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Copyright 1996 CAUSE. From CAUSE/EFFECT Volume 19, Number 3, Fall 1996, pp. 35-39. Permission to copy or disseminate all or part of this material is granted provided that the copies are not made or distributed for commercial advantage, the CAUSE copyright and its date appear, and notice is given that copying is by permission of CAUSE, the association for managing and using information resources in higher education. To disseminate otherwise, or to republish, requires written permission. For further information, contact Julia Rudy at CAUSE, 4840 Pearl East Circle, Suite 302E, Boulder, CO 80301 USA; 303-939-0308; e-mail: [email protected]
There is substantial variation in college and university computing and communications structures, budgeting and charge policies, and planning efforts. Although such management issues have been frequently discussed, there has been little systematic research concerning whether these structures, policies, and plans have any impact on outcomes such as the extent of access to and use of computing by faculty, staff, and students. This article draws on the 1994 CAUSE Institution Database (ID) Survey to provide an initial assessment of these issues.
A 1984 survey by Henry Lucas showed that information services departments had little power and visibility in most organizations.1 But computing today is becoming a central activity of strategic importance to both higher education institutions and businesses. For example, Mara points out that the definition of a user of information technology at Cornell has changed from a hundred or so central office users to over 20,000 members of the university community.2 If colleges and universities are to attract and keep top-notch staff, faculty, and students, they need to serve a full range of users and support teaching, research, and administration needs.
To achieve these goals, campus information managers need to know what approaches are effective. What measures can they take to help ensure success? For example, in recent years, many colleges and universities have spent a great deal of time developing technology plans that include strategic, telecommunications, networking, administrative, library, and academic components. Although plans may help to bring about enhanced effectiveness, there is skepticism about the utility of planning because many plans remain on shelves unused. Do institutions that construct formal plans (e.g., for networking) have more successful results (e.g., higher percentage of their workstations networked) than those who do not formally plan? Do plans that are updated annually or linked to the budget have more impact?
The chief information officer (CIO) has become a familiar position in higher education. Slightly more than 75 percent of institutions in the 1994 CAUSE Institution Database (ID) survey reported the existence of a CIO, though only about 56 percent said that the CIO is "recognized as such" in their organization. CIOs may come under attack if they are not viewed as being effective. For example, a Sloan Management Review article asked the question, "Is Your CIO Adding Value?"3 In the private sector, several CIOs have been fired, and in the public sector, CIOs have become the lightning rods for controversy in several states. As one former CIO noted, "States have to do more with less and they think that technology is going to pull a rabbit out of the hat for them."4
CIOs in higher education may come under similar pressure as the strategic importance of computing grows. Some observers have noted that the organizational rather than technological challenges have been most difficult and that there still is disagreement about whether centralized or decentralized structures work best in a college or university setting.5
Pitkin studied the role of college/university CIOs and found that they differed from their business counterparts because they did not carry out some roles necessary to be an effective executive.6 The structure and power of the CIO job can vary greatly. For example, some CIOs (about 18 percent) report directly to the chief executive officer (CEO) of their college or university. About 33 percent report to the chief administrative officer, 19 percent to the chief financial officer, and the remainder report to a variety of others. Does it matter whether there is a CIO or to whom the CIO reports? Is a CIO who reports directly to the CEO without any intervening layers of administration more effective? Does it make any difference as far as use of computers in the curriculum whether the head of academic computing reports to the CIO?
Finally, there has been controversy over what budget and cost recovery policies are most effective in encouraging use of computing by faculty, staff, and students. Thomas M. Schwen, chair of the Department of Instructional Systems Technology at Indiana University, stated that he was worried about a backlash when campus decision-makers found that faculty only made use of a tiny fraction (e.g., 12 percent) of the capabilities of high-tech classrooms.7
Do student fees and chargeback systems keep students and professors from using the Internet? There have been reports that high network costs have done so.8 Similarly, do colleges/universities with ongoing budgets (about 35 percent of our study sample) for replacing microcomputers and workstations have more faculty and students involved with computing in the curriculum and the Internet? Which policies, if any, positively influence the spread of academic use of computers?
The above questions deserve attention and careful study involving a variety of approaches, including case studies and the employment of experimental and quasi-experimental designs. Our study was exploratory, aimed more at focusing attention on these issues and developing hypotheses than at reaching final conclusions about the questions. But the importance of these issues should not be underestimated.
Many people argue that information technology has been slow to permeate the curriculum of colleges and universities. For example, Cotton found that the percentage of courses in which information technology was integrated into the curriculum was 17 percent, no higher than in her kindergarten to high school study.9 Stager, Williams, McClure, and Smith pointed to the dearth of evaluation studies concerning technology expenditures and the need to conduct such evaluations due to the shrinking economic resources available to higher education institutions.10
Can colleges and universities modify their structures, plans, and budgeting/charge policies to improve outcomes? We hope this article will help to stimulate research on this topic.
Our study examined four major categories of independent variables (planning activities, CIO-organizational structure, computer charge and budgeting policies, and resource allocation variables) concerning their impact on the outcome variables. A detailed list of variables employed in the analysis is provided in Exhibit 1. We included composite measures of both the planning and CIO variables that represented the total of positive responses to the individual questions. Thus the composite measure of CIO power ranged from zero to five. For example, a score of five is assigned to those institutions in which there is a CIO, (s)he is recognized as such, the CIO reports directly to the CEO, and both academic and administrative computing report to the CIO.
Our inquiry used a variety of statistical analysis techniques, including the use of a series of multiple regression analyses. These allowed us to study the impact of several independent variables (the structures, plans, and budgeting/charge policies of institutions) on outcomes simultaneously while "holding constant" (statistically) the infuence of certain environmental variables such as the size of the institution and its resources. Also, the general wealth of a college or university may allow it to look good on outcome measures, though its plans and policies may not be especially effective. Although our index of resources (ratio of micros/workstations to FTE) is rough, examination of institutions high on this variable confirmed that many wealthy private institutions scored among the leaders on this index (e.g., Harvard, University of Pennsylvania, Williams College, and Duke University), which supports our argument that this measure helps to control for institutional resources and wealth. We also studied the impact of other potentially relevant variables such as the Carnegie classification of the institution.
The study has several limitations that preclude viewing the results as more than exploratory at this point, including the following:
Despite these limitations, this study addresses significant issues and raises important questions for college and university officials seeking to discover what are the most effective structures and approaches to planning, organizing, budgeting, and charging for computing.
In the above analyses, we initially excluded the resource allocation variables because we wanted to focus on the impact of the CIO and the structure of computing, computing plans, and budgeting and charge policies. When we added the resource allocation variables to the analysis-such as percent of instructors with exclusive use of an institutional micro/workstation and student access to micros in their dorms--we were able to predict better the percent of faculty making use of software in the classroom and in the curriculum, though the percent of variance still remained modest.
Generally, while the existence of a plan was not a good predictor of outcomes, the existence of an academic plan did correlate somewhat with increased overall student access to the Internet. But the existence of an information technology plan that covered academics did not predict use of computing in the curriculum. Likewise, existence of a networking plan was not a predictor of the percent of micros/workstations networked, and neither updating the plan nor linking it to the budget proved to be predictors in the above analyses.13
The quality of the planning effort and the nature of the process may be crucial to the success of the plan, but we had no way of measuring these aspects of planning efforts. Institutions in which academic computing reports to the CIO more often reported superior outcomes. Other CIO-related variables were not important. The fact that the CIO reported directly to the CEO did not have any major positive impacts.
The computer charge variables turned out to be generally unimportant--student fees had no statistically significant correlations with the student index of access to the Internet nor use in the classroom or curriculum. The environmental variables (FTE, public or private institution, Carnegie classification, and our index of resources) had modest relationships with most of the outcome measures.
As expectations concerning information technology continue to soar, colleges and universities need to put more effort into linking their scarce resources (such as time putting together plans) to bottom-line results. Although many of the plans, structures, and policies did not have much effect on our outcome measures, might other variables not available for analysis--for example, incentives for faculty to use computers--have more effect? Finally, the above research was done using 1994 CAUSE ID Survey data. In the last year, there appears to have been a revolution in access to and use of the Internet. Has use of computing in the curriculum had a corresponding change? Can we identify any other practices that influence good outcomes? We need answers to these questions.
2Mark Mara, "Implementing Distributed Computing at Cornell University," in Managing Information Technology as a Catalyst of Change: Proceedings of the 1993 CAUSE Annual Conference (Boulder, Colo.: CAUSE, 1994), 91-122.
3Michael J. Earl and David F. Feeny, "Is Your CIO Adding Value?," Sloan Management Reviewa 36 (Spring 1994): 11-20.
4Tod Newcome, "The CIO-Lightning Rod for IT Troubles?" Government Technology, October 1995, 58.
5Joseph J. Branin, George D'Elia, and Douglas Lund, "Integrating Information Services in an Academic Setting: The Organizational and Technical Challenge," CAUSE/EFFECT, Fall 1994, 26-31,36-37.
6Gary M. Pitkin, "Leadership and the Changing Role of the Chief Information Officer in Higher Education," in CAUSE Proceedings, op cit., 55-66.
7Thomas J. DeLoughry, "Colleges Told to Take 'Disciplined Approach to Technology,'" Chronicle of Higher Education, 27 October 1993, A22-A23.
8See, for example, Thomas DeLoughry, "Unconnected: High Network Costs and Low Interest Keep Many Off the Internet," Chronicle of Higher Education, 23 February 1994, A19-A20.
9Carole Cotton, "Talking Turkey About 'Real Change,'" in CAUSE Proceedings, op cit., 301-310.
10Susan F. Stager, James G. Williams, Polley Ann McClure, and John W. Smith, "Assessing the Effectiveness of Information Technology," in CAUSE Proceedings, op cit., 257-263.
11See, e.g., Caroline Arms, ed., Campus Networking Strategies (Bedford, Mass.: Digital Press, 1988), and Brian L. Hawkins, ed., Organizing and Managing Information Resources on Campus (McKinney, Texas: Academic Computing Publications, 1989), for case studies of changes in information system structures. We need further research such as longitudinal analysis in which we can identify the sequence of changes to be certain of the nature of the relationships.
12We have by design not reported statistics such as R- square and the slope coefficients. Our focus here is whether the independent variables had any statistically significant impact on the dependent variables.
13Note that we only present here the composite results for the impact on the use of e-mail, Gopher, and World Wide Web. We did eighteen individual analyses which generally were consistent with the results we present here. However, in a few, the updating and linking of the plan to the budget did appear as predictors.
Bruce Rocheleau ([email protected]) is Associate Professor of Political Science at Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, Illinois. He teaches and does research concerning information technology and has published numerous articles concerning the use of information technology by governmental organizations. He received his BA from the University of Pennsylvania, MA from New York University, and PhD from the University of Florida. He is currently working on a monograph, "Computer Problems and Disasters: The Limitations of Information Systems in Government"