Thursday, August 3, 2000

Campus-Computing Officials Rank Their Worries in a New Educause Survey By FLORENCE OLSEN Distance education is the biggest emerging issue facing campus-computing officials who took part in a recent Educause survey. But the study found that many worries were competing for their attention. Securing financing for information technology and providing technology assistance to faculty members ranked highest as immediate concerns of the 464 senior-ranking officials who responded to the e-mail survey. They also said strategic planning and finding and keeping I.T staff members were taking much of their time right now. Other hot-button issues were electronic-learning environments, online student services, and network-support services. The chief information officers, surveyed in February, were asked to rank 33 I.T. issues or concerns from a variety of perspectives. The officials ranked the purchase and installation of campus-wide administrative systems as their most costly endeavors. The survey participants were I.T. administrators, for whom strategic planning "is always at the forefront of their thinking," says James Roche, director of research for Educause, the education-technology consortium. "If you had sent this survey to librarians, deans, or even programmers, I'm sure the results would be different." The survey report showed that advanced networking was more likely to be a concern at large universities than at small colleges. E-commerce ranked as an item of strategic importance for some large institutions, but few small colleges were concerned about it. Many of the I.T. issues listed on the survey failed to resonate with computing officials. Digital libraries, vendor relations, outsourcing, digital-records management, and Java, for example, were not big concerns. Nor were hardware and software standards, or site licenses for software. Mr. Roche says that some items may have received low rankings simply because the items represented issues that respondents found ambiguous or saw as part of larger issues that they ranked higher. He says that might explain the low rankings survey participants gave to portals, intellectual property, and information policies. The survey participants, for instance, may have considered portals as just one aspect of other issues, such as campus-wide administrative systems, online student services, data management, or electronic commerce, Mr. Roche says. The constant challenge for senior technology officials, he says, "is to maintain a delicate balance" between keeping technology on their campuses up to date and avoiding too-frequent upgrades that become disruptive or that drain the institution's financial resources. Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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