Chris Anderson has noticed that risk aversion and a lack of imagination are making CIOs irrelevant:

The consequence of this is that many CIOs are now just one step above Building Maintenance. They have the unpleasant job of mopping up data spills when they happen, along with enforcing draconian data retention policies sent down from the legal department. They respond to trouble tickets and disable user permissions. They practice saying “No”, not “What if…” And they block the ports used by the most popular services, from Skype to Second Life, which always reminds me of the old joke about the English shopkeeper who, when asked what happened to a certain product, answered “We don’t stock it anymore. It kept selling out.”

Later on he notes that this is the biggest problem at universities:

The life of a university CIO is like the life of a telco CEO, fast forwarded by about five years. The users want a dumb pipe, preferably at gigabit speed. They neither need or want the university to administer their email, wikis, blogs, video storage or discussion groups. They want it to simply get out of their way.

From what I know, universities didn’t create CIOs until recently, and they don’t really have much function. Most departments manage there own IT. In the liberal arts, this just means faculty and administrator desktops, but in the hard sciences it usually involves research equipment that goes over the central service’s head. Yes, there are certain shared services that the university needs - most importantly single sign-on, but I’d argue mail and file storage as well - but then get out of the way. With the price of storage as low as it is, I can’t imagine why universities have such low quotas, which is one of the things that drives engineering and art colleges to run their own parallel systems. If your job is keeping the lights on, that’s where you need to innovate - give people the tools they need to do what they want to do better, don’t blow money on tools that other people do better, cheaper.

And, as in all cases, if you’re having discussions about whether or not you’re relevant anymore, it means you’re already irrelevant. It’s time to either reinvent what you do, or stop wasting resources.

Categories: Business and Economics, Governance, Information Economics, Libraries, The Academy