Administration in an academic department

When I describe myself as an Administrator, people immediately ask “but what do you do?”. Administration it seems is all things to all men. A common mistake I find is that people confuse administration with management. University management is most commonly understood to be the policy‐making structure of bodies like Senate and Council, whereas the administration is the organisation which puts this policy into practice. The job content varies of course from department to department, and certainly varies in different universities. It would seem that what I am being asked to do in this article is to justify my own position. Let me say fron the outset that I have no intention of accepting that challenge. What I intend to do is to outline how I personally see the role of a departmental administrator.