IT Culture: Does Size Matter?

This panel pulls together several presenters to lead a discussion on IT culture. At many institutions IT departments are tasked with supporting broad sets of campus business, from payroll and financial aid systems, admissions and fundraising, course registration, and student information systems to networking and servers, instructional and research computing, and new media and web design and development. Given the diversity of responsibilities, IT departments routinely hire from a broad swath of commercial industries as well as academia, mixing bottom-line business types with nonprofit bohemians. What's your department like? Does the broad scope of responsibilities and diversity in employee experience make leadership and communication more challenging? Are reporting structures more or less critical? Does your department demonstrate strong camaraderie and self-directed collaboration, or do employees segregate by organizational unit and collaborations occur by decree? What factors contribute to a shared sense of mission or togetherness, and are they even relevant to success? Does size matter?