Story by Destinee Marking, Senior writer 

Microsoft Chief Technology Officer Norm Judah spoke to Murray State faculty and students Nov. 9.

Hunter Evans, telecommunications systems management graduate student and cyber security consultant at Microsoft, said the event was hosted through the Microsoft Teams platform so Judah could connect with faculty and students from his office in Redmond, Washington.

“I organized this event because the TSM 680 class had been hearing from various executives in the school systems around our area about technology,” Evans said. “I wanted to invite Microsoft’s Chief Technology Officer to share his insight and perspective. This allows us to encompass what the vision of a technical company like Microsoft has and tailor it to our case study strategy.”

Evans said he hopes attendees walked away understanding Judah’s vision.

“There is a combination of hardware, software and people required to articulate an idea and see it to fruition,” Evans said. “He repeatedly emphasized the need for people to be able to interpret and articulate data in order to be successful. Instead of a binary approach of one way or another, he touched on training the personalities of people to adapt and immerse themselves with the tools and technology to empower the younger generations and prepare them for the workforce of tomorrow.”

During his talk, Judah said educators should be leveraging tools and technologies that will enable students to build competencies like those of understanding and explaining information collection and presentation.

“I want the teacher to be able to be using technology and have the students using technology that is teaching them how to think about the information that they’re seeing,” Judah said. “So in other words, me giving you a spreadsheet that has demographic data in it without you really understanding how to analyze that demographic data, that doesn’t help at all. Some of it is about tools and technology, but some of it is about the ability to actually understand and frame around a problem set.”

In the end, Judah said being articulate with data and being able to tell stories with that data is key.

“No matter if you’re the best data scientist in the world or the best computer scientist in the world, the best economist in the world, if you can’t explain what you’re doing, you’re not that useful,” Judah said.

Evans said he is working with TSM faculty to arrange more events like this in the future.