By Monique Lucey
While 2009 was certainly a challenging year for higher education CIOs, 2010 is shaping up to be just as daunting. The economy is expected to still be plaguing budgets and staffing yet you’ll have a slew of new projects headed your way such as cloud computing and network and firewall virtualization. And get ready for regulatory compliance to play an even bigger role in your lives.
Experts are saying that it will take transformational CIOs, rather than functional ones, to help organizations achieve their business objectives. The difference is that you’ll have to adapt to being a strategic part of higher education institution’s leadership rather than a reactive service provider.
According to CIO Magazine’s “State of the CIO 2009” report, 70% of CIO respondents say that IT is considered an integral business partner by the rest of the business. In their leadership role, CIOs say they spend their time aligning IT with the business goals, cultivating the IT/business partnership, improving IT operations and system performance, and leading change efforts. This is in stark contrast to previous eras when CIOs were knee-deep in hardware and software deployments. These days CIOs say long-term strategic thinking and planning, expertise in running the IT function, and collaboration and influence are the leadership competencies most critical for their current role.
This switch from hands-on IT infrastructure management has resulted in 74% of respondents being able to say they hold a seat on their organization’s executive committee – a higher number than the past two years.
Sitting at the table requires you to be a visionary who can clearly communicate the power technology has to support business goals while at the same time keeping an eye to cost containment. In lieu of explaining the wonders of new hardware and software, you must map technology advances to revenue-generating projects.
In higher education, CIOs have to understand the needs of faculty, student and staff, targeting your efforts towards making admissions run more smoothly, academic resources more readily available, content access more compliant, and research networks more secure. In effect, CIOs must have a clear grasp on every requirement within your college or university.
Once you have that insight, as a 2009 Gartner report “Meeting the Challenge: The 2009 CIO Agenda” points out, CIOs above all else must be decisive and resourceful despite economic conditions. Gartner encourages CIOs to focus on improving business processes, using business intelligence to raise visibility, and enhance workforce effectiveness.
The research firm says CIOs must restructure IT to be more productive and more agile because “the business will not reduce its demand for IT just because you have fewer resources.” This is something that leaders at academic institutions know all too well. Gartner also advises modernizing your technical infrastructure to take advantage of newer technologies that lower cost, use less energy, deliver better performance and provide greater capacity.
The CIO that does all this will shine a positive light on IT and ensure that you maintain your newfound stature within the organization. What are you doing to meet the challenges in 2010? Has the difficult economy shifted your institution’s IT focus? How? We want to hear from you.
