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Highlands College will make four or five technology hires this year. This is how they pay double: put the new capability under innovation-first leadership, and the same hires that solve the technology problem become the engine for everything the college could build next.
↓ Start with the opportunityThe technology foundation is the thing standing between Highlands College and the speed this moment now allows. Enterprise AI accounts, infrastructure we own rather than rent, the ability to say yes quickly to tools that serve the team. Until that foundation is built and owned here, every good idea waits in a queue.
The hires to build it are already coming. So the real question is not whether to build the technology team. It is who leads it, and what else it is capable of.
Put it under one leader whose first language is innovation and who is fluent in technology, and two things happen at once. The technology problem gets solved by someone who treats it as a foundation, not a finish line. And the moment it is solved, the same leadership and much of the same capability turns toward the problems only an innovation function can take on.
When a third-party tool or an MCP would serve the organization, one leader with technology under them can say yes in a day. That same request, routed across departments, takes two months or quietly closes itself. Speed is the difference between an idea that ships and an idea that dies.
The leader heads HC Innovate and oversees the technology team, sitting above its leads so decisions move at the speed of the work. Innovation is the mandate. Technology is the foundation that serves it.
One leader. Innovation-first, technology-bilingual. Sits above the technology leads, so a yes is a yes. Working title.
The reason the role exists. Runs the loop, convenes the people, takes on the problems only an innovation function can.
The base that serves the mandate. Built and owned here, fast enough to keep up with the work.
Hired within this year's technology budget, with their priorities set by the hub. The people who turn the loop's ideas into real, full-stack systems.
We propose the title carry innovation, not technology. The reasoning is deliberate and worth stating plainly. The moment the role is read as the head of IT, the innovation mandate quietly collapses into operations, and the calendar fills with tickets instead of building. Leaving technology off the title protects the one thing the function exists to do. If the lead team wants it named, it can be added later. It is far easier to add than to remove.
The exact title is open. Lead of Innovation, Executive Director, whatever fits the structure best. What is not open is the weight behind it. The role has to carry real authority to convene people, claim resources, and move decisions, or the function cannot get anything done. The title can flex. The authority cannot.
One honest note on scope. Cybersecurity and hardware continue to partner with the established Church of the Highlands IT operation, given the shared facilities. That partnership is a feature, not a gap. It frees the new team to spend its energy on building rather than on a base that is already well covered.
HC Innovate works in two modes. Naming them is what keeps the function from being mistaken for a development shop.
Some problems need thinking, not building. The hub studies them, tests approaches, and brings findings and recommendations back to leadership. No software required.
Other problems need systems. This is where the technology team's development capability becomes the hub's build arm.
The same loop runs both. The mode depends on the problem, not the other way around.
One loop, three movements, eight steps, rooted in design thinking and made ours. Simple on purpose. Speed comes from keeping it that way.
Not a straight line. A loop. The last step, Share the Story, feeds the next Bring It.
Someone close to the work brings what they have seen. In conversation, not a form.
Weighed against the four questions, sharpened to a real, named problem.
Look at what already exists, what others do, what the tools now make possible.
Many approaches before one. Diverge before committing to a single path.
Build the smallest real version. Something you can hold and react to.
Put it in front of real people in the real world, usually inside eight weeks.
Keep it and deploy, reshape it, or set it down. Honest either way.
Tell what got built and what we learned. Recognition and the someday/maybe pile live here.
The four questions
Does it extend what Highlands College is for: graduates ready for ministry, churches stronger because we exist?
Does it lift the depth or formation-value of something we already do well?
Does it remove a real, named pain for students, faculty, staff, or partners?
Does it make existing work meaningfully easier, faster, more reliable, or less costly?
An idea has to answer at least one of these to move forward. The more it answers, the stronger it is. These are the questions that have to be answered, not a fixed ranking.
Most work moves fast because most work is safe. Anything touching student records or sensitive data takes the careful path it should. Speed where we can. Care where we must.
HC Innovate is not a new department. It is a small core that convenes the college's own people.
The leader, plus a small, AI-forward dev arm. Not straight coders. Builders who multiply themselves with the newest tools, the way a single person has already built finished, working systems in hours and days.
Members pulled from every area of the college at roughly 20% of their time, chosen by strength and not by title, lacing in by phase. The best thinking on a problem usually sits closest to the work.
This is why the model is affordable. The dedicated cost is the leader and a builder or two. The rest is the college contributing its own range to its own hardest problems.
Who leads it
Theological grounding, operational discipline, fluency in the tools, trust across departments. Forward-thinking enough to press an idea, technical enough to speak the language and test the thinking, relational enough to gather the right people. More gardener than expert: the job is to tend the space between this work and the rest of the college, not to be the smartest person on any single problem.
Three decisions.
Establish HC Innovate as a standing function with real input across the college, present in the rooms where direction is set, AllCo among them, with the new technology team reporting up through its leader. Early on, the team sets a charter that gives it the freedom to do its work well. We do not need to define every line of it now, only to name that it must exist. From there, the function needs enough authority and a sponsor to keep it from being buried in any single office. The rest of its standing it earns by what it produces.
Identify the leader against the profile above. Designate the AI-forward developer and the AI engineer among this year's hires as the hub's build arm, with their priorities set by the innovation function.
Begin with the technology foundation that unblocks the team, paired with one R&D problem, the financial model, so the function's identity is set as innovation from day one. Measure it on validated learning, real artifacts, and Gallup Q12 movement, not on tickets or uptime. Whoever leads stewards technology but answers for innovation.
This year's hires solve this year's problem. Under the right leadership, the same hires build the capacity to solve the next ten.
Read the full strategic overview →Gallup's Q12 distills decades of research into twelve things that, when true for a team, predict engagement, retention, and performance. The themes, in plain terms:
Summarized in plain language; the exact survey wording is Gallup's. Learn more at Gallup’s Q12 page.