Mission statements and public policies for information technology support are useful and certainly necessary for ensuring good service, but they are hardly sufficient guides for keeping that service on track. Most colleges and universities use a combination of user surveys, self-study, and committee oversight to assess how well the IT service organizations on campus are performing. These evaluative tools focus the critique of services in ways that downplay matters of public perception, institutional impact, and the interaction of providers and users of the services. Context is important but tends to get stripped away in many of the tools we use to evaluate IT services. As a result, our picture of the social dynamics of these services is sketchy, “cultural” factors are lost, and some indicators are even misread entirely.