10 March 2015 
Matt Sisson, Projects and Membership Manager
JISC has broached a rich area for discussion on a blog post on its website. Summarising its recent work on a project to look at the changing role of the IT leader, it asks the daring question “Is it important that the university’s senior IT person comes from a technology background?”.
The report, Technology in HE: defining the strategic leader, looks at the growing importance of IT in universities, the fragmentation of the role of ‘Chief Information Officer’, and the rise of increasingly disruptive IT technologies, and then examines how all these things impact on the skills that an effective IT leader needs.
The questions that follow for our network, where procurement and finance professionals face many related pressures, is ‘Do procurement leaders need to have a purchasing background?’ and of course ‘Do Finance leaders need to have a Finance background?’ The answers may well still be ‘Yes’ and ‘Yes’, but there maybe benefits in asking the question anyway. Do we need to be better at recognising the importance of fresh faces and perspectives in many of the projects we undertake? And do we recognise the unique ability that someone from outside the group has in identifying problems and solutions by asking ‘Why?’ in a way that someone embedded in the routine of the profession may never do?
