ITAC Survey Results - (part one of two)

Word cloud from the "additional comments" section of the survey, produced using voyant-tools,org

In March I surveyed ITAC (the IT leaders from the 23 CSU campuses) to solicit their guidance on the goals and tactics they would like to see employed to promote innovation in the CSU. IT leaders or their designees from 13 of the campuses completed the survey.

First, I asked them about time horizons. Overall, the preference was for a fairly near-term focus as shown here.

I was a bit surprised by this, as one usually thinks of innovation looking further into the future, but clearly a lot of campuses are looking at help thinking about the changes they need to make in the next two years. However, while the consensus on time horizon is skewed towards the near-term, the tolerance for risk in innovation was moderately high

I next asked the campus leaders how willing they would be to invest their own campus resources in innovation efforts. Given how challenging it can be to find resources on a CSU campus, I was very encouraged by the response.

Not surprisingly, nearly all campuses were interested in participating if additional resources could be provided centrally.

Next I asked about the potential areas for innovation focus. I've outlined these previously on the Cal State Innovate web site. I'll discuss these responses in my next blog post.