The title of Chief Information Officer at a college campus would logically include supervision of all academic disciplines, library, registrar, and bursar. Virtually everything on the campus is based on sharing information. Logic, however, is not sufficient to explain actual titles on real campuses, and I have 2 quotes from just such a person, a Chiefly Lacking Information Officer on a nearby college campus.
Quote: "Many of us in the 40-plus club think of technology as an overlay, but [for students] ... it's just there."
Quote: "We're built like product companies. We need to restructure ourselves as service organizations."
Technology is "just there" because of all the innovative folk in their smithies and bicycle shops working out the issues in the new technology, but also because our society subsequently removed automobiles and aeroplanes from the blacksmith and the bike repair shop and made those services into products. Transportation as a service barely survives into the 21st Century but transportation as a product thrives around the world. No one thinks of the private automobile as an overlay -- except for myself, a few Luddites, and various other eccentrics. In fact, thinking in that way might be one good definition of eccentric in our culture.
Perhaps, because our CLIO is not chief of all information, because she is especially not the chief of historical information, perhaps she meant to limit her commentary to electronically mediated information technology. Computers. Cellular telephones. Electronic notebooks. Products, one and all. No one wants to buy an information service today. (I'm not sure that anyone ever did want to, but we used to have to.) You may like to think of telephone and data connectivity as a service, but it is sold and purchased as a commodity: a product.
True, sometimes the car breaks down or the data connection is lost. In such circumstances one may need service. It is an anomolous situation. When the product fails, one seeks service.
Service is not dead by any means. There are innumerable automotive service centers (some of them quite good) dealing with failures in the automotive product. There are computer service centers (a few of them modestly effective) dealing with failures in the computer products.
But you hope never to need any of them.
All you want to buy is a reliable product which you can use until it wears out and must be replaced.
So ... why should we restructure ourselves as service organizations? Is it so that we can be out of date or undesired? The entire point of view is oddly out of sync with the realities of technologies, new and old. It is dissonant, which could be either funny or depressing. I admit that for me, with my history of working in information technology, this dissonance is more depressing. But as Calvin said to Hobbes, "The world is probably funnier to people who don't live here."