The 31 Division I conference offices will report their understanding of the goals and objectives behind recent changes in the governance structure as part of a preliminary assessment tool approved by the Division I Administration Cabinet.

The survey, distributed after the cabinet’s September meeting, asks conferences about their level of participation in the reorganized structure and aims to get at the conferences’ assessment of the level of communication occurring between conferences and governance bodies.

Conferences are responsible for making the initial appointments recommended to the Board of Directors for the various cabinets and councils in the new structure, and all nominations filter through the conference offices.

“We felt that after one year of operation, conferences would be the first point of entry for the research, to get the opinion of those commissioners and conferences offices as to how the structure is working,” said Rob Halvaks, chair of the Administration Cabinet and senior associate commissioner at the Big West Conference.

The conference surveys are due back to the NCAA research staff October 2.

The surveys are part of a broader assessment of the reorganization that the Administration Cabinet hopes will be ongoing. Next, the cabinet will examine the conference responses and reformulate the survey, adding more detail, to be sent to member institutions.

“We want to know how information flows from the governance structure to the conferences and then out to the membership. It’s really about communication,” Halvaks said. “We are really trying to assess how that is working.”

In addition to the surveys, the cabinet hopes to begin an exit-interview process, asking the chairs of the cabinets and councils, as well as any members of those bodies who leave the structure after a two-year appointment, to assess the effectiveness of the structure. That process is not expected to begin until late 2010.

The Division I governance structure was reorganized in September 2008. The changes replaced larger cabinets with a greater number of smaller groups with the goal of providing more effective support for presidential leadership from the substructure.