The knowledge society that Europe designed in Lisbon is based on a modern higher education system with innovative methods and resources. Universities that were pioneering in introducing computation and Internet for research have been walking fast to adopt information technology (IT) in three levels: teaching, management and government.
In Spain, this evolution has sometimes lacked of assessments and of lightness. For this reason, the IT Committee of the Spanish Association of University Rectors (CRUE in Spanish set of initials), in 2004, drove the establishment of an inquest, called UNIVERSITIC, in order to achieve a global assessment of IT in universities that includes: IT description, IT Management and IT Governance.
The results of the first year’s survey showed that Spanish Universities, in general had adopted a compromised stance with the aim of incorporating and use of IT, but frequently this compromise was more reactive than proactive, more improvised than planned.
Ten years later, this survey has been improved and now also includes the Latin America area. Current results indicate that universities usually plan IT implementation and they are aware of the need to achieve best practices both in IT management and in IT governance. So the UNIVERSITIC survey and its results are very useful for the Spanish and Latin American universities and we hope it could become a good reference for European Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) too.