Why is this IT different from all other ITs?

"Will I be surprised," an ex-CIO colleague from outside higher education asks, "by what I learn about information technology at Royal College?" The CFO at Royal (not its real name) knows my colleague socially, has just hired a new IT director, and wants informal advice about Royal's IT issues, opportunities, and challenges. Much of that advice will be generic to IT, my colleague knows: trends in networking, virtual servers, cloud storage, BYOD. But he suspects that campus IT differs from corporate IT in important ways. He wants to avoid faux pas. So I flag a few differences for him.

1. No one—and everyone—is in charge

Colleges and universities are designed for permanence: independent libraries, faculty tenure, departmental autonomy, fund accounting, 100-year buildings. They resist change. That's good: it's why they have survived as custodians of knowledge and culture, collectively if not individually, for centuries. But it's also problematic: campus governance can seem impenetrable and imperturbable to those not embedded in it.

One of my Presidents, Don Michael Randel, occasionally asserted that the University of Chicago was a $2-billion organization where not a single person would obey a direct order. (He also observed that in faculty affairs—which are central to campus governance, given tenure and departmental autonomy—200 to 2 is a tie.)

Campus authority and decision making are widely distributed, only occasionally shared, and as a result can be inscrutable and inconsistent. This is especially problematic for domains whose scope spans the campus, such as Facilities and IT, and where rapid change begs efficient decision making.

At best, distributed decision making degrades efficiency in such domains. At worst, it impedes necessary progress and leaves pressing problems unaddressed.

2. There's no money

As I wrote in a recent post, "All seven standard sources of higher-education funding—state appropriations, federal financial aid to students, students' and parents' ability to pay, eleemosynary support from foundations and private donors, federal research and other direct funding for campus operations, corporate support, and investment yields—are under pressure."

Of course this affects all campus operations, not just IT. In many other economic sectors, IT investment is viewed strategically, as a demonstrably effective way to streamline operations, enhance revenues, and otherwise offset shrinkage. But that's rarely the case in higher education, not least because revenue isn't the only (or even a primary) organizational goal.

Even so, campuses often expect IT to somehow make up for funding shortfalls. But given the governance challenges, they aren't willing to invest to that end. This mismatch between expectations and resources pinches IT especially hard.

3. Campus boundaries leak

Some years ago, in a live demonstration for the UChicago trustees, I had a typical undergraduate find a new interest, locate material, read it, search for relevant learning opportunities, identify researchers, communicate with them and instructors and advisers, make sure prerequisites had been satisfied, register for classes, shoot the breeze with friends, and otherwise participate extensively in campus academic, administrative, and social life—without ever leaving a dormitory room. But all of this electronic interaction was still confined largely to the physical campus.

Today, in contrast, "campuses" are defined as much by networks as by streets. Much education is at a distance, many students receive degrees based on coursework at diverse institutions (indeed, may never set foot on "campus"), and researchers collaborate without regard for location or affiliation. My undergraduate's online efforts today would ignore campus boundaries. As a result, higher education, enabled and driven by pervasive national networking, is coming to comprise something different from largely independent campuses serving well-defined student and research populations.

But what that something is remains unclear. IT promotes leaky boundaries, but leaky boundaries also challenge IT, if only because marketing, discounts, and site licenses based on physical "campuses" make less and less sense. IT collaboratives such as Internet2, the Common Solutions Group, and EdX have attempted to address this, but so far with constrained scope and success.

4. IT straddles hierarchy

Organizational schizophrenia inevitably afflicts IT, complicating policy and progress. Campus IT leaders work across contradictory, competing "academic" and "administrative" cultures. This is challenging when IT leaders report directly to Presidents. It can become unmanageable when they report up only one or the other line.

Sometimes the schizophrenia is severe enough that IT gets split in two, with "academic" and "administrative" units reporting separately to Provosts and CFOs and competing for resources and strategic attention. (Or even three: sometimes "research" gets its own unit.)

As I've written elsewhere, "a CIO reporting on the academic side gets excoriated as inefficient and unrealistic by the administrative side, a CIO reporting on the administrative side gets excoriated as obstructionist and penurious by those on the academic side, and one with dual reporting—the frequent, albeit imperfect, solution to the conundrum—gets hit both ways."

5. CapEx are from Mars; OpEx are from Venus

Most campuses treat capital expense and operating expense separately, often budgeting and funding them through different mechanisms. Campus capital expense traditionally has comprised buildings and other long-lived major facilities with expected lifetimes of 15, 20, or even 75 or 100 years. These often have been funded, at least in part, by major donations, special appropriations or grants for research facilities, or other one-time resources.

As a result, capital depreciation, even when it has to be calculated for indirect-cost rates and the like, rarely crosses the border into "total cost of ownership" (TCO) or annual budgets. Reinforcing this, depreciation usually has no tax implications, since except for certain auxiliary enterprises most campus activities are nonprofit and tax-exempt.

This is a problem for IT, since technology purchases often qualify as capital investment yet have short enough expected lifetimes that depreciating them—or, more precisely, budgeting explicitly for their replacement, and perhaps including that in rate calculations—is essential. For-profit and other organizations that fund capital investment out of operating revenues routinely account for IT depreciation in operating accounts; most campuses don't.

6. Costs trump effectiveness

Like TCO, "return on investment" (ROI) rarely figures recognizably in campus IT decisions. Campuses usually define their core goals in terms of research production, student learning, degree completion, and sometimes community service. The dearth of useful success measures for these goals is problematic generally: How can campuses make important choices without ways to measure their impact? But it's especially problematic for making return-based investment decisions, such as those common in IT, since the few available metrics (research articles, degree completion, etc.) never involve money. Absent monetary measures of "return", it's impossible to calculate ROI.

Instead, campuses often assess IT investments using a truncated version of benefit/cost analysis. In effect, they assume, given the lack of outcome measures, that all IT investments have the same effect on outcomes. Therefore, maximizing benefit/cost ratios is the same as minimizing cost. IT investments that reduce costs, or otherwise save money, are deemed more valuable than others.

Saving money is good. But if educational-technology and distance-leaning advocates are right, sometimes additional spending on IT is necessary to maximize institutional success—even though they can't measure the latter. Continuing to assess IT investments purely in terms of cost and savings, as classic ROI and benefit/cost analysis do, can make campuses unduly conservative technologically, and impede modernization and progress.

7. Convenience defeats security

As an especially problematic corollary of the Randel principle ("not a single person will obey a direct order"), cybersecurity (along with acceptable-use policies more generally) requires different approaches on campus than it does elsewhere. Major policy and procedure changes must be discussed at length with myriad constituencies. Even minor procedures common in industry—password requirements, encryption mechanisms, retention standards, network authentication, central procurement—meet with objection, and are often bypassed when implemented.

It's common, for example, for departments to run their own authentication, mail, and storage servers simply to get around campus requirements (and then to expect central campus help when those systems are compromised), or to go around carefully negotiated purchasing arrangements. And there's rarely a penalty for doing so. Indeed, centrally appropriated funds often pay for inadequately secured shadow systems and for equipment procured more expensively outside "required" procurement channels.

The point isn't that cybersecurity is unimportant. Rather, it requires different approaches than it does in organizations where central control, hierarchy, and authority work. As I wrote elsewhere about the more general loss of control over campus IT, "...organizational and management models based on ownership, faith, authority, and hierarchy—however benevolent, inclusive, and open—[must] give way to models based on persuasion, negotiation, contracting, and assessment."

And so...

These differences are part of what makes working within higher education IT attractive, I think: it's never predictable, it's heavily colored by campus culture, it requires careful thinking and lucid advocacy, and it's never dull. The differences also help ensure that IT is well tailored to campus purposes, at Royal and elsewhere, rather than adopting "best practices" from industry that may be nothing of the sort.

But some "best practices" are indeed best. They deserve more attention and wider adoption on campus than they often receive. This is a cultural challenge for people like my ex-CIO colleague who attempt to bring external wisdom to bear on campus IT. And it's a cultural challenge for those of us in campus IT who believe too strongly in our distinctiveness.

This IT, in short, need not be quite so different from all other IT.