Today’s Tuesday Reading is from Lance Bolton, Deputy CIO, Campus Engagement at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and a MOR program alum. Lance may be reached at [email protected] or via LinkedIn.
One of the most important things a leader can know isn’t how to solve every problem. It’s knowing who can.
That’s essentially Danny Ocean’s superpower in Ocean’s Eleven. He doesn’t assemble eleven people who think alike or have the same skills. He knows the problem requires different talents, finds them, and connects them around a common purpose.
There may be a lesson there for those of us leading IT in higher education. We may already have the talent we need. The harder question is whether we can see it.
That’s a lesson MOR has reinforced for me. Talent doesn’t wait for permission from the org chart. Nor does leadership reside only at the top of it. Greater alignment gives people more opportunities to lead from where they are, bringing their expertise, relationships, and perspective to challenges beyond their immediate responsibilities.
Integration expands the field of view
When we talk about IT integration, the conversation often starts with structure. What should be centralized? What should remain distributed? Where are we duplicating effort? How can we operate more efficiently?
Those are important questions, but they can obscure one of the more interesting benefits of greater alignment.
Integration can make talent visible
I saw this during a large integration effort, branded OneIT, at my former institution. With OneIT, the talent hadn’t suddenly appeared. What changed was our ability to see it and connect it with opportunity.
For years, one of our most reliable pipelines for early-career IT talent began at the central IT Help Desk. Student employees learned the environment, developed technical and customer-service skills, built relationships, and moved into full-time positions. Many people who built long careers in IT at that institution started at the Help Desk.
OneIT didn’t replace that pipeline. It helped expose another one.
Desktop support professionals had always been distributed throughout the university, doing important work and developing broad technical skills. But their relationships and visibility were often strongest within the organizations they supported. It wasn’t unusual for someone to spend much of a career within that local environment.
Greater alignment widened the circle
Desktop staff began working more frequently with colleagues across the institution. They participated in broader initiatives and communities. Their skills became visible to more people, and they gained greater visibility into opportunities elsewhere.
Over time, we saw desktop support become another pathway into roles such as systems administration, cybersecurity, research compute, and other areas of IT.
The IT Help Desk student-to-staff pipeline was still there. We had simply discovered another one. What emerged was more than another career pathway. The institution became better able to recognize expertise, connect people across boundaries, and bring a wider range of talent to bear on shared challenges. Integration increased not only individual opportunity but institutional capability.
Visibility works both ways
Visibility isn’t only about who leaders can see.
Integration didn’t simply make distributed talent more visible to central IT. It made the broader institution more accessible to distributed staff.
Someone working in a college could be tapped for a cross-campus security initiative, join a virtual team, participate in governance, or work alongside colleagues with expertise they might not otherwise encounter. Those experiences give people opportunities to stretch, build relationships, demonstrate their abilities, and see new possibilities for their own careers.
Integration shouldn’t be something that happens to distributed IT for the benefit of the center. Done well, it creates more ways for people to contribute beyond the boundaries of their home organization. Relationships form across those lines, perspectives broaden, and people begin to see possibilities in themselves and in one another that the org chart can easily hide.
Someone who starts in a college may eventually take a role in central IT. Someone from central IT may move into a college or research organization. Many won’t change jobs at all, but will gain meaningful experience working across those boundaries through projects, communities of practice, governance, or virtual teams.
I’ve had the opportunity to spend significant parts of my career in central and distributed IT. They are different environments. The pressures can be different. The relationships can be different. Even the same problem can look different depending on where you sit.
It’s much harder to think in terms of “us versus them” once you’ve spent meaningful time being both.
Where work belongs isn’t where talent belongs
For years, I’ve used a simple framework for thinking about technology work in a large university: Core, Common, and Unique.
Some work is Core and makes sense to provide institutionally. Some is Common across many organizations and benefits from coordination. And some is Unique, best kept close to the mission, discipline, research activity, or community it serves.
Core, Common, and Unique helps us think about where work belongs. But it shouldn’t limit where talent can contribute.
A security professional embedded in a college can contribute to an institutional security initiative. A central technologist can bring expertise to a research problem. Someone who spends most of their time serving one organization can still contribute to a virtual team or community tackling a problem for the entire university.
People don’t necessarily need new reporting lines to make broader contributions. They need connections. This is why integration and centralization shouldn’t be treated as synonyms. The goal isn’t to erase the boxes on the organizational chart. The goal is to make the lines between them more permeable.
From “them” to “we”
When those lines become more permeable, the benefits compound. Individuals gain visibility, relationships, stretch opportunities, and new career paths. The broader IT community gains access to expertise that may previously have been difficult to see or reach.
The community also gains people who understand the university from more than one organizational perspective. That last benefit may be the most enduring. People carry more than technical knowledge across organizational boundaries. They carry relationships, context, and empathy.
Over time, “central IT” and “distributed IT” can become less about who we are and more about where we happen to sit.
That’s when integration becomes more than an operating model. It becomes a talent strategy and a community-building strategy. Alignment creates connection. Connection creates visibility. Visibility creates opportunity. And shared experiences build a community of “we” rather than “them.”
The challenge for leaders isn’t always to find more talent. Sometimes it’s to create an environment where the talent we already have can be seen, connected, challenged, and given an opportunity to contribute.
Ocean’s Eleven needed people with different skills, experiences, and perspectives to solve a problem none of them could solve alone. Our universities already have those people.
The question is whether we’ve created enough connections to find them.
