Dive Brief:
- It is important to consider institutional priorities when hiring IT teams, according to participants in a seminar conducted with several CIOs from colleges and universities, with Bucknell University CIO Param Bedi advising that new staff should see themselves as consultants in early months and offer an outsider perspective on institutional practices, University Business reports.
- CIOs said they considered the institutional culture when looking for potential new hires, seeing who would be a good fit with the college and the IT department, and they valued practical skill sets and cautioned that beneficiaries of IT teams do not care about the skills used as long as the problem is solved.
- Ray V. Lefebvre, the VP of IT and the CIO for Bridgewater State University, stressed the importance of creating a project management team for a university, saying that it's extremely beneficial for institutions to have a project portfolio and a team guiding projects through each step of completion.
Dive Insight:
The notion that users of an institution's IT support staff do not necessarily worry about the tools utilized as opposed to the outcomes is important to consider. It is a reason why colleges and universities should encourage IT teams to bring students, faculty, staff and administrators into the decision-making fold, as UC Berkeley has done with its Student Technology Council, which sees students represented on IT committees and hired to staff the school's IT desk.
In addition to being an efficient way for students to garner essential tech experience, having the stakeholders who will most benefit from the work of the school's CIO and IT team on hand during the process (as well as being involved in project management teams) can offer dividends by creating student and faculty buy-in on innovative IT approaches. Having the beneficiaries of new services and tools in on the ground floor can ensure a new approach will offer the desired results, providing a stronger return on the institution's investment.