Editorial

512

Over the last decade I have watched, and 
in many senses participated in, the rise of 
the Chief Information Officer (CIO) posi-
tion at my institution. At the Ohio State 
University, where I served as Director of 
Libraries, I was on two search committees 
for our CIO—one recruited in 2000 and 
another in 2009. The growth in the impor-
tance of CIO position between these two 
searches was striking in many respects, 
including rising status, responsibility, 
and influence. In the first search in 2000, 
there were only a few units on campus—
the library, research, and administrative 
services—that seemed to care much about 
the relatively new CIO position, but by 
2009, every unit in both the academic and 
the administrative sides of campus saw 
the CIO as an essential partner or player 
in their operations. At my brand new 
institution, a high-tech, start-up, interna-
tional science and technology university, 
the CIO and his Information Technology 
(IT) staff are central to just about every-
thing. The two units on campus it seems 
everyone must work with, or through, 
are Human Resources and IT—which, of 
course, become the units most loved and 
hated at the same time. From talking with 
colleagues, I sense that my observation 
can be generalized to many academic 
institutions: the widespread growth in 
responsibility and influence of the CIO (or 
whatever this position might be called) in 
universities and colleges.

From my perspective, the rise of the 
CIO is not the result of self-aggrandize-
ment or empire building—although 
some CIOs of a certain bent might seize 
the power opportunities before them 
—but rather the natural and inevitable 
reaction to the rapid spread of informa-
tion technology and its integration into 
the fabric of all academic operations, 

The Rise of the CIO

beginning with administra-
tive functions, moving into 
the research enterprise, and 
now affecting teaching and 
learning activities. The library was an 
early adopter of IT, automating its own 
operations and then embracing digital 
content services from publishers and In-
ternet providers. However, in most cases, 
the library has kept its IT scope clear but 
limited—collecting and sharing scholar-
ship—and left broader IT services, such as 
administrative and academic computing, 
classroom support, computer labs, and 
tech support to the CIO.

Maybe this is just right and the way 
things should be between the library and 
the CIO and his or her sector of IT. The 
library takes care of content—a certain 
kind of published content—and the CIO 
takes care of everything else associated 
with IT and information services, hence 
the deserved title of “CIO” and the growth 
in the position’s influence and prestige. I 
have had many a librarian colleague warn 
me to be cautious in relationships with 
CIOs, to avoid mixing of library and IT 
missions, to keep our boundaries clear and 
set.  I do appreciate organizational clarity 
and the value of specialization, but not 
organizational defensiveness and profes-
sional protectionism that I sometimes see 
in librarians’ reaction to the CIO and IT 
sector. Pre-information commons days, I 
remember working in a library that had a 
computer lab in its central library. The lab 
was by far the busy place in the library. It 
needed more space and more staff, but nei-
ther the library staff nor the IT staff could 
see the benefit of working together. It took 
years to see we had a common challenge to 
provide effective access to online software 
and content and only through working in 
partnership would we be successful.



The CIO and the Library Director’s jobs 
are changing. The CIOs role is clearly ex-
panding. The Library Director’s role is not 
so clearly being redefined in an era where 
content, media, and technology services 
merge. Often these two executive posi-
tions are on different tracks, one adminis-
trative or operational, the other academic, 
but in reality they both need to straddle 
both sides of an academic institution. 
Most importantly both these executives 
need to coordinate and integrate aspects 
of their work and responsibility. How best 
to do this remains an open question that 
could greatly benefit from more research, 
case studies, and informed discussion. 
Organizational structures and relation-
ships are often the result of personalities 
and local work cultures, but I would like 

to see more professional study and reflec-
tion on this vitally important relationship 
between the CIO and the Library Director 
and their staffs. 

If library directors and academic librar-
ians are to expand their roles too—as I 
have argued in these pages before—into 
the realms of knowledge management 
and data curation, then I think they must 
have a much closer relationship with the 
CIO and information technology staff. 
Information policy, architecture, content, 
and services issues are too big, complex, 
and interdependent today to be dealt 
with in isolation or in separate pockets 
of a university or college.

Joseph Branin
Editor, College & Research Libraries