By Jessica Liebowitz and Jen Brant-Gargan

University technology leaders face enormous pressures: managing enterprise-wide systems that serve thousands of users, ensuring those systems remain operational and can be fixed when they break, and upholding data security and compliance requirements in one of the most fragmented and highly regulated environments in any sector.

Against this backdrop, a critical question often goes unasked: how can universities enable local innovation that addresses urgent operational problems while maintaining the enterprise infrastructure standards these complex institutions require? An innovative project at CPS—the student administrator partnership initiative—is putting this question front and center, and suggesting answers that could reshape how universities approach operational change.

Rather than managing (or declining to address) every local problem or opportunity, IT can mentor teams who specify challenges and build prototype solutions themselves. Instead of being a bottleneck, IT becomes a strategic guide, and its capacity stretches much further.

CPS Advisors identified a clear problem: they were spending too much time answering routine questions while students with nuanced situations were also waiting too long for expert student affairs guidance. Partnering with a technically proficient student in applied AI, CPS advisors are now designing an AI chatbot to handle basic inquiries while appropriately routing complex cases to their advisor team.

What makes this project distinctive is how it’s being built. The advisors identify the documents, with verified facts, figures, policies, directions, and deadlines, to make up the knowledge base. They specify the offices across the university that hold expertise on questions they know students will ask, ensuring the AI can route those questions properly. They also determine the kind of ongoing verification they can manage, from a bandwidth point of view, to ensure reliable responses. The student partner translates that operational wisdom into technical design.

With the student-admin partnership focused on understanding the operational bottleneck and building a prototype solution, IT leaders can then help guide the development toward enterprise standards. The student working on the CPS AI chatbot is learning to work within university data security protocols and system requirements. IT experts are ensuring the design will allow the chatbot to be maintained and scaled over time. Sustainability is being built in from the beginning, not retrofitted afterward.

This approach suggests a new way to understand operational innovation in higher education. Rather than managing (or declining to address) every local problem or opportunity, IT can mentor teams who specify challenges and build prototype solutions themselves. Instead of being a bottleneck, IT becomes a strategic guide, and its capacity stretches much further.

This single case study has no formal template yet, and it begs many questions about priority of problem types, trade-offs around cost-effectiveness, and scalability of local innovations across the university. And yet it already illuminates a process—student expertise plus administrator knowledge plus IT guidance—that could be documented, refined, and replicated across our university and beyond.

Dr. Jessica Liebowitz is a Research Professor in the Center for the Future of Higher Education and Work at Northeastern University’s College of Professional Studies. Jen Brant-Gargan is Chief Information Officer at Northeastern University.