Salaries are only about 60% of what similar positions are payed within other departments of the university. Salaries are dramatically low, which leads to high turnover and an inability to fill desperately needed positions, often for half a year or more, since almost no one is willing to work for so little. Often offices and promotions that properly belong with more far more experienced people who have been at the company for many years are lost as perks to attract people into new positions.
A middle-management layer was recently introduced as the group got larger, however these were a mixed bag mostly from much larger companies and most of their styles clash badly with the software / process we actually have. Differing opinions of how to proceed on projects were hard enough to reconcile years ago, and the clash has exacerbated that. There's definitely a lot of cultural shear as the older academics and engineers are being displaced and driven away by generic non-technical business people.
The software and processes have a technical complexity at this point that's beyond the technical understanding of the head of the organization, almost all of the middle management, and about two-thirds of the ground-level employees.
