2019 IT Leadership Survey

The 2019 IT Leadership Survey

Key Findings 

1. Cybersecurity is the Top Priority for IT Leaders today.
2. The top 3 Challenges faced by IT leaders for the past 3 years remain the same: Budget, Professional Development, and Breaking Down Silos.
3. Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) strategies declining in popularity. They are used by only 16% of school districts, probably as a result lower cost devices being introduced to the market.
4. Virtually all IT leaders (95%) agree that addressing the Homework Gap is a concern for their district. This is a significant change.  Last year 30% of leaders indicated digital equity was not important issue for their district vs. only 5% one year later.
5. Print is not dead. Past predictions have been overly optimistic. For 67% of districts, print still comprises at least half of their instructional materials.6.
6. Nearly a third of districts have fully implemented single sign-on (SSO), but other areas of interoperability – content, data, and data dashboards – are  only partially implemented. Most alarmingly, between 23% to 33% of districts report doing either nothing at all or are only in the planning stage for content, data, and data dashboard interoperability.
7. This survey identifies a number of ways in which IT leaders are looking to be more relevant to teachers and learning, with 75% of IT Leaders saying it is important to be more responsive to educator IT needs in the classroom.
8. The largest percentage of IT leaders continue to have education backgrounds (40%), followed by those with technical backgrounds (35%), a growing number from business/management backgrounds (20%) and other (3%).
9. Lack of ethnic and racial diversity in school district IT leadership remains a serious problem in most school systems with no progress since last year.
10. The percentage of women in school district IT leadership roles has declined in recent years.