Roles and leadership of the Chief Details Officer in higher education
The CIO position
Higher education is notoriously resistant to change, and if there is a trend toward implementing chief information officer (CIO) positions and aligning all technology units under these hierarchies, the entire organizational structure will be affected (O’Donnell, 1998). Due to the extensive literature on the chief details officers’ (CIO) roles and leadership, this paper reviewed only those that empirical study and expert opinion deemed relevant to this study on enterprise and higher education settings. According to Horgan (as cited in Viswadoss, 1999), the term Chief Data Officer (CIO) does not have a clear operative definition in higher education. Either there are other titles that perform a comparable executive leadership role for Info Technology, or the same title holds distinct responsibilities in distinct institutions. Horgan (1996) stated that a CIO could be a senior level administrator who participates in the institution’s executive council and who manages different data resources at an institution-wide level. A CIO could also be a senior details technology officer who provides high-level oversight for details technology-related operations and who works with heads or advisory groups of other information resources in planning for investing in technology, services, and data. Kaplan (2002) stated, “The nature of CIO’s job is changing since many CIOs today will have non-Details Technology (IT) backgrounds, even though this depends a excellent deal on the size of the company, the industry, and the markets they serve. The larger the business, the a lot more involved CIOs will be at a higher level with top management team developing methods. The smaller the organization and business, the much more the job will have operational and technical responsibility, but the key point is that we will see a lot more CIOs coming from non-IT backgrounds to the field.” (p. 72)
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February 10th, 2012 
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