I will soon join my team at the national EDUCAUSE conference. They will present, learn, and reconnect with colleagues while I spend time with friends, peers, and leaders from across the profession. These events always leave me thinking about the larger questions behind our work. Higher education needs both technological infrastructure and a profession capable of turning that infrastructure into value. The best conferences remind us that technology alone is never enough. They create space to discuss institutions, leadership, governance, and the ideas that shape all three.
Events like this are one of the few places where we can step back and wrestle with big, foundational questions. At their best, conferences create space for first principles to occupy center stage. They allow us to argue about the purpose of technology in the university, the role of the CIO, the nature of governance, and how institutions should be organized to derive value from technology. Those discussions rarely produce consensus, but they offer ideas large enough to organize a career around. They offer ways to understand the institution, the profession, and the authority required to lead. A transition into a new university has made the inquiry personal as well. Before deciding what technology should do, a CIO has to answer something more basic.
In today’s Dispatch, I ask: What’s the IT organization for?
The big picture
An IT organization exists to help the enterprise derive value from technology. Building, buying, implementing, securing, and supporting technology are necessary, but they are not sufficient. A university gains nothing simply because it purchased a product or completed an implementation. It gains value when technology becomes useful in teaching, research, and the administrative work that supports both.
Stating that purpose is easy. Holding to it and delivering on it is harder, because IT can fail in two opposite directions. The order taker accepts more than it can deliver or sustain. Service quality falls, important work competes with a growing pile of obligations, and IT carries responsibility for outcomes it cannot fully produce. The control-oriented IT organization makes a different mistake. Seeking a more strategic role, it creates toll gates and control points so it can influence technology decisions across the enterprise. Some are necessary, but when every decision must pass through them, users experience delay instead of value. They either route around IT or comply while quietly resenting the interference. The effort to gain influence leaves IT with less of it. One overcommits and the other overcontrols. Both cost the CIO something.
The Credibility Cycle
Broadbent and Kitzis described that cost in The New CIO Leader. In their account, credibility is more than personal reputation. A CIO with credibility receives resources and permission, gains access to the conversations where priorities are decided, and is capable of influencing them as directions are set. That capacity produces results, and results the enterprise recognizes renew the credibility, so the cycle compounds.
But failed obligations consume credibility, as does noticeable delay. Influence narrows and resources tighten, leaving the CIO less able to produce better results. The spiral deepens as IT tries to recover. An organization that has lost standing often promises more, hoping new commitments will restore goodwill, or argues for more control points, hoping greater involvement will prevent the next failure. The order taker and the control-oriented IT organization are both recovery strategies, and both make further failure more likely. Credibility follows visible results, not effort IT expends.
The Wolf and the Uses of Conflict
Kitzis wrote as Gartner’s senior voice on CIO leadership. A decade later, Tina Nunno, a Gartner Distinguished Fellow, worked the same ground, starting from a different place. Kitzis begins with results; Nunno begins with conflict. In The Wolf in CIO’s Clothing, she argues that CIOs operate amid competition for resources, authority, and influence. They must be able to use conflict defensively and, in extreme situations, offensively to protect IT’s ability to contribute to the enterprise. Her model leader is the wolf, a social animal with strong predatory instincts. The social half matters as much as the predatory half. Membership in the pack gives the wolf influence; its willingness to fight protects the resources and standing that make that influence useful. The ideal is not aggression, but the judgment to know when cooperation creates value and when conflict is necessary to preserve the capacity to create it.
The two accounts need each other. Kitzis explains why credibility matters and how it compounds or collapses. Nunno explains the judgment required to protect that credibility without becoming isolated from the enterprise that grants it.
That judgment becomes practical through three responses available to every CIO. Accommodation fits when a request is easy to support and helps the enterprise derive value. Saying yes builds relationships and produces value quickly. Analysis fits when the consequences of a request, or the support it will require, are not yet understood. Assertion fits when further accommodation would create a commitment IT cannot reasonably sustain, or when further analysis blocks a decision the enterprise needs.
Each response becomes dangerous when habit replaces judgment. Persistent accommodation leaves IT carrying obligations it cannot sustain. Service quality declines, and the credibility cycle runs backward. Persistent analysis converts uncertainty into delay; IT never says no, but users lose confidence that it can reach a decision. Persistent assertion produces decisions without the support needed to sustain them. The CIO may be right, but stands alone if the decision fails.
The wolf is not defined by any one of these responses. It knows which one the situation requires. Accommodation earns goodwill and easy value. Analysis exposes obligations before IT accepts them, and assertion protects resources and makes boundaries believable. Most leaders favor one response over another based on temperament. The skill is knowing when the situation requires something different.
Organizing for Judgment
Before a CIO can articulate how the enterprise should derive value from technology, the CIO needs a vision for how IT will be organized and operate. That vision determines where decisions will be made, which capabilities will be shared, and when IT will become involved. Without agreement on those questions, every request becomes a fresh contest among accommodation, analysis, and assertion. Good CIOs turn situational judgment into arrangements people can understand and rely on.
The available arrangements differ by enterprise. If leading a highly centralized IT organization, the CIO cannot use a distributed IT edge to relieve the central queue. Relief must come through delegation and empowered end users. Published standards, preapproved tools, and local teams with the ability to execute can keep ordinary work from entering IT’s queue. Empowered stakeholders can extend that capacity by applying technology close to the work within clear guardrails. But they must operate as extensions of the CIO organization, not substitutes for it. Otherwise, central IT risks becoming an order taker for technology architectures designed elsewhere.
Research universities have other options. The Edge-Leverage-Trust model articulated by Brad Wheeler gives colleges, departments, and researchers room to act while the institution provides scalable services and supports them broadly. The edge becomes a relief valve for central IT’s finite capacity, but only when local authority is real. Central IT accommodates by leaving ordinary decisions at the edge, analyzes where local choices touch shared obligations, and asserts itself when the consequences require an institutional decision. Trust grows when units know where they may act without permission and when central involvement will have a specific reason.
The structures differ, but the leadership task does not. Every CIO needs a working theory of where technology decisions belong, what IT should provide broadly, and which consequences justify intervention. The purpose is not centralization or federation for its own sake. It is to organize technology work so the enterprise can derive value without turning every decision into either another stop in IT’s queue or an obligation designed outside the organization and handed back for delivery.
Friction Needs a Reason
Friction is one tool available to the CIO, but it should be used selectively. At the personal level, assertion can slow, redirect, or stop a decision. At the organizational level, standards, reviews, and approval points can do the same without requiring the CIO’s direct involvement. Either form may protect the enterprise, but either can also become another toll gate that consumes credibility without producing value.
Friction needs an institutional reason. IT should be able to name the shared asset, institutional obligation, or future consequence that justifies creating friction. Simple preferences don’t always qualify. Neither does a taste for architectural uniformity, discomfort with local preferences, or the belief that everything belongs to central IT.
If no broader consequence can be named, accommodation is usually appropriate and the decision should stay close to the work. If the consequence is real but unclear, analysis can expose the commitment and build support for a durable decision. If the consequence is material and established, assertion by the CIO may be necessary. The same logic should govern organizational processes. Review should exist only where the consequence warrants it, and even justified friction should be no greater than the consequence requires. Often, the concern can be addressed without denying a request.
The final word
IT organizations exist to help the enterprise derive value from technology. Doing that requires an operating model that turns CIO judgment into arrangements others can understand and consistently rely on. At the individual level, the CIO must know when to accommodate, when to analyze, and when to assert judgment. At the organizational level, those choices become delegated authority, leveraged capabilities, and governance processes. Friction belongs in that model, but only for a reason. It is justified when a decision affects a shared asset, creates an institutional obligation, or carries a future consequence beyond the requester. Used selectively, friction protects the credibility and capacity IT needs to fulfill its purpose. Used habitually, it becomes another toll gate between the enterprise and the value technology should provide.
Dispatches is a free regular essay about technology, governance, and institutional change in higher education. Each essay takes up a question large enough to organize decisions around. This essay asks what an IT organization is for, and how CIOs create value, sustain credibility, and know when friction has a reason. If this argument would be useful in your institution, subscribe or forward it to a colleague.