Just as maintaining a healthy infrastructure of water delivery and roads is essential to the functioning of cities and towns, maintaining a healthy infrastructure of information technology is essential to the functioning of universities. Deterioration in IT infrastructure can lead to deterioration in research, teaching, and administration. Given the importance of information technology to all functions of the university, IT professionals must be strong advocates for appropriate life-cycle processes for IT infrastructure. One of the responsibilities of IT leaders is to provide their managers with appropriate background, analysis, and recommendations about IT infrastructure. This research bulletin develops a framework that can be used by IT management to assess the need for IT infrastructure projects, to analyze the issues and risks in implementing and maintaining IT infrastructure, and to engage other university officials in better understanding the impact of IT infrastructure projects.