University IT failing students, admit one fifth of university CIOs

But Kingston University CIO Simon Harrison says better funding models are driving change as students demand more sophisticated IT

One fifth of university IT leaders say they don't think their institution is meeting student demands on IT, according to new research. Furthermore, department heads agree, with only one quarter believing that their IT department is able to give them the support they need to best serve the needs of their students.

Other key findings in the research by virtualisation software vendor VMware included 89 per cent of IT leaders believing that further investment in IT infrastructure was needed, while only 13 per cent of institutions said that they offer Wi-Fi campus-wide, and only 11 per cent planning to introduce it over the next year.

Simon Harrison, CIO at Kingston University, told Computing that the findings were no surprise. He said IT leaders were arguing that they need more money and resources, but that there were a number of reasons for this. Universities have only a finite amount of money, he said, which is invested in educational resources, salaries, building upgrades and IT, among other things.

"Some of the investment is obvious when things break or don't work, but when you want to include new [technologies] and opportunities, that's where you need to put more of a strategic case forward to get people excited about what you want to do and show them the arts of the possible," Harrison said.

When Computing spoke to the University of Derby's IT director Neil Williams earlier this year, he explained that universities do not have long-term funding plans, and that this makes it harder for IT leaders to plan for the future. Harrison agreed with Williams, but said that universities are now changing the way they work.

At Kingston University for example, Harrison is working alongside a new chief financial officer, and he has been keen to get funding for IT to be put on a more long-term basis, such as a five-year cycle.

He believes universities are becoming more customer focused, particularly as students are paying significantly more to attend university than ever before. "They are putting different demands on us and asking for lots of things: quality of teaching, the physical estate, and the quality of IT," he said.

"Finance departments are thinking of new ways to free money to the organisation and share it out fairly. There are a lot of debates [in universities] and this is breaking down the traditional ways of funding, and multi-year funding programmes are starting to become more prevalent," he added.

Of the findings in the VMware research, Harrison was particularly surprised by the claim that some universities did not offer Wi-Fi across the whole of their campuses, and that many did not even have plans to implement pervasive, university-wide Wi-Fi.

Research for the VMware study was conducted by Ingenium in January and February 2014. It questioned 100 IT decision makers and 50 department heads at universities in the UK.