Management roles and the community college chief information officer

The community college chief information officer (CIO) is known by many different names including, vice president of information technology, director of information services, or dean of information technology. No matter what the title though, the CIO has an important part in the effectiveness of the institution for which he/she serve. With the constant evolution and further integration of technology into higher education, it is important to understand the management roles used by the CIO to direct information services (IS) departments.;Building on earlier management role studies, this study utilized a mixed method approach to identify CIO management role usage through participant interviews, and then compared those results to the data derived from a management role survey. Relying on interviews from 10 CIOs representing 10 separate colleges within a large community college district, three main themes were identified. These themes---communication, operational issues, and financial issues---were then examined for connections to common management roles. The management role totals were then used to create a prevalence ranking to document which roles were used most often by the participating CIOs. The qualitative data showed prevalence by the CIOs for the roles dealing with building and maintaining peer relationships and monitoring the current and future needs of the institution.;The CIOs also participated in an online management survey, developed and used in earlier studies, to compare the study group's results to those found in the previous studies. The results from the online management survey matched the results found in earlier studies and showed that the CIOs reported entrepreneurship and the allocation of personnel and financial resources as the most important roles for the CIOs.;The study showed a disparity between what roles the CIOs report as important to their position and the roles the CIO utilize on a daily basis to direct and administer the IS department.;This study documented the management role usage for community college CIOs to gain a further understanding of how the roles are used, delineate which roles are used most often, and show how the roles used compared to perceived importance rankings.