According to the Knoxville News Sentinel, customers of the University of Tennessee's Information Technology department are not happy campers.

The article says that UT faculty has adopted a resolution expressing "lack of confidence in the management of IT resources and IT activities," citing several complaints about email and database systems, server maintenance, ineffective communication, and more.

The article notes that UT does not have a permanent or even interim CIO at the moment, although the UT IT department's web page lists Faye Muly as the interim CIO.

That has to be one of the worst jobs in IT. Think about it. The UT system has about 9,000 employees and about 45,000 students, nearly all of whom are "users", i.e. customers of IT. And there could not be a more diverse user community in terms of applications, needs, experience, and troublemaking.

Further, their systems are a pile of spaghetti inside a rat's nest. They have several different email systems and a bunch of different operating platforms including mainframes, Unix, NT, supercomputers, probably some AS/400s, Novell (why?), every conceivable type of client and OS, etc. etc. etc., and a hodgepodge of applications for everything from running a business and making a payroll to molecular biology research. And it's scattered across hundreds of locations that all have to be tied together by reliable infrastructure.

Who could manage all that?

Just with the number of users and a $1+ billion budget, you would expect to have at least a $200K - $300K CIO/IT director. I seriously doubt UT is paying that or is even able to. A recent salary survey says the average compensation for university CIOs is $107K. In a past life I had programmers working for me that made a lot more than that.

Even if I was qualified, I wouldn't take that job for twice that.

By way of comparison, take Carmax as a random example. They have about 90 locations and about 15,000 employees, and about $500 million in operating revenues (it's a low margin business). Each location is a cookie cutter installation, with comparatively simple application/business requirements and standardized systems focused on one simple thing - selling and financing cars. Their CIO makes more than $500K. CIOs at top ranked financial services, retailers, and industrial companies can make ten times that.

I'm not sure how UT can solve its IT woes, but a cursory five minute look at the mishmash of systems would suggest they need to simplify and standardize, which was always my motto.

UT President John Petersen announced a reorganization earlier this year. Just reading it makes your head spin. Looking at their org chart, it appears they have a sort of traditional setup organized around functions like finance/administrative applications, database administrators, systems programmers/engineers, and support, with a couple of specialty/line of business departments they couldn't decide where to fit.

I've been out of the corporate IT world too long to know how they do things these days, but maybe a more "organic" structure organized around mission and end user communities instead of job function might work better in a complicated environment like a university.

In other words, the people keeping the books and printing paychecks on the mainframes can have their own analysts, programmers, systems programmers/engineers, and end user support people. The people running classroom instruction systems can have their own specialists in each area, and so on.

Maybe a single team working together to serve their customers who they know and understand would be more responsive to end user communities. They get to know their users better, the team has a unified sense of "ownership" and accountability for user satisfaction, and users have one stop shopping without the finger pointing. The only exception might be the infrastructure people who keep up the networks and phone systems, whose customers would be the mission departments.

With an IT department organized along functional lines, you've got people from three or four different departments trying to serve the same customer. Each department has its own agenda, management, areas of expertise, and problems, and they probably don't know much about what the other departments do, much less the individual needs and "personality" of the diverse end-user communities they serve.

The only problem with a mission oriented structure is that all these different types of personnel have to be managed differently (which I think is usually one of the reasons for the traditional functional organization). System geeks keep weird hours and don't understand applications or the mission, application analysts who understand the mission don't understand technology, programmers are expected to be the go-betweens who translate and mediate but they don't understand systems and infrastructure and most of the time even the applications, and so on.

Anyway, I don't know much about UT's operations but I found all of this sort of interesting from a sideline observer's point of view. One thing's pretty clear, though. It's a tough challenge, and I'm glad it's not mine.