OIT lacked a clear mission, according to administrators, which resulted in an organization that tried to do everything.

"OIT did not have a lot of administrative direction," says Proctor, who was responsible for OIT when he was vice president of finance. "It was deprived of top down direction."

OIT only had "bottom up priorities," he says, "always offering more services, more availability and always wanting to be on the cutting edge."

As part of the central administration, OIT's funding came from the various schools. The Deans were upset with OIT in part because they felt continuous mismanagement within OIT resulted in bad service and wasted their money.

"When I arrived [in 1994], [OIT] was under severe attack as being inefficient and a waste of money," Proctor says.

For the FAS, this translated into an organization which was out-of-touch and always trying to exceed its purpose.

"OIT was really on the wrong wavelength," says Arnold Professor of Science William H. Bossert '59, a member of the FAS Committee on Information Technology. "Central planing and central administration doesn't work in a university.... I rest having someone tell us what to buy and what to do."

OIT is about the only agency I can remember being hissed at in an FAS meeting," Bossert says.

"If we had in fact had the same [OIT] money in the FAS we could have done better," he says.

In the past two years, problems between the FAS and OIT accelerated to the point where the FAS considered going outside OIT for its connection to the Internet, one of the primary services OIT provides.

Franklin M. Steen, the director of ASCS Computer Services, confirms that the FAS has considered bypassing OIT. "It's always a possibility," he says.

The OIT governing board, a committee of faculty members from the schools responsible for managing OIT, literally became a battle scene as schools competed to set OIT's priorities, according to Proctor.

He says he held only two meetings of the governing board, meetings that he says "made the New York City Council look orderly and civilized."

Reorganization

In reorganizing OIT into UIS, the University sought to correct the problems with OIT.

"OIT had too many managers and too much overhead," says Anne H. Margulies, assistant provost for information systems.