Within higher education today, complexity is the constant. Institutions face simultaneous pressures from shrinking student populations, advancing technology, rising costs, and ever-evolving student expectations.

And at the heart of navigating these forces stands the Chief Information Officer (CIO), no longer a backstage technologist but a central architect of institutional resilience.

Resilience in higher education isn’t simply about systems that stay online or networks that bounce back. It’s about cultures that don’t crack, teams that adapt quickly, and strategies that transform uncertainty into capability. For CIOs, this means shifting from a tactical operator to a strategic enabler.

In times of crisis, when the learning management system (LMS) is acquired mid-semester, when a cyberattack hits over a holiday weekend, or when a senior engineer departs with undocumented institutional knowledge, brittle systems break, and brittle cultures do too. Institutional resilience demands a fundamentally different approach.

The new mandate: building a resilient organization from the inside out

CIOs must lead with more than just technical expertise. The role now centers on empowering people, shaping adaptive teams, and architecting a culture that thrives amid ambiguity.

A resilient institution starts with resilient people. This means prioritizing a proactive, holistic strategy over reactive firefighting. It means recognizing that the strength of your infrastructure is only as robust as the team behind it and the culture that supports them.

So, how do we build teams and systems that don’t just survive disruption but emerge stronger from it?

1. Build teams that thrive in uncertainty

At the core of institutional resilience is the human factor. No amount of automation or cloud migration can substitute for a high-functioning team that collaborates well, adapts quickly, and leads under pressure.

The best CIOs foster a culture rooted in three key attributes:

• Adaptive Thinkers: These individuals make decisions quickly with limited data and shift gears seamlessly while maintaining good judgment.
• Collaborative Doers: These team members solve problems across silos and see themselves as contributors to institutional goals, not just departmental ones.
• Emotional Ballast: In high-pressure moments, these leaders and staff remain calm, communicate effectively, and maintain focus.

Resilient teams are built, not born. CIOs must intentionally create conditions that reward these traits, provide growth opportunities, and normalize learning through failure.

"Sourcing people for on-site jobs has become increasingly difficult. We’ve had to get creative and looks for ways to augment our staff, and Boldyn has helped us do that. Their technician is embedded with my team, sits on the same floor as my network team so when something’s going on in our residence halls, we know about it first because they’re telling us or something on campus that could affect them, we share that information. Having our managed partner embedded with us is helping us keep that continuity.
As IT people, we're famous for not wanting to ask for help and wanting to solve the problem ourselves. But being able to take a step back and aligning yourself with the right partner is beneficial for everyone. At WVU, Boldyn has been able to provide a better level of service than we were ever going to be able to provide and they’ve worked with us to keep costs pretty flat, which was a big selling point for our administration."
Steve Watkins, Executive Director of IT Infrastructure and Operations at West Virginia University

2. Normalize not knowing—and keep moving anyway

Ambiguity is the operating norm in higher education. Budget timelines shift. Cyber threats evolve. Governance for new technologies like AI lags behind adoption.

Trying to eliminate ambiguity is futile. Managing through it is essential.

That starts by normalizing “I don’t know” as an acceptable and even expected stance. What matters more is momentum: asking the right questions, surfacing insights, and iterating toward clarity. CIOs must model and reward incremental problem-solving over paralysis by analysis.

Rather than penalize mistakes, leaders should highlight growth and consider a pre-mortem approach. Using this strategic planning technique helps to anticipate potential failures in a project before they happen so that teams can proactively address risks and improve their chances of success.

Here’s how a pre-mortem works:

Imagine the project has failed — Everyone involved pretends that the project has already been completed and has failed spectacularly.

1. Identify reasons for failure — Each team member writes down all the possible reasons why the project might have gone wrong.
2. Analyze and prioritize risks — The group discusses the potential causes of failure and prioritizes them based on likelihood and impact.
3. Develop preventive strategies — The team then creates action plans to mitigate or avoid these risks.

The benefits of a pre-mortem approach is three-fold:

• Encourages critical thinking and honest discussion.
• Helps uncover blind spots and hidden assumptions.
• Builds a culture of psychological safety, where people feel comfortable voicing concerns.

3. Shift from specialization to versatility

Rigid organizational structures don’t survive stress tests. Over-specialization creates silos, bottlenecks, and burnout.

Institutions are better served when they look within to map and gauge the talent on-hand and then identify the cross-functional teams that can assemble fast to solve emergent problems. This empowers the team members by bolstering institutional knowledge and reducing single points of failure. Here’s how CIOs can operationalize that shift:

• Encourage job shadowing and rotate team members across projects.
• Document processes rigorously—not just to preserve knowledge but to accelerate onboarding and response time during transitions.
• Push decision-making authority downward with clearly defined escalation paths.
• Create leadership labs by giving staff the space to take initiative, raise their hands, and develop cross-functional skills.

In today’s world, you want staff who can pick up a new tool on Tuesday, brief a vice president on Wednesday, and triage an incident by Thursday. That’s not aspirational—it’s essential.

4. Leverage managed services as strategic force multipliers

Outsourcing is often mischaracterized as a cost-cutting measure. But smart CIOs know that managed service providers (MSPs) are strategic levers that enable flexibility, focus, and scale.

The right MSP partnerships can do more than take on mundane tasks. They can:

• Offload high-volume, routine operations like patching, monitoring, and Tier 1 support—freeing your team for mission-critical work.
• Provide elastic capacity during peak demand—like semester transitions, major upgrades, or crisis recovery.
• Bring specialized expertise that complements your team and understands the nuances of higher ed, from semester-driven cycles to privacy regulations.

The goal isn’t to replace internal talent, it’s to preserve their capacity for innovation, leadership, and transformation. By using managed services wisely, CIOs can strategically retarget internal energy toward initiatives that align with the institution’s broader mission, not just keep the lights on.

5. Foster a culture of psychological safety and professional growth

People are the heart of resilience. Yet too often, institutional cultures punish mistakes, discourage experimentation, and overlook potential.

To build an IT culture capable of responding to ambiguity with clarity and confidence, CIOs must create psychological safety and professional opportunity:

• Reward people who take initiative—even if outcomes aren’t perfect.
• Use crisis moments as case studies for reflection, not blame.
• Identify rising talent and give them opportunities to lead.
• Spotlight team members who adapt, collaborate, and innovate under pressure.

By doing so, CIOs signal that resilience isn’t just a trait, it’s a practice. And it’s one that can be developed, supported, and scaled across the institution.

“We worked with the staff that we have, and they've done a fantastic job. Going forward to the point where one of those young individuals is now our Director of Information Technology, and they have really grown and taken over the whole department over the last 2 years. And not only that, I think part of it is making sure your IT department is really a part of the campus—not siloed. They've really got involved across campus and really helped us in a lot of ways. But it started with that CIO and executive advisory service that Boldyn was able to provide.”
- Gail Harris, Vice President of External Affairs at Tennessee Wesleyan University

6. Reframe the CIO role for the future

Ultimately, institutional resilience is not a function of how strong your firewall is or how modern your infrastructure appears on paper. It is measured by how your people perform in the moments that matter most.

That’s why the modern CIO is not just a technologist, but an architect of human systems that flex under pressure, scale with purpose, and respond to chaos with clarity.

The CIO must enable:

• Calm in crisis
• Adaptability by design
• Strategic use of tools and partners
• A team culture that prizes accountability, action, and alignment

Resilience is no longer a nice-to-have. It is the backbone of institutional survival and a differentiator in the evolving higher education landscape.

Turning the resilience mandate into a playbook

In order for higher education institutions to not only weather uncertainty but lead through it, they must build: 1) cultures that value adaptability, 2) systems that support flexibility, and 3) teams that embody both.

The CIO stands at the nexus of this transformation. By investing in people, redefining operations, and leading with intention, CIOs can turn a buzzword into a blueprint for long-term institutional vitality.

Resilience isn’t something you find in a boardroom or a server room—it’s something you and your team build together.