollars was spent earlier when he was aged eight or nine, and not when he was aged 25 and a long-term recidivist offender.

“Do we want to keep paying for prison or spend money early on to have a better outcome?

“But although traditional research promotes early intervention, governments do not do long-term investment very well. Without shared data and the use of analytics to make people accountable and provide the KPIs and tools for longer term pathways, it is hard to focus the social sector systemically on value.

“Why are we not systematically aggregating data to force (and support) the government to see the full picture to make better social investment decisions?”

He says this is not achievable unless the government can track people across services. “We can also use shared data to question which services work.

“Marc Smith is my way of telling the story of those first cases I read – of that 12-year old. But by tracking educational and justice sector outcomes as an adult it also finished the story by tracking the social and fiscal cost of poor early investment.”

He says the current system actually works for some people, but people like Marc Smith can fall into the gaps. It should work for everybody, not just the ‘average’ person.

Mansell cites the Ministry of Social Development as using operational analytics and joined up data to understand who their clients are and how to achieve better outcomes earlier.

“We are starting to make progress,” he states.

Lifeline

“We invested heavily in an integrated client view which is where the data is joined up,” he states. Initial attempts to get funding and formal support through the policy group failed.

“I have consistently found that policy folk are slowest to get it or accept the change because most of them are at risk of being disintermediated by big data.”

Mansell credits MSD CIO David Habershon, manager data warehouse Mike O’Neil and chief data Scientist Kip Marks for taking a punt and helping with the integration of data systems that allowed him to join information from across MSD and across agencies in the social sector.

“They gave me a lifeline,” he states. “We needed to build that stuff to get ready for welfare reform and they pitched in to get it done.

“There was a lot of opposition within MSD because it is such a radically different way to look at your business. They took some risks on behalf of a good idea when they did not have to,” says Mansell. “They got behind me and we had skunk works going on, they built the data and integrated that with the analytics and bought some of the new tools which was what we needed.”

He says the then MSD CEO Brendan Boyle also supported the initiative.

“It got even better because Brendan was a breath of fresh air in MSD and understands this kind of change deeply, so he is a great champion. It’s good to work for a CEO deeply committed to public value and not merely managing risk for ministers.

“This kind of work requires some champions to succeed,” says Mansell. 

Mansell says work on the project continues as analytics is continuing to be integrated into the ministry’s operating model.

“Analytics disrupts the status quo,” he explains. “It is not just a technical problem.

“We have been building predictive models for 20 years but no one used them until people were building this capability in support of a new kind of business model. That’s really when it gets used.”

The role of technology is to create a smart closed loop learning system, as part of a customer needs and outcomes centred business model, he says.

“That is very different and requires a very different channel strategy, a different kind of funding, and development of data structures.

“Yes, we were trying to build a new way of looking at data, a longitudinal view of data. But it is all about the government being more targeted, a bit more evidence based about where to target investment and accountable for the short and longer term outcomes. It’s about adding value through social spending.

“At the moment what people are accountable for is doing something fast or cheaply, and you are just cost shifting into the future.”

What makes sense for MSD makes sense for the social sector as a whole.

The real value of this approach is in applying it above the servicing level to make better investment decisions across health, justice, education and social development, he says.

This idea came off the back of identifying limitations in investment approach in MSD, he states. “MSD is really only optimising investment across a narrow service offering.

“Many times welfare beneficiaries need better health or education or child protection services, not better CV writing courses. So some of the case management investment in Work and Income should be moved elsewhere – re-invested. This wasn’t a popular view inside Work and Income.”

So, in 2012, he pitched the idea of a Whole of Government Analytics at the centre of government to drive structural shift in the way government investment is managed. This means building accountability and budget allocation around needs and outcomes on the basis of an independent (system level) understanding of pathways across services. This has led to the creation of an advanced analytics function at the centre of government (Treasury).

In addition, significant new funding was also received to expand the role of the ‘Integrated Data Infrastructure’ managed by Statistics New Zealand and enable remote access for a wider range of users. Organisations like Motu now have much better access to integrated case level government data to do research with, he says.

Mansell and New Zealand Data Alliance members work with ministers and Treasury to apply a whole-of-sector view of the social system. This information will be used to shift to population based funding and accountability for outcomes. Elements of these are now being trialled for the 2016 Budget.

“It is about being smarter about where you target,” he says. “Everybody who uses the service gets a better service there is less wastage, everybody wins …except service providers whose services are low value.

“The goal is to make everyone accountable for outcomes so that they start to be innovative about having to solve the problem, and how to avoid bad outcomes.”

Advocacy and risks

What keeps him up at night now are the risks attached to all of these. Along with the big benefits of using shared data to improve outcomes, come big risks. This is deeply personal information and needs to be handled sensitively, he states.

He is working with ministers and senior officials on both sides of the Tasman on how state agencies can safely use data to focus on outcomes and innovation. This, he says, including advocating for the right kind of national data ecosystems, is needed for responsible use of data science and data sharing.

“I shudder to think what the centre of government will do if it has unfettered use of personal citizen data. The government cannot be both gate keeper and user of social sector data. To do so invites a monopoly and so stagnation and I think, a drift to more coercive uses of citizen data.”

Mansell founded the New Zealand Data Alliance, a volunteer group of data scientists providing independent, non-commercial and non-partisan advice to community leaders on the responsible use of data to improve outcomes for New Zealanders. So far their work has included advising senior ministers and not-for-profits.

If GPs, schools and other social sector players can take control of their own data then they will have a powerful platform to challenge the hegemony at the centre of government, he says.

“There is nothing in principle stopping the social sector ‘Uber-ing’ (disintermediating) big government. The result would be a much safer, less fragmented, more innovative and a more powerful provider network.”

He admits being seen as a “lightning rod” when he was advocating all this from inside government.

“I was not popular. I did as much I could do, so I felt it was time to move on.

“The more you get involved in this stuff you start to realise several things. That ‘I don’t necessarily have all the answers’, sometimes you can get too caught up in your own mission and importance,” he states.

“So much of this is about asking the right questions rather than thinking you have the right answers. This is very new and letting go means enabling other people to ask questions and innovate. I think I am learning (slowly!) that you get more back by letting go.”

He says this work is being continued by a lot of people in both government and private sectors. “Most of us have kids and we just want to make New Zealand a better place” he says, on what drives him in the role. “This is one way to do it.”

The author, Divina Paredes, is a New Zealand-based writer interested in #CivilSociety #SpecialNeedsCommunity #SocialEnterprise #Data4Good #ICTTrends #Tech4Good #Digital Workplace & #Sustainability. Reach her via @divinap 

This article is adapted from an interview that was originally published in @cio_nz

Artwork: Dino Japa

Confront the facts, constantly: Jim Collins

The renowned author and researcher on what makes a company ‘great’ and distinguishes it from others 

In times of uncertainty, most people are wired to look at what other people are doing, says Jim Collins, author of Built to Last, Good to Great and Great by Choice. “But leaders turn to data and empirical evidence rather than social proof,” says Collins.

“It is important to have good data,” he adds, and to “face the brutal facts”.

“Change begins when you pick up the facts and you confront the brutal facts.

“If you don’t have the mechanism to confront real facts, you won’t be great.”

At the same time, Collins says, one should “never confuse great with big”.

A great company delivers superior performance, and makes a distinctive impact on the world it touches.

If the company disappears, will it leave a hole? “An organisation that does not meet that test is not great,” he says.

It is also about “lasting endurance” that goes beyond a market cycle or a leader. He asks, “does it have superior performance, distinctive impact, ability to continue to deliver superior performance, a proven approach beyond the individual leader?”

Collins says three factors figure in great companies who innovate differently: fanatic discipline, productive paranoia and empirical creativity. “The true productive paranoids are constantly confronting the facts.”

He says analytics plays a great role in innovation. “Do something creative and validate it,” he says. If you are truly disciplined and truly empirical the inevitable happens – “a wonderful blend of creativity and discipline” which he says is a “super rare skill”.

He concludes: “Greatness is a matter of conscious choice and discipline”.

These are from my notes during the keynote presentation of Jim Collins at the SAS Premier Business Leadership Series in Las Vegas in 2013. His message about the importance of having good data and to ‘face the brutal facts’ is relevant, more than ever.

The author, Divina Paredes, is a New Zealand-based writer interested in #CivilSociety #SpecialNeedsCommunity #SocialEnterprise #Data4Good #ICTTrends #Tech4Good #Digital Workplace & #Sustainability. Reach her via @divinap