A little over a week ago, a significant amount of uncertainty was introduced into the IT environment at the University of Illinois.

Michael Hites will become Executive Chief Information Officer, responsible for administrative information technology (IT) operations and University-wide IT policy-making.

First, I would like to offer my congratulations to Michael on the promotion. While AITS' porfolio previously touched on a lot of administrative computing, it did not hit upon everything which has resulted in significant redundancy like more than a dozen vacation and sick leave tracking systems on the Urbana campus alone. Beyond seeing the potential benefits, there is a lot of confusion and uncertainty about what it really means.

The announcement continues with the following:

As University-wide Executive Chief Information Officer, his portfolio will be expanded so that each campus CIO will report to Michael on matters relating to administrative IT and IT policies across the University. Matters pertaining to academic and research IT will be handled at the campus level, as is now the case, or through blended and shared services as may be appropriate. Michael will also oversee the cross-campus group that is tasked with implementing the several IT recommendations within the ARR report.

The first question that arises is what makes an IT service administrative vs. academic or research. Something like email and calendaring for students, faculty and staff is pretty easy to argue as being administrative. You can also pretty easily say that a faculty member's use of Prezi in the classroom is academic. There are a lot of things in between though: high network bandwidth research applications, enterprise-level learning management systems, web hosting for research groups, and many more.

The uncertainty becomes even stronger if you look at the ARR report for IT. If Michael is overseeing the ARR implementations, then research and academic technology is almost immediately included in his portfolio via these areas:

• Improvement of data stewardship
• Conslidation of research computing resources
• Diversification of learning environments

So what's going to happen? No one really knows for sure because these are the extent of the details that have been released so far.

I have already encountered a handful of people here and there that want to wait and see what it really means rather than move a project forward. Personally, I find that approach flawed. However I can hardly blame them as no one knows exactly how the new structure will impact how we support learning and research.