Welcome to "The Free Range CIO"

I REALLY wanted to name this blog "The Wandering CIO," but a quick Google search showed that Daniel Stroot has already staked out that Internet territory with his excellent site at www.wanderingcio.com, which is very worthy of being on your news feed list if you're a CIO.  Since my background and focus is the role of the CIO in higher education, "The Free Range CIO" is perhaps a more apt title for my personal musings.  Mr. Stroot calls his site "Personal Observations on Leading Technology;" while corporate CIOs may actually lead technology at their organizations, those of us in higher education must admit in all honesty that we work more in the realm of trying to influence that over which we have little formal control. Many of us university CIOs are truly "free range" beasts, like those free range cattle or chickens, set loose to wander and forage on our own with very little shepherding or guidance from our superiors, left to either flourish or die based on our own skills at navigating the dangers of the open prairie.  Seldom given much direction in terms of a coherent organizational strategic plan or set of priorities, and often even without a seat at the C-level meeting table, we wander the wilderness largely under our own command and seek to do good as best we can.

I've just spent four years on an "aside" assignment at my university, and am just now returning to the full-time CIO role.  It's an interesting time to re-enter this fray, as information technology, the CIO role, and much of higher education in general is under tremendous flux.  In this blog I'll post ongoing observations and sources that prove insightful to me as I step back into the wonderful world of a university CIO, in the hopes that they might prove useful to others ranging the same fields.