A perennial complaint among college IT departments is that no one in top administration listens to them. But a new survey shows that even if presidents aren’t listening, they are now within shouting distance slightly more often.
Educause, the higher-education technology consortium, has just released a survey of IT management on 952 campuses, ranging from large research universities to small community colleges. The data were collected in early 2007. We reported on some important findings about outsourcing yesterday.
When it comes to influential positions, the survey shows that the percentage of top IT administrators who sit in the president’s cabinet is now 48 percent, a 2-percentage-point increase over last year. Looking at different types of institutions, the percentage of IT leaders in cabinets climbs to its highest level among community colleges, which report 63 percent in the presidents’ top decision-making groups, up from last year’s level of 59 percent.
Questions about how well presidents listen were not asked. —Josh Fischman
