At many higher education institutions today, there are people who are exercising CIO-like responsibilities without holding a "Chief Officer" title, enjoying senior-level rank or belonging to the president’s cabinet. We found many such "default" CIOs in the sample of our subscribers we surveyed for the Hot Issues article this year (The Edutech Report, September 2001): "If there’s a CIO here, I guess I’m it"; "I talk to the VPs in their offices, but I don’t sit at the table when they meet."

When we identify an individual as a default CIO (DCIO), we don’t just mean that the person occupies the niche that has traditionally been called something like "Director of Information Systems." As technology has become a mainstay of higher education, most institutions have ended up with a main IT group that supports services that must be consistent across campus, such as networking, campus administration software, central services like email, and perhaps telecommunications. This central group often also supports desktops, classrooms, labs, servers, research machines, and other facilities for those units on the campus that don’t have their own support groups.

Heading up such a centralized IT operation does not necessarily catapult a person into the category of default CIO. As long as the director is focused on making things work and providing services, as long as the director’s role in the budget process emphasizes making a case for needs and requesting the funds to meet those needs, the head of IT is functioning as a department head. That remains true even if the director in question happens to be the highest ranking person on campus with exclusively IT matters in his or her job description. The expectations that the institution has for such key directors, however, can change dramatically over time, and these talented people often rise to another level, sometimes without even really noticing the qualitative change. Voila, the default CIO.

Defining the Default CIO
Whatever place the default CIO holds in the organizational structure, it is clear that the technology buck stops at his or her desk. The DCIO takes part in strategic planning, proposes an overall IT direction for the senior administration to adopt, is expected to give a heads-up before new technology surprises the institution, and plays a personal role in educating and winning over key constituencies, including the senior officers themselves. The DCIO is a key influence in encouraging the development of standards and policies that reach far beyond the DCIO’s explicit domain in the org chart.

However, the DCIO differs from a full-blown CIO in reporting relationship (reporting to one or even two senior officers, perhaps as associate vice president, executive director, or just plain director). Also, the DCIO sometimes has a somewhat limited span of control, which may not include one or more of the elements like the library, audio/visual, learning labs, telecommunications, or divisional facilities. Most significantly, the DCIO does not have a regular seat at the senior-level council. This last item, the DCIO’s arm’s-length involvement in senior deliberations, is perhaps the most defining quality of this twilight position.

Is this just a compromise an institution makes on the way toward creating a full-blown CIO position? Are there advantages to doing it this way? Does this model fit some institutions more than others? Let’s review some of the thinking that often goes into the decision about whether an institution should create a senior level information technology position.

When deciding whether it needs a real CIO (or a reasonable approximation), an institution must ask whether IT has come to have strategic (life-or-death, flourish-or-famish) importance for it. If not, then the IT needs are probably being handled by one or more functional departments that are seen as part of the infrastructure. The heads of these departments are probably too busy to be doing much duty at the institutional level, even as default CIO.

But let’s say that the institution has recognized a central role for IT in its vital activities and therefore decides that it needs a single person to carry that portfolio in a systematic and responsible way. The institution may want to bring serious technology expertise into the top-level planning process, but may still shy away from formally putting that person on the top line of the org chart. What follows are some common reasons why an institution might not want to create a senior-level position for IT, but instead might choose to locate the responsibility in a single place – just one level down.

Span of control
Some of the first experiments with the CIO concept were based on the idea of unifying all the aspects of the institution that are based on information technology. A notable example was the idea of bringing the Library and the traditional IT organization together under one roof, at least figuratively. Some of these mixed families worked well, others did not. Some institutions have backed away from creating a senior-level CIO position because they know they do not want that kind of CIO, they do not want to try to pull together disparate units into one organization.

However, the core idea of the CIO concept can be separated from the concept of a unified span of control. Over time, the CIO concept has migrated away from authority (the trademark of the "computer czar"), and moving toward leadership and influence. Although certain kinds of real authority are important for the CIO, a reporting relationship with all the units that provide or consume IT services is not one of them. In fact, the more we understand how IT is intertwined within all the essential efforts of the institution, the more futile it seems anyway to try to separate out the units that are technology-intensive and bring them under one office.

What do senior administrators do?
Another facet of the span of control issue has to do with defining what kind of responsibility justifies a senior-level position. Some institutions hesitate to elevate the Director of IT to the position of a senior administrator because the size of the IT budget and the number of IT staff, even though they may be large, do not seem to constitute a big enough responsibility for, say, a vice president.

But people are often included in the president’s cabinet for reasons other than the size of the unit they head. For instance, the person responsible for enrollment management or for public relations may form a permanent part of senior-level discussions because of the abiding importance of their area of expertise, not the number of people they supervise or the size of their budgets.

Watering down the soup
Sometimes there is a reluctance on the part of the existing senior administrators to add a CIO position out of fear that it may dilute their own influence, or reduce their share of a zero-sum pie of resources.

This situation is as close to pure academic politics as you can get, and will take a skillful president to handle. The president can make it clear that the CIO will be expected to bring an institution-wide perspective to the senior administration’s deliberations, not simply to plead for his or her own projects, and remind everyone that it is in their own interest to have a sound IT policy undergird everything the institution does.

Call a CIO when you need one
Many of the issues that the top administrators need to work out among themselves do not directly involve IT. For instance, financial aid strategies, faculty salaries, or major curricular decisions don’t seem to call for a "techie." Why not just put the IT honcho at a subordinate level and invite him or her to the meetings as required? This thinking is flawed because, for one thing, it often turns out that most big issues have a strong IT component hidden in them somewhere.

But to look at it from the other direction, it is just as important to educate the IT leader in the ins and outs of the institution’s priority dilemmas. The IT leader has to be at the table and on the retreats for the benefit of his or her own education (and continual reeducation) about the institution’s plans, goals, challenges, and capabilities to ensure strong IT support.

If an institution thinks it needs the functions of a CIO, there are also structural benefits that come from making it a formal position at a senior-level. Such a decision stresses the importance that IT has for the institution. And if the top IT person reports to the president, that eliminates some of the perception that IT is dominated by one or another faction on campus.

The placement of the IT leader can also be important for plugging the IT staff into the institution; otherwise they may feel that their main problem is not being able to get their message "to the top." JS