One of the things we're tracking in NTEN's annual Nonprofit IT Staffing and Spending report is where IT is located within organizations -- as in, where the primary IT staff are in the organizational structure.

In our latest report, respondents told us that their IT was most likely housed as part of General Operations or Administration (about a third of all respondents). How does this compare to previous years?

Well, it turns out the trends are not what we'd like to see.

Looking at these numbers from 2008-2010, we can see the proportion of respondents indicating that there is a separate department for IT has been decreasing, while the proportion of respondents who say there is "No one with official IT responsibility" within the organization is increasing.

Why are we concerned about these trends? Because the research also shows that organizations that assess themselves as Leaders when it comes to Technology Adoption compared to the rest of the nonprofit sector report the opposite:

Leader organizations are most likely to have stand-alone IT Departments, and are the least likely to report having no one on staff with IT responsibility.

While organizational budget and staff size will undoubtedly play a factor in the organizational structure (and our survey statistics bear this correlation out), we also see from separate research that organizational size doesn't have to be a direct factor in Technology Leadership.

So these numbers beg the questions:

• Just how important is organizational structure to organizational technology adoption?
• If an organization has no IT Department, what other factors can contribute to effective technology leadership?

We'd love to hear your reactions to these numbers and these questions.