Elevate the Role of the CIO in Higher Education
Collaborate with the institution to lead transformation and leave behind a legacy of growth.
- Transformations are happening in Higher Education, but CIOs are often involved only when it comes time to implement change. This makes it difficult for the CIO to be perceived as an organizational leader.
- CIOs find it difficult to juggle operational activities, strategic initiatives, and involvement in business transformation.
- CIOs don’t always have the IT organization structured and mobilized in a manner that facilitates the identification of transformation opportunities and the planning for and the implementation of organization-wide change.
Our Advice
Critical Insight
Don’t take an ad hoc approach to transformation. Build the capability to identify opportunities, and plan for and implement change.
Impact and Result
- Elevate your stature as an institutional leader.
- Empower the IT organization to act with an institutional mind first and technology second.
- Create a high-powered IT organization that is focused on driving lasting change, improving student experiences, and encouraging collaboration across the entire institution.
- Generate opportunities for institutional, as manifested through strategic enrollment planning, research growth, higher student experience satisfaction, greater community collaboration, etc.
Workshop: Elevate the Role of the CIO in Higher Education
Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.
Module 1: Determine Readiness to Become a Transformational CIO
The Purpose
- Understand stakeholder and executive perception of the CIO’s performance and leadership.
- Determine whether the CIO is ready to lead transformation.
Key Benefits Achieved
- Decision to evolve role or address areas of improvement as a pre-requisite to becoming a transformational CIO.
Activities
Outputs
Select data collection techniques.
Conduct diagnostic programs.
- Select stakeholder and executive perception of the CIO
Review results and define readiness.
- Decide whether to proceed with the role evolution.
Module 2: Build Business Partnerships
The Purpose
- Identify potential business partners and create a plan to establish key partnerships.
Key Benefits Achieved
- An actionable set of initiatives that will help the CIO create valuable partnerships with internal or external business stakeholders.
Activities
Outputs
Identify potential business partners.
Evaluate and prioritize list of potential partners.
Create a plan to establish the target partnerships.
- Partnership strategy
Module 3: Establish IT’s Ability to Transform
The Purpose
- Make the case and plan for the development of key capabilities that will enable the IT organization to handle transformation.
Key Benefits Achieved
- A maturity assessment of critical capabilities.
- A plan to address maturity gaps in preparation for a transformational mandate.
Activities
Outputs
Define transformation as a capability.
Assess the current and target transformation capability maturity.
- Transformation capability assessment
Develop a roadmap to address gaps.
- Roadmap to develop the transformation capability
Module 4: Shift IT’s Focus to the Customer
The Purpose
- Gain an understanding of the end customer of the organization.
Key Benefits Achieved
- A change in IT mindset away from a focus on operational activities or internal customers to external customers.
- A clear understanding of how the organization creates and delivers value to customers.
- Opportunities for business transformation.
Activities
Outputs
Analyze value streams that impact the customer.
- Value stream maps
Map business capabilities to value streams.
- Business capability map
Module 5: Establish Transformation Leadership and Sustain the Capability
The Purpose
- Establish a formal process for empowering employees and developing new leaders.
- Create a culture of continuous improvement and a long-term focus.
Key Benefits Achieved
- Increased ability to sustain momentum that is inherent to business transformations.
- Better strategic workforce planning and a clearer career path for individuals in IT.
- A system to measure IT’s contribution to business transformation.
Activities
Outputs
Set the structure for the office of the CIO.
- OCIO structure document
Assess current leadership skills and needs.
Spread a culture of self-discovery.
Maintain the transformation capability.
- Transformational leadership dashboard
Elevate the Role of the CIO in Higher Education
Collaborate with the institution to lead transformation and leave behind a legacy of growth.
Analyst Perspective
Elevate your role and embrace the role of an institutional leader.
In an ever-evolving higher education landscape, institutions are turning to technology as a means to gain an unfamiliar benefit, a competitive edge. Academic leaders are actively seeking innovative technological solutions to drive their transformational agendas. Chief Information Officers (CIO) in the higher education sector face a choice: either actively participate in shaping institutional transformations or choose to remain as a steward of technology overseeing IT as a cost-center.
To choose to be transformational CIO in higher education is to become a leader who proactively engages with academic peers, identifying opportunities for transformation and collaborating to drive meaningful change within the institution. To assume this role, the CIO must cultivate the ability to drive transformation and elevate the importance of IT.
Mark Maby
Research Director, Industry Practice
Info-Tech Research Group
Executive Summary
| Your Challenge | Common Obstacles | Info-Tech’s Approach |
|
Digital transformation has increased in higher education since the pandemic, but IT is still seen as a service provider which leaves the transformation in a state of poor direction. The ability to successfully transform has become critical to achieving long-term student success and secure enrolment. IT personnel and leaders are leaving jobs, creating instability which drains institutional knowledge and hinders long-term planning. |
Fewer than 40% of transformations achieve the desired benefits (Isernet et al., McKinsey & Company). Many CIOs in higher education are still not perceived as strategic institutional partners and are only involved to help implement change (Grajek). CIOs have traditionally not been well positioned to lead business transformations. |
CIOs need to prove that they have the ability to think of the institution first and technology second. CIOs need to create partnerships with institutional leadership to identify opportunities for growth and co-create value. The CIO needs to instill a culture of student-centricity within the IT organization. The CIO has to adopt a new leadership style: focus on developing the leaders of tomorrow and step away from operational activities. |
Info-Tech Insight
Don’t take an ad hoc approach to transformation. Build the capability to identify opportunities, and plan for and implement change.
CIOs have to decide whether to remain a technologist or take on a transformative role
Technology is increasingly central to higher education and its strategic priorities. However, this does not mean the role of the CIO is going to become more strategic.
The CIO can choose to remain in the supportive role of a technology leader.
But there is an opportunity for the CIO to co-lead transformation and become an institutional leader that helps drive institutional priorities.
Transformative leadership is a choice that the CIO needs to make.
The pandemic made the higher education CIO more strategic while creating new risks
The CIO needs to decide if they want to be operational or transformative.
The first year of the pandemic saw a rise in parallel roles to CIO:
- Chief Innovation Officers increased by 4%
- Chief Digital Officers increased by 5%
- Chief Technology Officers (CTO) increased by 4%
These new roles don’t replace the CIO, which was only eliminated in 1% of cases.
These roles are transformative, taking on the strategic initiatives that align with the institutional imperatives set forth by the president.
When there are two C-suite executives charged with technology, the CIO becomes more operational and less strategic.
Sources: Brooks, EDUCAUSE QuickPoll Results: Senior IT Leadership; Brooks and O’Brien, The Higher Education CIO, 2019; McCormack, The Adaptive CIO: Balancing Institutional Structure and Culture.
About Info-Tech
Info-Tech Research Group is the world’s fastest-growing information technology research and advisory company, proudly serving over 30,000 IT professionals.
We produce unbiased and highly relevant research to help CIOs and IT leaders make strategic, timely, and well-informed decisions. We partner closely with IT teams to provide everything they need, from actionable tools to analyst guidance, ensuring they deliver measurable results for their organizations.
What Is a Blueprint?
A blueprint is designed to be a roadmap, containing a methodology and the tools and templates you need to solve your IT problems.
Each blueprint can be accompanied by a Guided Implementation that provides you access to our world-class analysts to help you get through the project.
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Speak With An Analyst
Get the help you need in this 6-phase advisory process. You'll receive 11 touchpoints with our researchers, all included in your membership.
Guided Implementation 1: Are you ready to lead transformation?
- Call 1: Identify data collection techniques.
- Call 2: Validate your decision to proceed.
Guided Implementation 2: Build institutional partnerships
- Call 1: Identify and prioritize potential partners.
- Call 2: Create a plan to establish partnerships.
Guided Implementation 3: Develop the capability to transform
- Call 1: Define and assess capabilities.
- Call 2: Address maturity gaps.
Guided Implementation 4: Shift IT’s focus to students, faculty, and staff
- Call 1: Discuss the ways in which your organization creates value for customers.
- Call 2: Outline the different value streams and select one to focus on.
Guided Implementation 5: Adopt a transformational approach to leadership
- Call 1: Review how the IT department is progressing in terms of skill discovery.
- Call 2: Discuss best practices to creating/modeling the OCIO function.
Guided Implementation 6: Sustain the transformational capability
- Call 1: Discuss the ways your organization is currently tracking, or could be tracking, the key transformation metrics.