| How community colleges design their Information Technology (IT) leadership jobs provides insight both into the relationship between IT and organization structuring in higher education and also into the changing nature of the community college itself. In the 1970s, private and public sector organizations began to create positions generally called Chief Information Officer (CIO) in order to provide high level coordination over increasingly complex information technology resources and needs. This study examines the emergence of the CIO function in a small but purposive sample of innovation-oriented community colleges.; Organizational theorists suggest three approaches to this design process: contingency theory, institutional isomorphism, and idiosyncratic job creation. The research attempts to compare the usefulness of these frameworks. Data were gathered about CIO job design at 23 community colleges in 16 U.S. states and 1 Canadian province. The study examines how these jobs have been structured: position in the institution, assigned responsibilities in key areas, and the reason and nature of the most recent job redesign. Of the 23, 15 were either new jobs or had been redesigned in within the last two years. The reasons ranged from improving coordination of IT activities to managing organizational change agendas. About half the CIOs reported directly to the President of the institution. Several infrastructure responsibilities (for example, maintaining the college computer network) were held by nearly all respondents, and some academic responsibilities (for example, teaching computer science to students) were held by virtually none. Responsibilities for the college learning environment, for example the faculty technology training function, varied among the institutions. Two common configurations of structure and responsibility, and two unusual ones emerged from the research.; The emergence of the CIO job in community colleges, still undergoing frequent redesign, reflects those institutions' search for structural forms to advance their multiple missions in the context of pervasive demand for and use of information technology. This research suggests that contingency theory and institutional isomorphism approach provide better explanations for this process than the concept of idiosyncratic jobs. |
