I have two brief stories to share that came up on the same day, and reflect an attitude I’ve seen all too often in our industry. (Neither story came from my own institution, should you be interested!)

Story 1: When requesting additional resources to support the use of PCs in special needs exams, a technical team leader was told by a central IT manager “This isn’t an IT issue. We should not be supporting this”.

Story 2: An entrepreneur had organised a meeting of a group of bigwigs that could bring substantial work, money and prestige to his organisation. Unfortunately the PC wasn’t working. After speaking to the IT Help Guy, the response he got back was “Oh, that sounds like a network issue. Its not my job to handle network issues. You’ll need to contact <some other team>”.

At what point did our IT departments become the ones to dictate policy and procedure? 

OK, I get that there needs to be a structure to any support department, and that (in the case of story 2) perhaps there was a deeper problem here that required the network team to be involved. But the approach and attitude of the IT chap didn’t help the situation, and in fact only served to heighten the problem.

In the former story, not only was the attitude entirely unhelpful, but it appears that IT management have completely forgotten that their initial remit (as with IT departments in every educational establishment in the world) is to support the use of technology within the spheres of Teaching, Learning and Assessment. To suggest that it is not IT’s role to support a computer-aided exam, and that the exam should go ahead without any on-site technical support, is not only ludicrous but fundamentally opposed to the nature of the business.

All too often I have seen IT departments (and other support departments too) dictating policy and telling the academics and students what they have to / are allowed to do. I admit to being guilty of it myself on occasion, but its completely wrong.

Yes, there have to be processes and procedures that support work needs to follow. Academics can’t just demand any old thing they like. The support departments are there to provide that structure and help support whatever educational activity is trying to be carried out in such a way that it gives the best possible result for the lowest cost in resources. But for ANY support department to try and dictate what academic practices an institution should undertake only shows a clear lack of direction within that department and an inherent mistaken belief in the meaning of the word “support”.

There are a great many fantastic support (and specifically IT support) staff members out there, but the attitudes and beliefs highlighted in these two stories appear to be increasingly widespread. Does there need to be a fundamental shift in our sector to remind our IT departments that while knowledge of configuring IP traffic through a Cisco router or setting up a functional Active Directory server is critical to the success of our businesses, it does not come with an innate right to determine how such technology is used?