David Azar, Systems Administrator at Pingry School, explores the unique transition from corporate IT to the "white-glove" service model of independent schools. He discusses strategies for developing internal talent, the critical importance of reliable infrastructure like Wi-Fi, and how collaborative leadership programs like the ATLIS Leadership Institute (ALI) foster essential professional networks.

1. The Pingry School
2. Pingry’s Values for AI Use
3. Pingry Hall of Fame
4. Pingry Archives
5. Loom, free screen recorder for PC and Mac
6. ATLIS Leadership Institute, education and networking program designed to prepare and support technology leaders in independent schools as they grow into their positions and expand their influence
7. The Lawrenceville School, private, coeducational preparatory school for boarding and day students located in NewJersey
8. Preservica, active digital preservation software
9. Bynder, digital assets management
10. Coquito recipe, popular Puerto Rican holiday drink
11. Rockefeller Center Holidays
12. Marathon movie watching in PJs
13. Emmet Otter’s Jugband Christmas

Matt, welcome to Talking technology with ATLIS,

the show that plugs you into the important topics and trends for

technology leaders all through a unique Independent School lens.

We'll hear stories from technology directors and other

special guests from the Independent School community,

and provide you with focused learning and deep dive topics.

Welcome to Talking technology with ATLIS. My name is Peter

Frank, and I am the Senior Director of certification and

operations for the Association of technology leaders in

independent schools.

And I am Bill Stites, the Director of

Technology at Montclair Kimberly Academy in Montclair, New

Jersey, and I'm Hiram

Cuevas, the Director of Information Systems

and Academic Technology at St Christopher school in Richmond,

Virginia.

All right, so this is one of the first episodes, if

not the first episode of the new year, 2026 How are you feeling

about that? Are we ready for 2026

No, not quite there yet.

When this airs, it will actually be 2026 Do you

think we'll feel differently when we listen to this? Do you

think we'll be running and gunning?

I hope so. I've said this multiple times. I look

forward to the winter break, because it's the only time of

year that the school officially like shuts down. There's no

summer camps, there's no people in offices.

Is it really completely shut down? No.

The only people that are here at that point are

generally our buildings and grounds

guys and your advancing team closing out the

year.

No, some, but I'd never really hear from them.

You said some that's not all gone. All right,

Hiram, no one asked you. My opinion is the only

opinion that it matters on the podcast. So you can just zip it

and we can move on. Wow, I'm not feeling well, and you're picking

on me. I'm still sick.

This is how we're launching the year. We're off to

a great

start here. I blame Hiram.

You can't ask me Father Time. And you know, Bill

is showing his age.

I'm done. I'm out. We need Christina here. I

understand he needs mom exactly because Dad's not doing it.

I understand, well, speaking of things going awry.

So we've also got, like, snow shutdowns. All of that has

begun. So Hiram, this is the first time you've been home this

winter.

This is day two of the current snow storm. And then

we were off one day last week for snow as well. So we've

already had three snow days, right?

And Bill, not for you, though. No, it's pretty

nice here. I mean, it's cold, but it's sunny and pretty nice.

It will be on at 18

last night. So when any melting was supposed to

happen, it wasn't gonna

happen, right? Pretty cool for Virginia, too.

I'm here in Erie, Pennsylvania, so we do not shut down. If our

schools shut down, that means, like the city shut down.

As a former New Yorker, I do get a big chuckle

out of this, but I intentionally stay off the roads, because

people around here just do not know how to drive.

Well, we've got a great guest to start us out this

year, speaking of keeping things going amidst strife and

challenges, we have David Azar, and he is a long time system

administrator at the pancreas School.

Welcome David, thank you. It's fun watching the boys

act up. I'm happy mom's away.

That's good. I'm glad you welcome it with

enthusiasm. We appreciate that. So David, tell us a little bit

about yourself. Tell us what it's been like to work at

pengree for

so long. So it's shocking. Actually, you know,

when you look back on it, I'll be there 11 years at the New

Year. So I started January, 5, 2015, I had worked corporate it

for about seven or eight years in New York City. I was raised

in Brooklyn, worked in the city, and then I moved out to Jersey

with my then girlfriend, now wife. The opportunity at Pingree

came up, and I'm like, Oh, this is nice. I take a break from

commuting for a year or two, see what the education sector is

like, and then go back to the city. You know, 11 years later,

I'm still here and no plans to leave anytime soon. Nice.

I understand, reliable and secure IT systems

is actually pretty seriously baked into pinger's mission. Is

that true? Can you talk a little bit about that? Absolutely.

So pinger was founded, and in the last 100

years, we've really pride ourselves on having an honor

code, and that kind of guides the mission internally. But we

can't be naive and assume everyone's gonna follow that

same honor code. So for a very long time now, we've had network

access control, which was we were very early adopters in the

education space with that, and then a number of other policies

and procedures and regular it audits to ensure. Sure what

we're doing is at the forefront of security. It is a cat and

mouse game. Making sure you stay ahead and current is always a

challenge.

And is your focus more on day to day? Or there's

also a lot of strategy and long term as well.

I don't manage the strategy personally. My boss,

Steve France, leads that with operations and the school as a

whole, where the schools going tech kind of leads the way,

right? So what their mission is becomes our mission. But the day

to day, I try to focus on with our team.

Dave, you and I know each other fairly well,

given the proximity and everything. But can you give

everyone an idea of Pingree size, your makeup, you're

similar to MKA, and you're multi divisional. But what's the staff

look like? You've mentioned Steve's name a few times, which

I generally try to keep out of the conversation, given it's

Steve, but just give everyone an overview of how Pingree set up,

what you guys look like from that staff. Because the one

thing I'm particularly interested in is you co opting

someone out of your buildings and grounds department as well.

Sure, absolutely. The bigger schools, a K to 12

independent day school, we have approximately 11 150 1200

students. It's really hard to nail down an FTE, but we

probably have 350 people, whether staff or faculty,

operations, facilities, just a lot of people supporting those

students within our department. We're actually much smaller than

we used to be. The academic side of the house left us

intentionally so we were able to focus more on both missions. So

on the tech side, we're five, which is really happy to be

there at five. And then the academic technology people are

merged with the library, so they have a really strong team as

well. And then we have a great facilities team. And we've had a

great facilities team for a long time. And we had a young guy,

Eric, who was on facilities, and he was doing all of our data

runs. And then we saw some promise in him, and we were

really excited to advance his career, and he was looking to do

more than just general facilities. So we sent him first

to a training course on doing fiber optics splicing, and then

he really excelled at that, and like that helped us, obviously.

And he was already doing a lot of our low voltage. He's doing

all the structured wire. And then we get him more and more

involved with the security side of the house, because he's

setting up the cameras for me, because he's running the wire

and he's on the ladder. So might as well teach him how to manage

the cameras even more. And then next thing you know, he's going

back to school. He did his undergraduates in computer

science now as a full member of our team,

I think it's that connection that's particularly

interesting, because we've often talked about the relationship

between the IT department and your grounds department,

buildings and grounds facilities, whatever the name is

that you've got on it, having that close relationship with

them to be able to develop that talent internally. Not only

provides you, I think, with a great deal of flexibility, it

provides you with the ability to help shape costs in some

regards, enormously.

Yeah, when I worked in the city, and this is going

back 11 years, we were paying $300 per wire run. Now I'm not

sure exactly what structure of cabling costs in Jersey, but

that adds up very quickly when you want to change the scope of

cameras in a wing, like, let's say you want to run five, six

additional runs. And whenever you run a run, it's really you

should run two runs, right? And having that done in house, and

having a person doing it who is thoughtful about it and is going

to be supporting it. Because, like, if you get an outside guy

to come in and run some wire for you, that's great, but they

don't have to support that wire, so they're just throwing it up

there. He's being really considerate about how he's

running that wire for the school, for the visibility of

the wire, for maintenance. It's a huge help for us. And if

people aren't aware when we say, like, Pingree does a lot of

projects. We don't have a static environment. We're always

essentially under construction, and we're building and expanding

the footprint. So huge advantage to have them on our team.

There are so many net positives in the way that

you've actually completed this internal hire, the fact that you

got somebody who understands the school culture. You've got

somebody who you trust already on staff, and then someone who

understands how to future proof Pingree as best as they can,

because they've been part of the conversations all along. I

commend you on that, because Nothing's worse than bringing on

a vendor where you've got a new installer who you've got to show

them where everything is, and they don't quite understand how

you conduct business on the campus, you burn up a lot of

hours just by bringing them up to speed. Hey, I just noticed

mom's in the house. Let's give a shout out.

Hey everybody. Hello, it's Christina

joining. You guys a little bit late. It's so nice to see you,

and I apologize that I wasn't able to hop on right as you got

started, I understand you've already started a really great

conversation. David, thank you for being with us. I really

appreciate it. Yeah, of course, happy to be here. I know that

I'm kind of late to the conversation, and I was loving

just listening to what you guys were talking about, but as I

interrupt the flow of everything and wonder how everyone is

doing. What are the couple things, David, that you're

working on to sort of wrap up your year? What's on your agenda

before you get to walk out for the year end break?

Fortunately, not too much. We had a very large switch

project that started this summer. We changed every network

switch across our three campuses, there's always a

couple of, like, stragglers that you have to deal with. So winter

break, we're going to really tackle the last of that, and

then a couple of loose ends here and there, but that's kind of

like the big one that we want to button up, and we want to just

make sure that project is all cleaned up because the equipment

that is in places now out of support. So it's really time to

get it out.

So since I know that this is one of my

favorite questions, I would imagine the gentleman held on to

this for me. Can you tell me a little bit about your

background? Because I know we sort of just jumped into Pingry

and talking about some of the projects that you're working on,

but tell us about you

sure we briefly touched on it, but I was born

and raised in Brooklyn, went to Long Island University. Computer

Science degree. I worked for a startup right out of college. It

was a little boutique white glove backup company. Called

back up my info. They were awesome. I worked for them for

like, a year and a half. They ended up getting purchased by

Western Digital, but not when I worked there, unfortunately.

Then I went off and I worked for the Archdiocese in New York, and

that's probably the closest correlation between where I am

now, and then just the nonprofit and a lot of fundraising. And

then I worked for a corporate company for three or four years,

and then Pingree was looking for a replacement for my

predecessor. I got the call, and I thought it'd be a great

opportunity to not commute to the city. I thought I'll do this

for a year or two, and then 11 years later, I'm still here. My

son goes to Penguin, pretty baked into the community.

Now that's how they they always get you.

That's how it always happens. My friend, yeah, I want to peel

back that a little bit, because you came from corporate, you

came from Tech, and then you found yourself in this situation

with a school. Tell me, 11 years ago, I'm sure things were a

little bit different, but what was that transition like for

you? Was it a big shock to the system?

There was concerns. I had never worked in a school

environment. I had gone to school, obviously, but I didn't

work in a school environment. I didn't really understand

independent school culture, but I was wowed in the interview. I

had never experienced an interview like an interview at

Pingree and maybe other independent schools do a similar

thing, but like, I sat in a round table with the student

tech committee, and they asked me questions, and then I spoke

with the librarian, and I'm like, why are they putting me in

front of these people? What's happening here? But then I

reflected on it, and I was like, wow, this is like, they want buy

in from the whole community, and it was just a really interesting

environment. So I thought, sure, why not give it a try for a year

or two? What's the worst that happens? And then pygmy grows on

you? It's great.

Do you have advice for someone who's coming

into the Independent School world? We have some resources at

ATLIS, because that shock to the system is one that we've heard

about quite a bit from our members, is coming into

independent school culture. So if someone was either

interviewing at Pingree or just in general, listening to this

podcast, who was coming from it, tech, corporate and coming into

independent schools. Do you have any advice or guidance that

you'd give them?

I would tell them that we're not crazy, even

though our policies sound like we are, you know, allowing your

end users to have administrative rights on their devices and not

blocking everything. And I came from a world where it was No

ticket, no laundry. Don't walk in my office. I don't even want

to see you like I'm going to call you when I want to call

you. I answer tickets via ticket only. I'm going to remote into

your machine without notice. There was a very sort of

traditional corporate culture. It's very different in

independent schools, I really enjoy it. People regularly

compliment our tech office, we really try hard to make it a

positive experience to come to the tech office. There's a couch

in the tech office. We have candy for the kids. It's an

inviting place. You have to be prepared for that, if you're

coming from corporate, that you're dealing with kids, you're

dealing with teachers, and you have to engage with them at

where they are, and you're not going to change the teacher

who's been there forever. You're gonna support them, right?

So Dave, speaking to the culture, I mean, you're

one of you're my phone a friend. If I got a question about stuff,

you know, I'll reach out to you. I'll reach out to Steve.

Dave, he says that to everybody. He

just likes to spend a lot of time on the phone. Own.

I'm

a talker. I think that you've hit on

something, to be honest, Dave, he's a chatty dude. I love this

about Bill,

but you've also got your experiential campus where

you've gone out of your way to host events there, you know, for

n, j, A is, I just got off a call not 30 minutes ago. That

was the njis tech steering group, you know, where we were

all on the call for about an hour. If you can speak to your

belief in and around the openness that I think we have in

the njis tech community, that regardless of how we're, in some

cases, competing for students, that doesn't sit in any way with

the way in which we work, in it in New Jersey, and your thoughts

and feelings around that, because, again, you've been at

the center of that with a lot of the work that you've done and a

lot of the work that Pingree has done to bring people together.

Yeah, absolutely. So I guess athletically, we're

competing, but within our world, I consider you partners. We work

together very strongly, and I think that's critically

important. I mean, we've sat on calls with our vendors, and a

lot of times it's us ganging up against them and pushing through

our initiatives and making sure that our voice is heard. And

that's much stronger when we're speaking in one voice. I could

think of like Veracross and Magnus. Is a couple of examples,

but there are many others. But yeah, no, we work together

great. And, you know, it's collaborative. We are always

excited if you take on a new product. We want to hear about

that implementation and vice versa, you know, because

technology is always changing, nothing I learned in college is

implemented today. That'd be a terrible place to be if

everything I learned in school is still in place. So we're

always learning from each other. And if you sat down, and, God

knows, you sit down and read all the paperwork, if I have a

question about paperwork, Bill is the person to speak to, he'll

tell you where that person identifiable information is

going. So that saves me a lot of effort. Yeah.

I mean, that's the thing I love about

the ATLIS community, is that it's so collaborative. It's

really unique. I know that you guys may not see that

perspective, but when you come from other Association,

communities, even other professions, it's just

incredible how much you all are willing to share with each other

in terms of some of the lessons learned. You know, it's

interesting, having been at your school for a while, I'm curious

if there's anything in that category of lessons learned that

was either sort of made easier with the community, basically

like a time where you were just really kind of up against a

challenge and you were able to kind of work through it with the

community. Can you think of any examples in that space?

Oh, sure to come to mind implementing our new sis. A

few years ago, we were early adopters in Veracross. Everyone

seems to be on Veracross. Now, when we went on Veracross, no

one knew who they were, and Bill was still on a custom proof

product. And we had spoken with the proof guys. They had a great

product, but they had no sales team, right? And they couldn't

sell the product to the school. So we went over to Veracross,

and that implementation was really rocky. So it took

everyone on the Veracross listserv that we would speak in

this Google group to kind of iron out the problems, and then

they implemented some additional products, data exports. Package

was hugely helpful. Another example was during covid,

talking about a time of collaboration. I mean, every

school was exploring different technology. How are we going to

do this hybrid day, and how are we going to maintain good

quality experiences for the students? I'd be on a call with

Bill or another school, and he's got an owl and I got a Zoom

Room, and someone's got a Google meet classroom, and we're trying

to figure out what technology is working and how does everyone

sound? And how are we going to do this with the Plexiglas? And

we were the only ones in the building, so it was really

helpful. I looked back on that and like there was a lot of

communication during that time.

There's so many pieces of the puzzle that I

don't even know where to go next, right? Because it's

everything from network management, copier management,

cameras, storage, access, control. You oversee a lot of

pieces of the puzzle, and it's a lot to keep track of, and it's

also really complicated by the fact that you're serving both

adults and children. So how do you organize your priorities? Is

it reactive?

No, it's well defined. Wi Fi and printing. Ah,

if the internet works, if everyone can print, I could do

everything else tomorrow.

It's so true, though, right? The end

users tell you very quickly what the priorities are,

and then I get to prioritize everything else internally, the

things they don't see. No one's going to prioritize access

control until. Not working. No one's going to prioritize

storage management until we're out of storage. So internally,

our team has to manage those priorities. But public facing,

end user facing, keep it really simple. Make sure the Wi Fi is

really high quality. No one's ever having problems. Make sure

there's excessive coverage, anywhere where there's going to

be a density. You know, people think Wi Fi is like air, okay,

there's enough room in the air for everybody. There's been

enough Wi Fi. That's definitely not true, and it takes a lot of

money and time to build up density in places that you don't

expect density to be a need. That's something that you work

out over time, and you try to be considerate of everyone's view,

right? Like, if you're going to be running tests and more and

more tests, like AP College Board, they want all of their

exams to be on computers. Now, saves them an enormous amount of

money, right? But to proctor all of your exams in classrooms

require an enormous number of Proctor so everyone wants to

consolidate. Well, if you put 300 people in my gym, it's going

to be a real problem for everyone. So like, let's be

considerate about it, and put 150 in this gym and 150

in this space, and one can make it work,

all right? So Dave, given that that's the case, that obviously,

when Wi Fi is working, well, then there's no issues. When

people are able to print, there's no issues. So you end up

being infrastructure, right, which tends to be sort of behind

the scenes. So how is it that you can get the attention of

your leaders when something like air, ie, Wi Fi is a challenge or

you need more of it, like, how do you have those conversations

with people who might not have technical backgrounds but need

to understand a little bit about why there's not just more air,

right? Is that a challenge in terms of getting the attention

or the seat at the table to be able to have those types of

conversations? It's certainly not an exciting conversation to

have, but it's one that's so necessary for the work that we

do at schools.

I'm in a fortunate position where I've never

experienced that friction. Now I'm in a li this year, and I

have a lot of people in my cohort and a lot of people in

the whole group this year, and they do experience that

friction. So I know that it does exist, but I just very

fortunately, have not experienced it. Both my current

boss and my prior boss had great relationships with our CFO, and

we're under the CFO, and then the director of it is on the

admin team, which is like our senior leadership council. And

we identify the projects that are critical to us, and then the

school identifies its direction, and we try to align those two.

And for the most part, we don't really have any critical needs

that aren't being addressed. We're very lucky in that regard.

Now there's some other stuff, like AV technology, like our

theater is in desperate need of repair, but that's a huge

project, and it's going to rotate fundraising and but

that's not directly in my scope.

You briefly mentioned ally, and Ally is one

of what I would call two crown jewels that ATLIS has, you know,

Ali and then the T list. What were your reasons for going on

board to join the alley program?

Well, my initial reason was really simple. My

boss did it the prior year, two years ago, and really found it

beneficial, and he thought I would benefit from it as well.

So that was initially why I did it. Then I started researching

it before I applied for it for the professional development and

I thought it'd be a really interesting opportunity. You

know, we're well into it now, and easily the best piece for me

is that I've been partnered up with a group of tech people who

I have, like, a lot of similarities with, and our

schools are similarly sized, and, like we do, bounce

questions off each other, and it's been really nice. Like, not

just the project pieces, the project pieces are interesting

and thoughtful and you get to think through a problem, but

also just getting on the call with the guys and ladies has

been really good. Just another reason to not have to call bill.

There's always a reason to call bill. I don't want to knock

Bill. Bill has been good to me. I would have been stranded in

Ohio had it not been for Bill. He had that rental car. That's

right for listeners that are not aware we had some weather

concerns that he ended up driving me all the way home.

Very kind of

a fun ride. It's always okay to not bill

one the ATLIS Leadership Institute Ali

was a kickoff at the same time in the same place as the annual

board retreat the Atlas and Atlas certification Council

board retreats. And then there was weather, summer weather in

late July that rolled through and disrupted a ton of flights.

And I remember sitting in the airport with Bill everybody

looking at their delays, and Bill just stood up and he went,

forget it, I'm driving. And he took off and went and grabbed a

rental car. And apparently, Dave, you got swept up into that

whole thing. So did you guys. I'm sure that you talked about

ATLIS board business and Ali all the way home, right?

We had a great seven hour conversation. You,

it's surprising that I don't think we stopped

talking. NAIS got the same gift for gab that I have. The only

time I don't think we were talking is when I thought we

were actually going to end up off the road because we were

hydroplaning as we were driving out of Ohio.

He's not exaggerating. The weather got

pretty rough, and he handled the car really well, but we were

definitely silent.

Oh my gosh, bonded for life over that, I'm

sure. As you look at the year and years ahead, we talk a lot

about AI and the effect and the impact, and coming from that

technical lens, where you're concerned about some of the

protection, and what it means in terms of even the pressure it

puts on our infrastructure. Thoughts on that, how's your

school dealing with some of that? The AI related stuff

that's been a lot on the Ed Tech side, and our team

has done a really good job of documenting a lot of things

related to AI, and we have this awesome website that kind of

defines Pingree vision about AI. If you just Google Pingry AI,

it's like, it'll come right up. Yeah, that's more of like on the

Ed Tech side and discussing, like, using AI in a learning

environment. I think my scope and my interest has been more on

the technology side, and I think it's very interesting. You know,

I don't do I have the same job in five years, probably not a

lot of the pieces of my job are probably going to be absorbed,

and that's for the better. I think, I think future ticket

systems are not going to need a lot of intervention. They're

going to be able to support users independently of tech

professionals. So that's a real concern for someone who's, like,

a level one technician, certainly, but we've outsourced

so much of that as a society, not independent schools. But,

like, I know, not a lot of people are you doing tier one

tech in America anymore? So there's definitely going to be

an impact that's

really interesting. Do you guys see

that too at your schools? Bill and Hiram. I mean, do you all

expect that the Help Desk function will evolve, or has it

already evolved in some of your time?

I think it definitely is going to evolve. I

can tell you that with the advent of AI and the ability to

cull resources in a way in which I don't think we were able to

before we're able to get at the heart of things much more easily

and much sooner. Because I think the level of detail in the

responses that you get out of AI can provide a greater level of

depth than anything that you might have googled and had to

have read, like a few articles on and gone back and forth, on

it's kind of pulling all of those things together and giving

you that up front. I do think that there is a certain reliance

on and I think this is a good lesson for AI in general on the

human factor and the human touch in all of this, that there are

going to be people that are still hesitant to do the thing

on their own, even though they may have those clearly outlined,

but it's definitely made our jobs a lot easier, and has

allowed us to have the answers to questions in ways that would

have taken us much longer to come to Yeah, I

think that's a Great point, but if you think about

like an ATM versus going to the teller, I think it's the end

user's choice. They prefer the experience of going to the

teller, or there's something complicated, or they need to

speak with a personal banker, and then if it's something

quick, they feel like they're gonna be able to self help.

That's going to free up time for your department, and that

becomes an end user's preference. Certainly my school,

our schools, we're always going to have that white glove

approach where we're going to be available, the door is going to

be open, there's going to be people present. I don't ever

envision my job being remote. I need to be in the building.

And so much of what we've talked about on the

pod, and actually, Dave, you mentioned it earlier, is about

that relationship building with your community, and that is

essentially the that white glove service. To Bill's point, I've

built a couple of Google gems to help me with various things so

that it hones in on the information that I want to

search about, whether it's the Google Dashboard, whether it's a

Blackburn knowledge based system, whether it's Gam and it

has made me more efficient there, but there is no way that

I'm going to trade away. Me going to visit an end user to

have a conversation with them about what they're going

through, so that I can support them even better with the

mission of the school.

Yeah, absolutely. Spending time outside of your

office is critically important. I'm sure we've all experienced

that. If you're the type of person who's just always in your

office, you're not really understanding what's happening.

One of my favorite things to do is, at the very beginning of the

school year, once all like the real craziness is settled in, I

go to. Every department office, and I just sit down at the

department office. I'm like, who's moved because everyone is

like a Domino's game, and I want to get everyone's phones right,

and I want to make sure everyone's extensions are

labeled. But it's an opportunity to connect with everybody at the

beginning of the year, when there's a lot of chaos happening

and they don't have time to come to tech. So I sit in that office

for an hour, solve a couple problems, get everyone's phone

extensions where they belong, and that soft touch of being

with all of the people right when the chaos is really

happening, I think, reassures them that, like, hey, Tech's

here helping, where they're not just in that office or from the

corner.

I have another question that I want to

go into, because I really like what you're saying, and I'd like

to talk about where useful documentation comes from, this

combination of both having the policies and the procedures that

are somewhat automated or routine or outlined, but then

combined with the human piece of it. So Dave, I know that you're

in particular interested in this topic of documentation that

actually helps. So tell me a little bit about that, because I

also want to ask Hiram and Bill to respond to what you say,

because I know that they spend a lot of time in this space, too.

So let's hear what you kind of think about the phrase

documentation that actually is effective and helps.

I think I'm naturally a pessimist, and I

just assume no one reads. So for the longest time, I've always

been tasked with doing documentation on different

things, sometimes because I'm subject matter expert on it, or

sometimes just because I'm the only one available to be able to

do it. And I find that a lot of the documentation is a little

bit verbose and they assume the end user skill level and like,

you have to, like, lay it all out, but you don't want to say

too much. I find images help. I don't like video support,

because then you're scrubbing through the video always, like,

for a little while, people are like, Oh, just do a loom about

it. I like written documentation that's brief to the point and

highlights the key points, and assumes that our community is

somewhat educated on the topic and doesn't need to know every

minute detail. Because if that is the person you're dealing

with, they're not going to read that documentation, they're

going to come for you, they're going to come to you, and you're

going to help them no matter what. So it's a balance between,

like leaving some of the details out and just keeping it short

and helpful. Those are the things really important, things

you need to know to accomplish this task.

It's interesting you say that balance between

brief documentation and specifically video I tend to

like short video clips personally, but I found myself

in a position just two days ago where I was trying to create

some documentation, and it was going to be a video on how to

use the Phish alert button in Gmail, because I nailed a bunch

of people on my latest phishing test, and this video ended up

being over five minutes long. Was like, they don't need this.

There was a lot of good information in there. And I was

like, I got to take a step back. Then I think about this crazy

time of year. They just need a couple of screenshots, some one

liners, here and there. Go here, click here, click here, and

you're good to go. So I hear you. There's this allure to

video and makes it appear as if you're doing a better job

because you're using video and it has its place, don't get me

wrong, but brevity, I think, is the key to success with support

for a very busy faculty and staff, especially during this

time of year.

Yeah, absolutely. And No, listen, I've created a

lot of videos over the years on how to do things, and they can

be very helpful, but they're not searchable. When you go into

your email and you're like, where's that spam button?

Where's that phishing thing he told me about, you can't search

your video for that. So it's like, having that in your Google

Doc and have it be searchable and it's a one pager is my

preferred method, certainly,

Bill, do you have approaches to documentation

or communication? And I guess one of my questions for all of

you is, if they don't read because they're busy and they

don't really listen to a video because they're busy, are there

other creative ways that you've considered to try to get

information across, especially to your busy faculty?

So I think there's two different types of

documentation. I think there's the documentation that we need

on the IT side of things so that we can create, like the run

books or those things that we need to understand how we've

configured and set up systems. So there's what I'll call the

internal IT documentation and that, I think we can be a little

looser with, not in whether we do it, but how we do it, your

language and the way in which you work through things can be

at a little bit more of a technical level. To Dave's

point, when it comes to any type of documentation, the idea. Of

the one pager is really what I try to boil everything down. Now

it doesn't get to be one page every time, but you try to boil

it down. In lieu of doing videos, which we do on occasion,

I generally will screenshot every step and make sure that

there is a video associated with it. But how we do it, how we get

it out? It depends on what the issue is, but I tend to try to

make them just in time versus just in case. So sending short

emails out, you know, if you're talking about phishing things,

you know, Hiram mentioned catching people on those. We get

these headmaster emails or these, you know, there was

something recently that came out with a lot of text messages here

in New Jersey about issues with the DMV, and you've got

outstanding tickets and all these things. You know, I try to

use things that are happening in the moment to highlight what it

is we need to focus on and then fill in with those very rarely

Am I just building documentation and putting it somewhere in the

hopes that someone at some point looks at it. It's usually

contextualized around a specific thing that's happening at that

time.

Yeah, that's a great point. The only time we do data

dump on our end users is when they first get hired. We make a

Schoology course for them, and then it is a bit of a data dump.

And I always make a joke that here's where all the information

is. There's gonna be a test on this tomorrow, and it's not

really for them to read. It's a reference. And I'm kind of

pointing them back to this reference, and then oftentimes

we'll get a ticket, and I'll literally just answer the

question, like, Hey, this is how you do the thing. And FYI,

here's a link to the article, or the knowledge based article

about how to do that thing. But really, what they just want to

know is how to do that thing. So, like, I'm not going to

punish them and make them have to dig through it. I'll give

them the answer and then say, here's the thing too.

That makes a lot of sense. We have to be

flexible, right, especially when people are busy and distracted.

So that definitely makes a lot of sense. Okay, so now just

changing topics, just a little bit, Dave, I wanted to talk to

you a little bit more about your experience in the ALI program.

We heard about. You know why you decided to walk the path? What

are some of the projects that you're into right now? Have you

guys picked your research project? Is your group focused

on what your final deliverable will be?

Yet? No, we haven't picked a research project yet.

Right now, we're we were just honing in a slideshow, a 10

Minute slide show we're going to be sharing out soon. Ours was

about data integrity. I think we are on the third class. I don't

know a lot about the research project yet, but I'm excited for

it. I guess this has been really fun, and seeing the way the

other schools in our group deal with data and manage it has

given me some insight, and, you know, we're just sharing ideas.

It's been pretty good.

Yeah, that's a big part of the project,

right? Like, so you're not deep into the research piece of it

yet, which is always a very critical component of the ALI

program. But the leading up to it, you know, we're sort of

walking you toward thinking through what a big research

project might be, the idea of data, either governance or

making sure that your data is clean and usable is going to be,

I think, a continued part of the work that we all do. I was just

at a session last week talking about the use of AI and these

big organizations that are putting together big llms. But

it all comes back to data, like, if there's not useful data, and

if the data is junk, then the LLM is going to be junk. And

it's really interesting, because I feel like, as I understand it,

technology became more ubiquitous and more of a common

conversation at schools, like, Oh, hey, we're doing a bunch of

this technology. Maybe we should have a strategy. I feel like

we're in this moment where data governance is sort of stepping

into a spotlight, similar to what we experienced with

technology in general a while back, right, where data

governance is like, oh, maybe we should pay attention to that,

because if we want to leverage it, it's going to be an

important thing to make sure that it's clean. Does your

school focus on that? Do you guys have much of those

conversations at this point, or is it sort of like a beginning,

exploratory kind of vibe?

It's an ongoing conversation. Managing Your data

is difficult, and it's constantly coming in, in many

different channels, but let's say in the admission side of the

house, you're always getting end users coming in, people coming

in, and keeping just person records clean and then

everything else associated with that is a real challenge. So

there's a team that meets semi regularly to talk about the

actual data set and who's doing the cleaning and how often we're

going through and merging records checking. Alumni

information to make sure it's accurate, and then even our

archivist is involved with historical records, because it's

amazing how we like you wouldn't think it, but we find a student

from the 1970s and we're like, wow, this person hasn't been in

our systems, and now it's this exploration of What sports did

this person play, and how did we miss him for all these years?

And then you'll get someone who gives us a donation. They're

like, Yeah, I was a student for four years. I didn't graduate

from Pingree. And you're like, Wow, we got to find everything

we can about this person. And Pete Vlasic, our archivist, gets

involved and helps us with that so many facets to data and

keeping it clean, data governance as a whole

bill and Hiram, are you guys doing the

same? I mean, I know we talk about what you're doing, but I

want to for people who are popping into this particular

podcast, I'd love it if you guys could also share a little bit

about how you're thinking about data governance and sort of, is

it a constant fight to have that conversation, or is the school

bought into the importance of it? I would

say it's not a fight, but just a reminder, more

than anything else, I think people often will forget,

especially when a new system comes on board, and they fail to

recognize that there's actually a contact point with your core

tech stack that is important to the general flow of data. And

Dave, I really like the fact that you brought up your

archivist, because we have also brought on an archivist

recently, and we're trying really, really hard to get a

sense of how all this data is going to connect back to a

resource that the Advancement team can use, that the general

faculty can use when they're looking at school history and

events of that nature, and make sure it's in a coherent package.

It's a Herculean undertaking to try and assemble all that

information. And there's some great schools out there that are

doing wonderful things with their archives, and this is

where we can lean on one of them is up in your area. That's the

Lawrenceville school. They have a fantastic archivist and

archive for their school. We've been having good conversations

with them about how to manage this, because we don't want to

recreate the wheel. We also want to make mistakes along the way.

This is a new area for us, so there aren't a whole lot of

models out there, at least in the tech space, to say, Oh, this

is how you should, or one should take care of your data from an

archiving perspective.

So what does an archivist do? I've never

heard you guys say that before. What are they doing? Trying to

piece together old data.

I can give an example how we started at

Pingree with an archivist. So we had a project where we ran out

of wall space. We couldn't honor every athletic team anymore in

the way that we wanted to. We literally had no walls for all

the photos. We were years behind, and it's disappointing.

The kids come through. They want to see their photos. So we ended

up building the Pingree Hall of Fame. If you Google pingre Hall

of Fame, its first result and you'll see it. It's a completely

interactive experience. If you click on any of the students

names, you see their entire history of pingery. All the

teams are on all their achievements. Same thing for

coaches and then teams that have been honored as Hall of Fame

classes are all in there. It's really very cool. Check it out.

But that took an enormous undertaking. The amount of

metadata you need to accomplish. This is shocking. It was an

enormous project. It took 18 months, two years. Pete, who

spearheaded it, has a beautiful write up about it somewhere. I

can't tell you exactly where it is, but he has a whole write up

about that project that steamrolled it to a million

other projects. And it's a huge resource for development. It's a

resource for athletics. It's really great. And then that's

expanded beyond just athletics. You know, we're doing that with

the arts, with the yearbooks, with the newspapers. It's

massive, and you need to use what's called a dam, a digital

asset management tool.

So interesting. What are you using

it for? Hiram? So

very much like what Dave is using it up at

Pingree. We've also digitized every yearbook that we've

generated. We've digitized every newspaper, school publication in

there as well. So in terms of the metadata, this is what we

had to take a step back and we were trying to figure out, gosh,

what are some of the tags that we should use? Obviously, your

class years are important. But then within your class years,

you have to also realize your sports are divided up, usually

at the seasons, fall, winter and spring, and they actually

overlap different academic years. So when you're looking at

Fall cross country, it's very different than, say, spring

baseball. So you need to be cognizant of the academic year.

Isn't just the graduation year per se, but it's an academic

year which spans two years. So. That proved to be problematic,

but we're in the very early, early stages of this, and we're

looking at, and I hate to necessarily name drop, but we're

looking at high end product called preservica. And I'm not

sure if that's what you all are using, Dave, but I know that's

what Lawrenceville, I believe, is using, is preservica. That's

what a lot of museums use to digitize a lot of their assets,

so that they can also be searchable by the community and

also the external community. But some of the more sensitive

assets that you may have thinking about things like Port

minutes, perhaps report cards and things like that, that

advisor letters could be behind a secure portal so that people

that do need some access to these assets may actually have

these assets. So it becomes also a security issue as well. In

terms of how you're storing your data and your data retention,

we use a product called binder for the Hall of

Fame. It's a custom front end, but essentially it just reads

back to binder. Yeah, the collections have different

security policies. So we do the board minutes. We have board

minutes go back a really long way, handwritten board minutes

going back to the 60s, maybe even earlier. I don't want to

misquote it, but yeah, it's an incredible depth. I mean, all of

our schools have been around for so long. That's its own podcast,

really. It's an enormous undertaking,

if you think about it. Christina, the access to a

primary document from the historical perspective of your

school is quite fascinating when you read through some of these

letters that come back from parents or from alums during the

war, for example, it's very different look and feel than

somebody who is sending a communication to the school from

the 70s or 80s.

This is one of those areas where, you know, I

talked about that sharing piece. We went, we sat down with them

at Pingree so that we could go through and understand their

process for this. Because Tye was very point. You know, when

you're starting this out, you need examples. You need to see

what's working, what's not working, and then how can you

develop your program? Ours isn't at the same level that they're

at at Pingree at this point, nor is it probably where they are at

Lawrenceville. But again, it's getting those building blocks in

place, knowing who you can turn to, who your phone or friend is

when you need to do that, and then go from there.

I love it. You guys always teach me

something new that I hadn't thought of, and the things that

fall into the realm of tech at a school just it never ceases to

amaze me. So this has been really interesting, and now I

feel like we have another topic to tackle on a future podcast.

So Dave, I don't know if that's a thank you or if the guys are

slapping their heads, I'm not sure, but this is really

fascinating. So I very much appreciate you joining us. And

before we wrap up and let you go on with the rest of your day,

usually the guys have something crazy to ask, around zombies and

weapons. Sometimes we've asked about coffee. We've even gone so

far as talked about candy corn, yes or no, favorite flavor of

pie. So here's where I'm going to land this with you. We're

coming into the end of the year, and regardless of what holiday

tradition you look forward to or what holidays you're

celebrating, I'm curious if there's something that really

just marks the end of a year and the start of a new year. For

you, what's your end of year, start of a new year, sort of

tradition or routine look like.

On the work side, there really isn't much. I guess

winter break is the demarcation point. But in my personal life,

my family loves to go see the tree the Rockefeller Center, and

I get such a kick out of that, because it's just a tourist

trap, and I'm so jaded as a New Yorker, it's beautiful, but year

after year, we go, and my son wants to go to the Lego store,

and God forbid someone says, Rockettes. But you know, it's so

fun, and it's this family tradition, and we've done it for

years, and as much as I ho hum it, I'm the first one out the

door to do it. That's probably my big end of Year Holiday touch

point.

I love it. Grumpy dad goes to Rockefeller

Center. I think that we need some live streaming from you.

That sounds really, really awesome. Bill and Hiram, real

quick. What are your year end traditions that you're looking

forward to? Are you also going to go see the tree like Dave?

It's too crowded. That's just too many people for

me. As much as I like to chat and be around people, that's you

feel like a sardine as you're trying to get to that thing.

I can't but it's so pretty bill. Come on.

I think it's funny in the Stites household, what

has marked the holiday season is literally the curl up in the

back room, get under some blankets and not come out of

your pajamas for a day, maybe two. You know, who knows, and

sit there and just watch either Lord of the Rings from first to

last, The Hobbit from first to. Last Harry Potter, Star Wars,

something we just all kind of get together in the back, we

order up food, or I make a soup, and we go from there.

Awesome. Hiram, what are you looking

forward to? Year End,

family tradition is always watching the Charlie

Brown Christmas Special. Everybody comes on over and we

have a nice meal together, and then we'll watch the Charlie

Brown Christmas special. The past few years we have all

attended Christmas Eve mass, and then we come home and we open up

our presents, and then we have a really great breakfast first

thing in the morning for Christmas Day, so we don't have

to worry about rushing out to get to church. I will admit,

Bill, I feel the same way about the tourist trap as a former New

Yorker, but when I was coaching and we would go compete at the

armory at 160/8 Street, I drove one of those school vans all the

way to Rockefeller Center so we could do a drive by, so our boys

could see the giant Christmas tree, and they were the world To

be able to see it

drive by correct it's yeah,

that's the way to do it, any year end

traditions for you, Peter,

so for me, two things super quick. Number one,

I draw a hard line with no Christmas. If it's not Christmas

time, like when my kids want to get under my skin, they'll start

singing Christmas songs, like in the summer or whatever, just to

get to me and I immediately, no, no, no, no, no. 100% and I just

want to say, like I love now, though I love that I've done

that because I love Christmas time, because it's all fresh and

new, because I forbid it any other time of the year.

Number one, good man, Peter Frank, first time I'm

gonna agree with you.

And finally, so specific tradition. I am an

emmet otters jug in Christmas person like all day,

my wife, you just hit her heart strings there.

Yeah, I don't know how that music is not more

popular than it is, because it's some of the greatest Christmas

music ever. So Emmet otter all day.

We got to drop that in the show notes,

even though this will likely drop after the holidays, but

we're dropping that anyway. And for me, finally, I have many

traditions. You know, I'm Italian. I love the big

gatherings. But a couple years ago, husband and I went to

Puerto Rico, and we started drinking the Coquito at the

holidays. And now my kids love it. We make a virgin batch for

the non 20 ones, but for the 20 ones and up. We love some good

Puerto Rican white rum in our Coquito. And I just Hiram. I

just ordered the ingredients for it in today's pickup. So I am

ready to get into Coquito season.

I want to batch for my son or my daughter, not

my youngest daughter. But yeah, we love Coquito, and it's so

funny. You say that because my mother just sent me a picture of

a bottle that she just made for herself.

I'm not Puerto Rican, but I am all about

that Coquito. It's amazing. It's so good. We'll put the recipe

for that in the show notes too. Gentlemen, this has been such a

pleasure. Audience. Thank you for indulging us a little bit in

our year end holiday tradition. Holiday Traditions. I hope that

you guys have a great, wonderful rest of your day. And Dave,

thank you so much for joining us on the pod. It's been really

awesome.

This has been talking technology with ATLIS,

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