When I talk about IT in a corporate context, I believe there are two types of IT investments: operational investments and strategic investments. Operational investments are the types of things that fall into best practices in an operational context, commonly seen as improvements in infrastructure. Strategic investments are those that allow the organization to offer new products and services or deliver products and services in ways that are significant improvements over past methods. In higher education, we can look at IT investment in the same way, in a way that demands that we make sure our infrastructure measures up to best practice.

The story goes that when money gets tight in higher education, professional development is often one of the first things cut for IT professionals. One would hope that no organization would cut their professional development budget completely, but there are probably some that do. In this sort of environment where we have shrinking budgets for training opportunities but a large population that has a penchant for learning, it becomes possible to get creative in offering professional development. A do-it-yourself model becomes an appealing way in which a community can come together to help each other, and you need three ingredients to make the process enjoyable for instructors and participants alike.

Update: The video from May 2 has been posted with relevant content starting at 28:44.

The Academic Senate of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign met to discuss a resolution about the reorganization of IT at the University that would be sent to the President, the Chancellor and the Board of Trustees. I discussed the reorganization in a previous post, but the changes so far have been to pull the central IT organizations at each campus into Michael's management as well as to move the campus CIOs to report to him (a change which resulted in the resignation of Urbana campus CIO Sally Jackson).

Now that I am back from the AUTM annual meeting, I have some time to reflect on the last couple weeks. The first event I attended was the EDUCAUSE Institute Management Program which was a week long management and leadership seminar for IT professionals working in higher education. The program is taught by IT managers and leaders from all over the country including CIOs, IT directors, and librarians. The individual sessions covered a lot of management and leadership issues from the state of IT in higher education to developing an organizational culture to effective teams. The following are a few of the highlights for me and what I was able to take away from the week.

This week I attended the EDUCAUSE Management Institute, and it was just amazing. It was four days of management and leadership sessions for IT managers in higher education. It was one of those things that can potentially alter the course of your career. I'll have some more comments in a few days when I have a bit more time.

With about a year to go on my Master's in MIS degree, I have started to plan my thesis. While I was thinking one morning about Herzberg's Motivation-Hygiene Theory for human resource management, I began to think about whether there were things that IT managers can do to impact their relationship with organizational leaders in terms of satisfaction and innovation. For example, if the email system is consistently off-line or is buggy, management is likely to be dissatisfied with how their IT services are operating and are unlikely to give funding and support for projects that do not directly address that issue. For my thesis, I have decided to take this concept and build a set of guidelines for IT leaders and organizational leaders. To narrow the research, I decided to focus my thesis on higher education.

While doing a literature search for coverage of the topic, I came across an study from EDUCAUSE, an organization focused on IT in higher education. The study was a snapshot of IT leadership in higher education published in 2004, so it is pretty current as far as academic research is concerned. Some of the significant parts of the study covered innovation and IT effectiveness within higher education, and so it has several insights useful for my thesis and for my career. Perhaps the most interesting is that IT leaders feel that the components necessary for innovation, such as transformational leadership, are in place, but they feel that there is little innovation that receives support.

I can see where there might be a possible explanation for this disconnect between having an innovative environment and being able to be innovative with higher education IT management. The reason might be from a difference of opinion of what innovation actually means. To most IT workers who are interested in innovation such as myself, innovation is the "fun" side of IT management where we come up with ideas and systems using new technologies that impact the operations of the organization we support. However in an organization that is far behind on the scale of adopter categories, basic services such as share calendaring for staff or high capacity data storage for researchers could potentially be innovative. Adopter categories are part of the Diffusion of Innovations theory by Everett Rogers. For an organization that is not at the front of the adopter category curve, improving basic teaching support systems may be the type of innovation they need rather than implementing a high-end SAN to support the terabytes of data generated from research.

So while it is possible to elicit the responses that determine whether an organization is conducive to innovation, the services that IT workers see as innovative may not be getting support and hence make them believe their organization does not support innovation. The organization is simply continuing with its normal pace of adopting innovations while IT workers feel like the environment is stagnant. This disconnect between the meaning of innovation might be the cause for the EDUCAUSE study's innovation issue, and perhaps I will find additional data to support my belief in my research.