The Modern University Technology Stack: How RISD Is Building for What's Next

One art-and-design institution's deliberate approach to interoperability, AI-powered search, and mobile-first experience offers a replicable model for digital leaders across higher education.

A modern university technology stack should feel less like a collection of products and more like a well-composed experience. Higher education rarely gets to start from a blank page, though. Most institutions carry years of inherited systems, fragmented ownership, and siloed content. The challenge is no longer simply keeping systems running. It is making them work together in ways that feel seamless to the people using them.

That is what makes Rhode Island School of Design’s approach so instructive. RISD’s digital strategy is not about chasing the newest platform. It is about creating an ecosystem where infrastructure, content, design, and user experience reinforce one another—and the technology stack is not a collection of tools. It is a foundation that either enables or limits everything your institution can do.

A Shared Architecture Philosophy

Rick Mickool, RISD’s CIO, has spent 35 years in higher education technology across institutions ranging from small specialty schools to large R1s. When asked how he frames RISD’s technology priorities, he doesn’t reach for efficiency metrics. His answer is more fundamental.

"It’s all about experience, and ultimately the ability for the infrastructure to enable personalization and customization."

— Rick Mickool, CIO, RISD

Framing infrastructure, in service of experience, sets the terms for every technology decision at RISD. And critically, it rules out a certain kind of vendor relationship.

This is not theoretical. It shows up in procurement decisions, integration design, and how RISD’s digital and IT teams collaborate. Brian Clark is the Senior Director of Digital Experience and his role sits at exactly this intersection—reporting into both marketing and IT—so the CMS is neither an IT asset that marketing tolerates nor a marketing tool that IT resents. The two functions are architecturally joined.

SearchStax: Turning Search into an Experience Layer

Search is one of the clearest tests of whether a university's digital ecosystem is actually working. Users do not care which office owns a page, which subdomain hosts the content, or what the internal org chart looks like. They want to find the answer. As Rick puts it:

"People don’t care about the org chart or the department structures. And they shouldn't have to learn it. They should be able to ask questions at the starting point, and automatically navigate to an answer and to an action of getting stuff done." — Rick Mickool, CIO, RISD

That expectation creates a very specific problem at institutions like RISD, where content is intentionally distributed across subdomains and specialized sites. Before SearchStax, no solution existed to bridge that fragmentation. Brian describes what search looked like before, and when asked directly whether cross-subdomain search had been possible prior to their search enhancement, his answer was unambiguous: “Oh, no. It was completely siloed.” 

The stakes become clear when you consider what the digital team had promised leadership: that any RISD user could search from any entry point and find content anywhere across the institution’s web ecosystem. That promise required infrastructure that did not yet exist.

SearchStax delivered the architecture RISD needed—one search experience across all core Drupal sites, near-real-time indexing through a Drupal Connector, and the analytics visibility to understand what users were looking for and what was failing to surface. A practical use case is easy to understand: a user searching for "calendar" from risd.edu can surface the academic calendar hosted on a different RISD subdomain, without needing to know where it lives.

The next chapter RISD is testing is AI-assisted search. Brian has been deliberate about avoiding the pattern that defines most university AI deployments: the generic chatbot in the corner of the screen.

"We want to avoid the customer service style 'hi, how can I help you?' chatbot and build more organic moments for AI into the interface of the site itself—so that it's almost like talking to the site."

— Brian Clark, Senior Director of Digital Experience, RISD

RISD is implementing SearchStax's Smart Answers precisely because it fits this vision: AI that activates contextually within the search experience rather than as a bolt-on overlay. The transition from keyword mode to conversational mode happens on the user’s terms.

Rick is explicit about why this matters beyond the user experience. A centralized AI search layer prevents the fragmentation problem that plagues large institutions—where every department eventually acquires its own search bot, creating yet another silo to maintain. "What I'm hoping it will ward off," he says, "is each administrative area looking at their own sort of search bot and investing in that."

Pantheon: The Operational Backbone for the Web

If SearchStax improves discovery, Pantheon is the operational foundation that makes large-scale digital governance sustainable. The decision to implement a robust Web Operations platform was not about replacing a CMS. It was about understanding the “infrastructure, the platform that needed to be in place, and its ability to talk to all of the other boring systems—administrative systems.” Pantheon provides the Dev, Test, and Live environment structure to manage Drupal at scale, maintaining a central code base while pushing updates across multiple sites. For a team built on speed and minimal bureaucracy, that matters.

When urgent questions arose from RISD’s large international student population during a period of immigration uncertainty, the team assembled a comprehensive FAQ section in an extraordinarily short time. The reason was not a heroic effort. It was architecture.

"I'll get asked, How did you get this done so quickly? Because we built a system. A good system can feel invisible... sometimes it helps with internal awareness to be talking about it externally. They're like, 'Oh, this is getting attention. We should probably pay closer attention."

— Brian Clark

That quote captures something important for higher education digital leaders: speed is not a talent advantage. It is an infrastructure advantage. Institutions with the right platform foundations can respond to institutional needs—and external crises—in ways that siloed, disconnected environments simply cannot match.

Modo Labs: Bringing the Ecosystem to Students' Hands

A modern university stack cannot stop at the website. For students especially, the experience of the institution increasingly happens on mobile. That makes Modo Labs a meaningful part of RISD's ecosystem.

RISD partners with Modo Labs to create a centralized mobile hub—a single point of access to information that had previously been scattered across systems and channels. Personalized content, campus information, engagement tools, and a branded experience that lets students find what they need without needing to understand the underlying complexity.

Modo Labs reflects the same design principle visible throughout RISD's stack: don't force users to understand internal architecture. Bring the complexity together behind the scenes, then present something clearer and more relevant on the front end. It is the mobile counterpart to what SearchStax is doing for discovery and what Pantheon is doing for web operations.

Workday and Slate: The Administrative Foundation

The three user-facing layers described above work because of what sits underneath them: enterprise administrative systems that most users never see directly but interact with constantly. RISD runs Workday across HR, finance, payroll, and—more recently—student information. The choice of Workday was not just about functionality. It came down to the same principle that governs everything else in the stack.

At RISD, a prestigious design school, the aesthetic bar for every interface is unusually high. The answer is web services and integration flexibility—RISD’s visual identity applied to what would otherwise be a generic enterprise system. As Rick notes, most people don’t like the Workday interface; the goal is to deliver something better on top of it.

The same logic applies to Slate, which RISD uses for admissions. Behind the scenes, RISD integrates with Slate to deliver interface-friendly views of enrollment data. Slate handles CRM and communication workflows; RISD’s web layer handles what prospective students actually see. Closed, proprietary interfaces are replaced by ones that can be designed and governed like everything else in the ecosystem.

This is the part of RISD’s architecture that most digital leaders underestimate. The institutions that struggle with digital transformation are often not failing at the front end. They are failing because their administrative systems are locked down in ways that prevent real-time integration, meaningful personalization, or coherent cross-functional experience. RISD avoided that trap.

That coherence—three products serving different functions but reinforcing the same user experience goal—is not accidental. It is the result of the philosophy Rick and Brian have built together.

What Digital Leaders Should Take Away

RISD is a specialized art and design school, not a flagship R1. That matters, because it means this approach is not dependent on scale or resources most institutions lack. What it depends on is clarity of philosophy, alignment between IT and marketing, and a commitment to interoperability over convenience. Several principles translate directly to other institutions.

First, administrative system openness is a prerequisite, not a preference. Workday and Slate decisions were not driven by feature comparisons. They were driven by integration architecture. Institutions that lock themselves into closed systems at the administrative layer will find themselves unable to deliver the kind of seamless front-end experience that students and faculty expect—no matter how much they invest in CMS platforms or mobile apps.

Second, IT and the marketing/digital function need a shared vocabulary for technology decisions. At RISD, the Senior Director of Digital Experience reports to both marketing and IT—a structural solution to a governance problem that paralyzes many institutions. The result is a team that uses the same language—platforms, interoperability, openness, experience—because they built the strategy together. That alignment is why RISD can move quickly when it needs to.

Third, AI in search is not a chatbot strategy. RISD is taking a measured, experience-first approach to AI that embeds intelligence into existing user behavior rather than imposing a new interaction pattern. That restraint is as instructive as the implementation itself.

Institutions need to stop thinking in isolated systems and start designing for connection. RISD’s strategy works because the architecture connecting them was built with interoperability as the starting assumption, not an afterthought.

Higher education has spent two decades acquiring systems. The institutions that will define the next decade are the ones building ecosystems.