The Place of Information Technology in Planning for Innovation

Michael A. McRobbie, president of Indiana University, writes in EDUCAUSE Review about the evolution of his perspectives on higher education innovation and information technology as he moved from VP for information technology and CIO, to VP for research, then interim provost, and finally president:

And in the specific case of IT, as I have progressed from vice president for information technology and chief information officer to vice president for research, to interim provost and vice president for academic affairs, and finally to president of Indiana University, it has become increasingly clear to me that unless one is doing computer science, IT is not an end in itself. Investment in IT at the institutional level is just like investment in any other kind of infrastructure to support research, scholarship, and instruction. This is not a particularly profound observation, but there is nothing like having responsibility for all of the affairs of a great research university to put this truth into stark relief.

At the most basic level, investment in IT infrastructure is part of the cost of doing business at a research university. At the very least, an institution must provide basic IT resources and connectivity to faculty, staff, and students. But this is no longer enough to ensure that an institution is even minimally competitive. Why? Because research in nearly all academic areas requires advanced IT infrastructure to a greater or lesser degree, and because an institution's ability to attract and retain research faculty—and increasingly, instructional faculty—now depends, in large part, on its ability to provide and support that infrastructure. Students too expect their IT environments to be contemporary and flexible, ready to change dramatically from one generation of students to the next—a period, on average, of only about five years.