Ask a provost, CIO, dean or chair whether IT, analytics, HR, or communications should be centralized or decentralized, and you’re likely to hear very different perspectives.
Deans and chairs typically want these positions filled by employees who understand the specific, day-to-day needs of their program and are readily accessible to the unit. Meanwhile, the CIO and provost see redundant systems, inconsistent data, missed savings and security risks. They would prefer to run the institution as a single enterprise rather than a dispersed collection of offices.
Management typically treats this as a choice between centralized and decentralized structures. Some might recall Mintzberg’s classic distinctions between staff and line. This problem is not new.
So, how can we organize in ways where experts stay close to the areas they serve while gaining the advantages of scale and scope across a large and complex organization like the modern university?
In universities, academic and student affairs, enrollment management, advancement, and athletics are mission-facing or, in managerial terms,”the line.” Their value comes from relationships with students, faculty, alumni, donors, and other stakeholders. Proximity, local knowledge and flexibility matter.
IT, HR, finance, institutional analytics, marketing and communications, legal affairs, and facilities, by contrast, serve as “staff,” creating the conditions for the line to do its mission-facing work.
Organizational research has long argued that mature complex organizations need both enterprise-wide standardization and local responsiveness. However structured, effectiveness depends on coordination: shared data definitions, common technology, cybersecurity standards, professional development, policies, and governance.
When these functions operate independently across units, duplication and inconsistency follow. Yet restructuring for efficiency often conflicts with universities’ participatory culture and shared governance.
A hybrid enterprise services model coordinates what should be shared while keeping expertise close to the people who need it most. Neither central offices nor isolated staff placements achieve that.
Career progression becomes clearer
Under a hybrid model, staff professionals are housed in the colleges, divisions, or departments they serve, but belong to a broader functional unit with whom they meet regularly to share insights, benchmark and coordinate. For example, an analyst might spend most of her time supporting enrollment while also being part of an institutional analytics unit.
The dean and chair thus retain specialized staff who understand their unit, while the provost and CIO bring dispersed functional teams together around common standards, shared expertise and stronger institutional learning. Think of a department chairs meeting, or in athletics, a meeting of all coaches across sports.
This approach also benefits staff. An analyst working alone in a department may have meaningful work but few chances to learn from other analysts on best practices, troubleshooting and career development. Conversely, staff isolated in a central team miss the variety of mission-related work that makes working at a university so engaging.
A hybrid organization gives employees a professional home and an applied space to work. Early-career staff gain mentors. Experienced employees gain opportunities to lead projects, teach others, and develop management skills.
Career progression becomes clearer as well as the professional moves from analyst to senior analyst to team leader, working with different units along the way. This matters for retention.
Universities compete for professionals whose skills transfer easily to other industries. Salary matters, but so do growth, community, and mentorship. If your best analyst has to leave to find mentors, broader assignments, or a promotion, your structure is working against your retention strategy.
A career path with depth and variety
When professionals work across boundaries, knowledge travels with them. An HR onboarding practice can be piloted in one division before being applied more widely. Analytics methods for enrollment planning can improve financial forecasting. Instead of solving the same problem five times, people learn from one another.
This becomes even more important as universities adopt AI, which depends on trustworthy data, coordinated technology and shared policies. If six offices define student data differently, AI won’t resolve the disagreement. It will just produce faster answers to different questions.
Universities don’t need to redraw their organizational chart tomorrow. Start by regularly bringing together the functional roles dispersed across the university. Hold a “chairs meeting.” Establish communities of practice. Develop common tools and definitions. Build mentoring across units. Identify cross-unit projects where staff work as one team, then return to their home departments to pilot, implement, and evaluate.
The centralization debate focuses too much on reporting lines. The strategic opportunity is to create an environment where lessons learned in one part of the university benefit the rest.
For institutions, this means stronger coordination and greater capacity to respond to change. For employees, it means colleagues who understand their work, mentors who help them grow, and a career path with depth and variety that keeps them at the university.
