The CTO Project

I’m all about smackdowns at the moment. Here’s the latest. Today I finished our reaccreditation self-study. That means I wrote a long report analyzing the effectiveness of our organization for a committee which will never read it. I’m pretty certain about that.

In the IT self-study I provide evidence supporting what I see as our top 10 issues. They are:

1. Strategic planning

2. Governance, Organization, and Leadership

3. Communications/Public Relations for IT

4. Collaboration/Partnerships/Building Relationships

5. Funding IT

6. Staffing/HR Management/Trainings

7. Support Services

8. Administrative/ERP/Information Systems

9. Electronic Classrooms/Technology Buildings/Commons

10. Faculty Development, Support, and Training

Educause released its current issues report this month. Overall, here are the current IT issues in higher education:

1. Security

2. Administrative/ERP/Information Systems

3. Funding IT

4. Infrastructure

5. Identity/Access Management

6. Disaster Recovery/Business Continuity

7. Governance, Organization, and Leadership

8. Change Management

9. E-Learning/Distributed Teaching and Learning

10. Staffing/HR Management/Training

So, we overlap in 4 areas. 2 areas (strategic planning and faculty development) were on last year’s top 10 list. So, we’re not far off in 6 areas. 2 more areas (collaboration and communication) are in the top 10 for “issues that CIOs spend the most time on.” Given that there was no CTO at this organization for over a year, it makes sense that these two issues would now be critical for us. The final 2 (classrooms and support services) haven’t been on Educause’s top 10 since 2001 and 2000, respectively. So, uh, yeah, we might want to focus on those.