A shortage of information technology professionals in the workforce has created a crisis for many EDUCAUSE members, at a time when information technology is proliferating across campuses, requiring more staff support than ever before.
This issue of CAUSE/EFFECT offers a special focus on IT staffing challenges, beginning with an introduction by Susan Jurow, executive director of the College and University Personnel Association (CUPA), and EDUCAUSE President Brian Hawkins, that sets the tone for the articles that follow. Jurow and Hawkins emphasize the need for human resource and IT professionals to work together to find solutions to the challenges that concern both of our association constituencies. Their article also appears in the Fall/Winter 1998 issue of CUPA Journal, which similarly focuses on staffing challenges related to the widespread and distributed use of information technology on campuses. In a cooperative exchange, CUPA Journal and CAUSE/EFFECT are co-publishing two other articles, one contributed by EDUCAUSE member Ann West and the other written by CUPA member William Wallace.
Another feature in this issue of CAUSE/EFFECT presents a potpourri of resourceful responses to IT staffing challenges from half a dozen EDUCAUSE member campuses, and two award-winning projects related to human resource challenges are included in the Good Ideas section.In addition to the articles presented here, we refer you to a set of resources related to IT staffing issues on the EDUCAUSE Web server. "Retaining, Retraining, and Recruiting Information Technology Staff" (see http://www.educause.edu/issues/issue.asp?issue=hrit) provides links to online campus and government articles, reports, papers, plans, projects, and other Web sites on this topic. If you have a related online resource you would like to share with your colleagues, please send the URL to [email protected] and ask us to add it to the IT staffing issues page.