Within the last several years, between 400 and 500 faculty development programs have been instituted in colleges and universities. However, there is no clear agreement on what faculty development programs should be doing. This paper examines the major approaches to faculty development that institutions can use and the role of institutional researcher in relation to faculty development. The thesis is that the role of the institutional researcher is to create reliable data bases about the institution's faculty members in order to influence the decisionmaking process of power elites in the institution. A taxonomy for creating a data about the personal, professional and organizational dimensions of faculty members is presented to guide the institutional researcher. (Author/JMF)