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The CIO’s Perfect Storm
6/22/2006
What could promote a CIO’s ability to focus more broadly? It would be helpful if our administrations—our presidents, chancellors, and provosts—continued to grow their grasp of the role of IT in the strategic advance of the institution in the 21st century. Having a continuing, heightening relationship between them and the campus IT leaders will help CIOs to address the challenges coming down the road and not consume quite as much focus to do that.
Let me give you an example: the whole database breach issue. It’s complicated by the fact that at many institutions the CIO is the lonely voice in the wilderness crying out to address this threat, and that senior administration will not fully grasp, until they actually have incidents, what the impact is. And that’s not to indict all senior administration; there are many presidents and chancellors and provosts who certainly are very much in tune—especially once they have experienced this. CIOs who have presidents who grasp this issue can encourage those presidents to talk to their colleagues and get this discussion going beyond the CIO community. This then allows CIOs to spend more time working with administration to resolve the problems, and less time just trying to raise awareness and manage the politics of the problem within their institutions. In turn, it allows time and energy for broader focus on other IT topics.
Given this whole picture, and what you’ve seen in your new position in the last year, do you see that the role of the CIO is changing, or has to change? I actually fear that the role of the CIO is going to change from one of being a holistic information technology advocate and a provider of broad, full-range information technology services, to one very, very focused on these key and potentially deadly survival issues. I’m concerned that with this—and the natural course of events over time, which leads CIOs to pay attention mostly to what may be considered by faculty, researchers, and students as administrative computing issues—you’ll start to see a fracturing of IT on campus.
There’s been a lot of effort in the last couple decades to build a holistic IT environment. Twenty years ago, you had separate organizations for administrative computing, academic computing, and telecommunications. Those areas have now merged into the CIO’s portfolio. It is successful where that merger yields efficiencies that improve the effectiveness of all three. But my concern is, now that they’re all together, if the CIO’s focus moves almost exclusively into one area—the “perfect storm” issues—you will start to see diminishing focus in other critical areas.
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