EDTECH: What role should CIOs play in helping their institutions plan for the future? ZHOU: As technologists, it’s our job to learn the cutting edge. The cutting edge isn’t always beneficial, but we have the responsibility to identify emerging technologies we can bring to our institutions to drive the best outcomes. That’s where CIO 3.0 plays a big role — that may be AI, quantum or other things, but that’s where CIOs can be a transformative force. EDTECH: How have you approached user satisfaction at Texas Tech? ZHOU: One of the things that defines the existence of technology is the customer who can benefit from what we bring in. Being customer-centric is critical and makes our work more meaningful every day. I’m fortunate to have a good team that’s focused on customer satisfaction. What I bring to Texas Tech is to accelerate and expand that culture and create new initiatives to put customer-centricity on steroids. It’s not a one-off activity, but an intentional system including policy, processes and KPIs like the net promoter score to methodically drive improvements. I joined Texas Tech in September 2024, and over the next year, we more than doubled our faculty satisfaction score. EDTECH: As someone who’s been focused on quantum computing for some time, why is now the time to advance this field? ZHOU: When I started with IBM, we were at a 130-nanometer semiconductor processing node, and today, the semiconductor manufacturing technology has moved to about 2 nanometers. It’s amazingly small, and it raises the question, what is the next technology that can allow us to continue driving the evolution? Quantum potentially is what would continue to drive that upscaling of processing power. DISCOVER: Universities leverage quantum computing to advance research. The other angle is application. We are trying to solve a lot