Technology & Learning - May 2008 - (Page 38)

School CIO More Than a Techie www.schoolcio.com How will the job of the top technology leader change in the next five years? What skills and understanding will you need in order to fill the role successfully in the year 2012? An exclusive excerpt from COSN’s 2008 Compendium explores the future. E xperts predict that a few years from now the IT part of the job will be considerably less important than it is today. In Grooming the 2010 CIO, the Society for Information Management predicts that, for the corporate world, “by 2010, business and IT will be fundamentally entwined and interdependent” and the CIO will be a “full-fledged member of the top management team, expected to weigh in on discussions and decisions that have nothing to do with IT.” A number of other pundits agree that tomorrow’s CIO/CTO—whether in industry or education—will be less of a techie and more of a business or education leader. In K–12 districts, of course, this is only possible if there is adequate staffing, allowing the CTO to serve as a cabinet member and delegate IT implementation to a highly qualified technology expert. Luke Fox, executive director of IT for Richland County School District One in South Carolina, explains, “I advocate having a CIO reporting directly to the superintendent with three executive directors—responsible for research and accountability, IT, and instructional technology—reporting to the CIO. I believe this allows the CIO to leverage all related technology for strategic district goals.” Gartner’s Bill Rust describes these two sets of complementary skills and attributes as soft and hard, or yin and yang—with the technology expert needing the hard (yang) skills and the CIO requiring the yin skills of leadership and vision. While he thinks that both leaders have a crucial role to play, he recommends that the cabinet-level CIO/CTO should be the one with the soft skills. In CIOs in K-12 Education Must Demonstrate Political and Interpersonal Skills, he elaborates on the personal leadership skills that he believes are crucial to a district’s top technology leader. According to Jeffrey Hunt, an important part of that leadership job involves facilitating communication across groups about the role technology will play in meeting district goals. “The idea is to be an internal consultant,” he says, “to listen to the needs, goals and challenges of the district’s departments and schools and determine through collaborative leadership the means to resolve issues.” Ramona Tyson, associate superintendent, management information systems, for the DeKalb School System in Decatur, Georgia, offers an example: “As an IT department, we had to get out of our offices and come from behind the nuts and bolts of technical operations and get into departmental meetings. It meant listening to their challenges and finding ways, through the use of technology, to assist them in meeting their goals and objectives. They became our advocates in securing funding because they knew we were problem solvers with a true interest in partnering with them to improve teaching and learning.” Of course, leadership skills are needed for internal team building as well—to support and develop expertise within the departments that report directly to the CTO. Greg Davis, executive director of technology for the Des Moines Public Schools in Iowa, advocates taking a distributed leadership approach to building leadership capacity—a concept that he’s currently elaborating on in his doctoral thesis work. “The main message,” he explains, “is that CTOs don’t have to be the sole source of technology leadership in the district. It’s far more important for the CTO to be skilled at building leadership capacity and able to fill the gaps in ed tech leadership in the organization. The more ‘domineering’ a CTO is, the less likely it is that the district will be able to sustain its technology initiatives when that CTO leaves.” Other capacity-building suggestions include the following from Bill Rust: “Single out individuals who are wellmotivated—and who, perhaps, have real star power—and get them involved with your agenda. Point out successes and relate them to the educational goals of the school system, even if they occur outside the realm of your immediate responsibility. Recognition programs can be extremely effective, even when no monetary award is attached.” ■ For the full compendium, go to techlearning.com or cosn.org. 38 | A Technology & Learning Publication School CIO May 2008 http://www.schoolcio.com.schoolcio.com http://www.cosn.org http://www.techlearning.com

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Technology & Learning - May 2008 Contents New@techlearning.com Editor’s Desk News and Trends E-Learning Gets Real Cover Story: Make Students Info Literate School CIO Product Guide Reviews Best of the Blogs What’s New LOY Profile Series

Technology & Learning - May 2008

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