IT Restructuring: Challenges and Opportunities

Sharon P. Pitt is interim deputy CIO and interim executive director, Technology Systems Division, at George Mason University.

IT restructuring is on the rise. The drivers are sometimes external, from decreases in state financial support for public higher education to fewer college-going students to increased public scrutiny of the cost of college attendance. Other drivers are internal, such as leadership change or the need to address service creep after years of incremental enrollment growth. Finally, some drivers are based in technology itself, as IT organizations develop new strategies to deal with consumerization, mobility, and the cloud.

IT organizations can respond to these drivers to reduce costs, address growth, and embrace new technologies and leaders in multiple ways. Strategies for restructuring include changing the IT organization's placement, consolidating IT, distributing IT, downsizing staff, redesigning the IT organization, creating new services, and outsourcing services.

Restructuring offers huge opportunities for the IT organization and the institution it serves. Many IT staff will embrace and relish the change that restructuring affords for them and for the organization. Others will not. Regardless of the perspective, however, restructuring entails enormous angst. IT staff is very aware of institutional pressures, budget concerns, leadership changes, and the impact of new technologies on the IT organization. And, whether explicit or implicit, likely or unlikely, staff members face fear over for their roles in the new organizational structure — if in fact they'll have a role at all.

For engaged participants, restructuring can be more straightforward and less stressful. Creating opportunities for inclusion in the restructuring process — from individual staff to the university community — is a success factor. Transparency and open communication are other key elements to reduce angst and concern over change. Unpalatable decisions will be made, but the opportunity to provide real input about change will help stakeholders maintain a positive perspective.

Design and Placement of the IT Organization

Most higher education institutions have a central IT organization responsible at the very least for networking, telecommunications, administrative systems, support services, and learning management systems.¹ Organizationally, IT functions might reside within the central IT organization, be distributed outside it, or even be provided by a system office. Restructuring provides an opportunity to think about units and services both within and outside the IT organization to determine how they might better serve the institution through consolidation or distribution.

Key Issues

A good place to start when assessing the IT structure is the EDUCAUSE Core Data Service. The CDS lets you assess how your IT organization compares with others that serve similar institutions.

Questions to ask:

• Are your IT organization's functional responsibilities similar to those of your peers? Where do those functions report?
• Are you resourced similarly to your peers?
• If your budget varies from the norm, is this because you offer a diverse range and depth of services compared to other institutions, or is it for some other reason?

To determine whether your organization has the staff and resources required to address your institution's demands, you must review your core IT budget. A budget review should be holistic and include the multiple resources that support IT services, including general resources, equipment, revenue from fees, research, capital, salary savings, and auxiliary services. You can also conduct comparative research to determine whether you need to adjust any organizational revenue sources, including chargeback and technology fees. In some cases, this comparative research might lead to restructuring strategies such as service consolidation, distribution, or even downsizing.

Questions to ask:

• How does your IT staffing compare with that of your peers?
• Are all IT functions appropriately funded or is fund reallocation necessary and appropriate?
• Are IT functions focused on revenue creation or service provision?

Another key restructuring strategy is organizational placement — that is, ensuring that the IT organization and CIO are appropriately placed within the broader institutional structure and thus better able to help an institution achieve its IT-supported goals. Even when there is little flexibility in the IT organization's institutional placement, defining the IT organization's purpose and communicating it to the broader institutional community will solidify and formalize needed connections and the roles of key stakeholders, dependents, and partners of IT service provisioning.

Advice

Define both the CIO's role and the IT organization's purpose. The CIO's position in the organization expresses, both internally and externally, the IT organization's value and purpose to the institution. Within the IT field, the person to whom the CIO reports often is perceived as a signal of technology's purpose within an institution:

• Reporting to the president or chancellor indicates that technology is strategic to that institution.
• Reporting to the provost indicates that the institution values and leverages technology to support teaching and learning.
• Reporting to the chief administrative officer indicates that the institution is focused on efficient business processes and solid infrastructure.

Without clarifying the role and reporting structures and developing a concomitant communication strategy, incorrect perceptions about IT's value and purpose might disrupt the IT organization's ability to respond to institutional needs.

IT Governance

When restructuring, particularly in a context of broad institutional change, today's IT organizations must ensure agile response to their community's technology needs. Using IT governance to ensure appropriate engagement levels can help ensure that faculty, students, and administrators engage with IT decision making and feel empowered to assign IT resources to address their needs.

Aligning Goals and Effort

Almost all IT organizations have some form of governance. The purpose of IT governance is to ensure that the IT organization's work aligns with the institution's mission and strategic plans. Effective IT governance articulates the IT organization's performance criteria, measures its performance, and allocates resources to support the institution's IT mission and goals; it also identifies and addresses risks related to IT investment.² Restructuring offers the opportunity to define and establish measures for performance criteria that support the institution's articulated business, academic, and research goals. In addition, an effective IT governance structure engages the university community in establishing goals and understanding risks, and thus helps it set priorities and allocate resources.

Advice

Review existing IT governance structures within and outside the institution to create an inclusive but agile and interworking governance structure. IT governance groups can address a range of IT concerns, such as adopting infrastructure standards, modifying the institution's ERP, securing sensitive data assets, establishing acceptable IT security risk,  and ensuring that academic technologies align with teaching and learning goals. These governance groups can also identify technology concerns and provide a venue for airing and resolving different perspectives.³ Further, committee members should actively and publicly support committee-sanctioned conclusions.⁴ All in all, a well-defined and coherent governance structure should ensure that technology issues are identified, addressed, and discussed.⁵

Effective Communication

Beyond inclusive governance, today's IT organizations increasingly need an improved and effective communication function. IT organizations must clearly communicate to user communities, vendors, and campus leadership, as well as within the IT organization itself.

Staff Roles and User Expectations

Staff members assigned to communication responsibilities act as organizational boundary spanners, translating organizational activities within and external to the IT organization. IT communication staff should educate the user community about strategic technology concerns, share information about emergencies and service interruptions, and notify the user community about upcoming projects, programs, and initiatives.⁶ Another key responsibility of communication staff is to translate technical information to the nontechnical user community, as well as to manage the user community's expectations.

Today, expectations about technology are high. Faculty members connect both institutional and personal devices to a network, and reliability is essential. They also use teaching tools and applications in technology classrooms, and want to push the learning management system's capabilities. Students want reliable wireless and wired infrastructure for their social and learning activities, which are performed with multiple and increasingly advanced computing devices. Administrators want both a reliable network and data mining capabilities to support effective business process management and data-driven decision making.

Users expect the IT organization to provide all of these services with high reliability and flexibility, and low cost. In such a context, the university community must have a common understanding of technology's value to the academic enterprise, engage in IT decision making, and have reasonable expectations for the IT organization's capability and response.

Advice

Consider hiring a communication officer and/or a director of client relations. More and more IT organizations are hiring communication professionals to create a communications function within the IT organization.⁷ These staff members are responsible for client relations, as well as strategic and routine communications both internal and external to the organization.

Communications strategies include developing and maintaining e-mail lists, newsletters, websites, and a social media presence, as well as acquiring feedback from the user community. Internal organization communications can be as simple as sharing the comings and goings of IT staff and as complex as developing operational agreements between technical units. External communications focus on relationship-building and acquiring feedback from the university community. Client relations support the creation and maintenance of formal service level agreements (SLAs) and service processes, which helps manage client expectations.

Responding to IT Consumerization and Mobility

In addition to current issues in restructuring, changes in technology use may require the elimination of services, as well as the creation of new services that leverage personally-owned devices. 

Changes in Technology Use

Over the years, technology has become increasingly affordable, powerful, mobile, and connected. New capacities of mobility and connectedness, combined with technology's almost ubiquitous use in higher education, are changing the IT organization in academia.

Computing devices, whether personally owned or institutionally purchased, are replacing devices once deployed by the central IT organization. These new devices are mobile and connected, letting faculty, staff, and students use computing resources outside of predefined locations and tethered network connections. Further, rather than using just one mobile or connected device, faculty, staff, and students use multiple computing devices for research, work, and study, including desktops, laptops, tablets, e-readers, and smartphones.

Advice

It's essential to leverage these changes in computer ownership and technology use. Thoughtfully consider discontinuing services that are best provided outside the institution or purchased by individuals via other providers. For services best supported institutionally, consider creating new services, such as mobile applications that are based on a well-defined mobile strategy. In addition, you can sometimes reduce or eliminate traditional services such as general computer labs, instead providing software as a service (SaaS), which is suitable for some student demographics.

Responding to the Cloud

Increased use of public, private, and personal clouds perhaps has the greatest impact of all technology forces on a central IT organization's optimal design and structure.

Why Cloud?

Public cloud services give faculty, staff, students, and administrators easy access to technology services such as social media, document storage, and productivity tools without having to interact with a salesperson or an IT professional.⁸ Individuals and departments can acquire cloud services at little to no cost. Further, these cloud services are platform and device agnostic: they can be acquired from almost any wireless- or cellular-capable device almost anywhere an Internet or cellular connection is available.

Private cloud services enable broad, on-demand, and easy access to professional software and tools. Using public and private clouds to provide services such as virtualized desktops, infrastructure as a service (IaaS), and platform as a service (PaaS), lets IT organizations optimize computing resources, increase accountability, and customize and package educational and research resources for students and faculty.

Advice

To broadly leverage valuable cloud services, the IT organization might need to become a cloud services broker, creating a structure for cloud governance, security, and service integration to encourage and support cloud services use.

As a cloud broker, the IT organization would

• preapprove specific cloud services for individual and institutional use;
• evaluate the costs/value of using cloud rather than traditionally provisioned services;
• create security guidelines for acquiring cloud services;
• create specific security requirements for cloud services that integrate with highly sensitive institutional data; and
• establish speedy workflow processes to approve new cloud services that administrators, researchers, teachers, and learners desire.

In addition to framework and processes development, deploying a cloud-brokered service will require a review of organizational units that previously provided more traditional computing services. As the IT organization increasingly embraces cloud services to both improve services and reduce costs, it might have to eliminate some organizational functions and realign others. IT might have to redefine the role of some units and support functions, focusing on directory services, authentication services, and virtualized system administration, all of which support institutionally provided and brokered cloud services.

Conclusion

Today's IT organizations must be agile, engage the institutional community in decision making, align services to institutional priorities, communicate effectively, and respond to emerging and promising technologies. Understanding and assessing the current context of organizational change is a starting point for effectiveness. Transparency, communication, and inclusion are also essential components of successful organization change. 

Whether led internally or by a consultant, performed with immediacy or agonizingly slow, institutions must help staff and the university community engage positively in restructuring. To reveal the particular challenges and opportunities your institution faces, consider asking the IT staff and university community the following questions:

• What are the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats related to the delivery of centralized and decentralized IT services? What are the redundancies? What gaps in services, support, and infrastructure are evident? What are the growth areas?
• What organizational structure will help IT more effectively respond to the university community's priorities in a client-centered way, ensuring that IT projects and operations align with institutional priorities? How might this organizational structure allow for integrated governance, including engaging the university community in the IT governance processes?
• How might IT be organized to offer greater inclusion in decision making and productive collaboration across IT units? Across the institution?
• What structure fosters agility, responsiveness to client needs, service effectiveness, and innovation?
• What is an appropriate IT organizational structure for the institution now and in the future? What emerging and authentic technologies and service practices inform that structure?
• How might IT be structured to ensure improved sensitivity to cost, increased accountability and transparency, data-based decision making, and better communication with the university community?

An organizational assessment's results should clearly articulate the IT organization's challenges and opportunities. It's helpful to have a clear plan that includes organizational assessment outcomes, organizational principles, steps for implementation, and timelines. No matter how well laid your restructuring plans, however, unexpected events and decisions will disrupt the process: leadership's guidance on restructuring might radically change, unexpected budget cuts could derail or delay the restructuring process, or key staff might leave for other opportunities. To contend with such disruptions, individuals and the organization must be agile, composed, and adaptable to changing conditions, seeking to achieve a best result where possible.

1. A. W. (Tony) Bates and Albert Sangrà, Managing Technology in Higher Education: Strategies for Transforming Teaching and Learning (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2011), 115.
2. The Information Technology Governance Institution provides a definition of IT governance.
3. Bates and Sangrà, Managing Technology, 113.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid., 113–114.
6. Lisa V. Trubitt and Jeffrey L. Overholtzer, "Good Communication: The Other Social Network for Successful IT Organizations," EDUCAUSE Review 44, no. 6 (November/December 2009): 90–92.
7. Ibid.