With about a year to go on my Master's in MIS degree, I have started to plan my thesis. While I was thinking one morning about Herzberg's Motivation-Hygiene Theory for human resource management, I began to think about whether there were things that IT managers can do to impact their relationship with organizational leaders in terms of satisfaction and innovation. For example, if the email system is consistently off-line or is buggy, management is likely to be dissatisfied with how their IT services are operating and are unlikely to give funding and support for projects that do not directly address that issue. For my thesis, I have decided to take this concept and build a set of guidelines for IT leaders and organizational leaders. To narrow the research, I decided to focus my thesis on higher education.

While doing a literature search for coverage of the topic, I came across an study from EDUCAUSE, an organization focused on IT in higher education. The study was a snapshot of IT leadership in higher education published in 2004, so it is pretty current as far as academic research is concerned. Some of the significant parts of the study covered innovation and IT effectiveness within higher education, and so it has several insights useful for my thesis and for my career. Perhaps the most interesting is that IT leaders feel that the components necessary for innovation, such as transformational leadership, are in place, but they feel that there is little innovation that receives support.

I can see where there might be a possible explanation for this disconnect between having an innovative environment and being able to be innovative with higher education IT management. The reason might be from a difference of opinion of what innovation actually means. To most IT workers who are interested in innovation such as myself, innovation is the "fun" side of IT management where we come up with ideas and systems using new technologies that impact the operations of the organization we support. However in an organization that is far behind on the scale of adopter categories, basic services such as share calendaring for staff or high capacity data storage for researchers could potentially be innovative. Adopter categories are part of the Diffusion of Innovations theory by Everett Rogers. For an organization that is not at the front of the adopter category curve, improving basic teaching support systems may be the type of innovation they need rather than implementing a high-end SAN to support the terabytes of data generated from research.

So while it is possible to elicit the responses that determine whether an organization is conducive to innovation, the services that IT workers see as innovative may not be getting support and hence make them believe their organization does not support innovation. The organization is simply continuing with its normal pace of adopting innovations while IT workers feel like the environment is stagnant. This disconnect between the meaning of innovation might be the cause for the EDUCAUSE study's innovation issue, and perhaps I will find additional data to support my belief in my research.