Advisory Board Spotlight: Barb Fugate
The new chair of TLI's Advisory Board is Barb Fugate (ST '18). Barb spent more than three decades leading IT and cybersecurity teams in the banking industry, most recently as United Bankers' Bank CIO and CISO. She is an experienced executive with a long history of developing high-performing teams in IT and cybersecurity, exceeding risk management standards in the highly regulated financial services industry.
Barb is also a 2018 alumna of TLI's Security Technologies program, with a Minor in Management of Technology. She has a bachelor’s degree from Doane University and a Master’s degree from Pepperdine University. Barb also served as an Intelligence Officer in the US Marine Corps.
She was kind enough to sit down with us and answer some of our questions.
Q: Tell us a bit about your background, and how you found your way to the TLI program as a student
A: After my undergraduate work, I went through Quantico and was commissioned as a Marine officer, and served in the Marine Corps in the early 1980s. I was an intelligence officer – best leadership training in the world, hands down.
I was discharged from the Marine Corps in 1984 as a Captain, and went on to get my first Master's degree. From there I started working in the banking industry, and then specialized in bank technology. I also got into playing rugby and ended up playing for the United States in a World Cup. It was the very first Women's World Cup in 1991, and we won. So I have a World Cup gold medal.
Q: What? That's wild.
A: Yep, it's a very little known fact... in the early 90's rugby did not get the attention it does today. I think we got a one-inch mention in USA Today.
I coached rugby for a lot of years and coached the USA under-23 national team. We went on a bunch of international tours. So I've done lots of international touring, but it was with rugby sides, which is a great way to go to places like New Zealand.
Q: How did you first hear about TLI's ST program and what brought you to choose that one over some other program?
A: I already had a master's degree, and so I wasn't actively looking, but I was at the Cybersecurity Summit in the fall of 2016. I met Mike Johnson (previous Director of the MSST program) there and we hit it off pretty quickly. He had been in banking, as the CISO at Bremer and he'd been a bank examiner. So he understood immediately what my job was, what my challenges were.
In one of the conference sessions I sat next to a gentleman who was a current MSST student, and he was very enthusiastic about it. So between those two and then some follow-up conversations with Mike Johnson, it became clear to me it was a good time to make that move.
I was a student in ST from 2017 to 2018, so I was in the 2018 cohort. I chose it because I really wanted to deepen my understanding and my expertise in cybersecurity. It's one of those fields that doesn't hold still. I had been in bank technology for over three decades, but over that time the technology had evolved, as you can imagine, drastically. And cybersecurity was becoming a more important part of my role.
At the time I was both the CIO and the CISO for a commercial bank. I just felt like it was time to really dig in to broaden and deepen my understanding of the issues and risks with cybersecurity. I wanted to do a better job managing risk in our bank and for our customer banks, as the bank
where I worked was a banker's bank. So we were in a role to provide support and to secure the information that we processed on behalf of almost a thousand community banks.
Q: What else surprised you about the program?
A: I expected to learn new things, and happily I did. I wasn't in a highly technical role, so I didn't pursue the more technical cyber minor. I instead chose the minor in management of technology because it would apply to my CIO role already.
One of the reasons I believe so much in this program, is that when you get to a certain level in your career, your communication skill can be what makes or breaks you. I thought I was a pretty good writer, but Chip Laingen and his course on communication of risk helped fine-tune my writing and presentation skills.
The more responsibility you take on as a technology manager, the more you'll find yourself speaking to business colleagues and fellow executive managers, and not to technical people. You can know a whole lot about cybersecurity but if you cannot communicate risk in business terms, it won't do your organization much good.
So I believe the communication and presentation skills in the MSST course were absolutely invaluable. Although it wasn't something I considered a weakness of mine, the chance to focus on them and elevate them was an opportunity I had not expected.
Q: How have you kept involved with the program between the time you graduated and when you took a role on the Advisory Board?
A: I was on the advisory team for the Minneapolis Cybersecurity Summit, so I was at the Summit all day every day in 2018. And of course I was happy to stop by the TLI booth because there were always people I knew there. So it was an easy organic connection. It was then that I realized there was an opportunity to stay involved with the TLI Advisory Board.
Q: Who first approached you to join the Advisory Board for TLI?
A: I don't actually remember how that happened, although I'm sure my friend Pat Dillon had something to do with it.
I knew that she'd been serving in that role and she and I talked about it a few times over the last couple of years. Allison [Hubel] contacted me as well to see if I was interested.
Q: How do you feel that your time as a student in the program informs your approach to taking on the chair role?
A: It's hard to be a student and to work full time. I think we owe it to the students to make sure that their time is treasured and well spent. We want to ensure that the curriculum that we offer is meaty and meaningful. But we also can't overload them because they are probably going to get up and go to work the next morning.
When you're going to school and trying to work full time, you're going to get stretched from time to time. So I think we owe it to students to make the absolute best use of their time and to respect their time commitment - understand that they've got families and jobs.
Q: What do you see as the big challenges for TLI looking out a few years?
A: I think the whole management team, [TLI Director] Dr. Hubel and [DGS] Dr. Lawton, Marcia Cole, who is the Fellow for MSST, and then of course [MDI Fellow] Mark [Wehde] and [MOT Fellow] Judy [Pennington], are all well aware of the challenges of higher education right now. Knowing the cost of higher education, our challenge is to identify and draw in the students who can benefit from it and who can help us grow as a program.
We all agree the need is there. It's figuring out how to bridge those gaps of time and money. But we certainly know the need for excellent technology managers, and the need for medical device innovation is only going to continue to grow. And of course there is a need for security leaders, those are well-known statistics we share about the number of unfilled cybersecurity jobs. And these skills apply to all programs - I think it's equally important to make sure that we're turning out MOT leaders who understand how to analyze and communicate risk. Everyone has these same risks. It's not specific to people who are in cybersecurity jobs.
Q: I know that Dr. Hubel wants to make the Advisory Board more active within the Institute. How do you see that playing out?
A: I think it's twofold. In one sense, and Dr. Hubel is spot on about this, the Advisory Board brings people into the room from different industries. We have so many robust technical industries in the Twin Cities to draw from. Those folks help us bridge those connections and create programs like the new certificate programs. So the industry connection piece is one important focus.
The other piece is that the Advisory Board can help ensure that the curriculum is what Dr. Lawton and all of the Fellows want it to be, and what the students want it to be. We all want the students to see real world problems and to continue with their professional careers more prepared to take them head on. The Advisory Board can help in reviewing the curriculum in all the programs to make sure that we stay connected. I think it's important for people to know about the Advisory Board and the role that we can play.