- This HEPI blog was kindly authored by Mel Gomes, Head of IT Commercial Management and Contracts, Royal Holloway.
In May 2024, a leading UK law firm, Mills and Reeve, ran a webinar for commercial providers of higher education addressing the potential consequence of a university becoming insolvent. This, alongside the leaked list complied by Sue Gray, Chief of Staff to the new Prime Minister, which includes universities going under as a potential crisis which might be faced by the new Labour government, highlights the current context of an operating model that isn’t working for many institutions.
Higher education is not the only public sector in crisis, but the recent Future of Britain Conference, hosted by the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, on 9th July 2024, emphasised the route to transforming public services is the technological revolution. And in his keynote opening speech, Tony Blair said:
The biggest risk is not being too bold, but being too timid.
Words that the traditionally risk-averse UK higher education sector would do well to heed.
Learnings from Down Under
In this context it was encouraging to hear firsthand some of the thinking of leading universities in Australia as part of TechnologyOne’s Global Mobility Program 3.0, which I was pleased to be a part of for two weeks this spring. I was invited, alongside a group of other selected members from TechnologyOne’s existing UK university customer base, to engage in an exchange of ideas and thought leadership inspired by academic tours of the past.
In a very refreshing opening visit to Curtin University, the leading institution in Western Australia with 61,000 students and in the top 1% of world rankings, the Chief Information Officer (CIO) spoke about applying the principle ‘invest in digital structure, patch buildings.’
The CIO came to Curtin University from outside of the public sector and spoke passionately about what the sector can learn from industry, including the recruiting and retaining of talent, having longer-term strategies to combat external threats to survive and having a structure where the CIO reports directly to the CEO.
He also shared developments from his IT team, including stopping the siloed thinking of business system owners and individual departments buying products outside of a joined-up technology roadmap; having commercial teams within IT with dedicated resource to manage financial operations (FinOps); partnering with major suppliers; and moving 90% of workload to the cloud.
Like Curtin, Macquarie University in Sydney, an institution that has grown nearly three-fold in 20 years, also moved 90% of its workload away from on-prem, locally-hosted hardware, and is already reporting savings.
Another feature of Macquarie’s overall operating model is having 4,000 industry partners, which enables it to offer students blocks of work experience. Similarly, Victoria University, based in the heart of Melbourne, also partners with businesses so apprenticeships are part of their core offering, pointing to a future of a more diverse income stream and potentially digital credentials.
Like the UK sector, the threat to international student numbers is also a concern in Australia; of the 45,000 students at Victoria, 17% are international, and of the 50,000 students at Queensland University of Technology, with two campuses in Brisbane, 16% are international.
But Queensland University of Technology recognises that technology is central to retention, and the IT team there have focused on student experience, rolling out digital applications, redesigning the service model to reduce enquiries and embedding service improvement in its offerings.
Improving student experience and enabling cost sustainability
Of course, a significant difference between the regions is the economies of scale Australian Universities can maximise, with fewer universities and greater student numbers. However, improving user experience through technology is aligned with their drive to become cost-sustainable.
And as well at the university visits across four different states in Australia, the well-thought-out Global Mobility Program allowed us to attend a two-day Education User Group in Melbourne with over 200 users from across Australian universities, have time with the TechnologyOne leadership team in Brisbane and spend time with the Times Higher Education’s regional editor in Sydney, to further explore differentials that benefit UK universities.
That included the value proposition of enterprise applications designed to give both students and staff a seamless experience aligned while reducing technical debt, via software as a service (SaaS), which allows configuration but not customisation of code, with co-delivery – a theme of the academic MBA module Leadership and Management of Public Services – where software enhancements for all are largely instigated by the user community, a key feature.
And as well as reducing total cost ownership, perhaps most importantly of all in the current climate, was a commercial model where the supplier costs are fixed for implementation, creating cost certainty and mitigating the financial risk for universities that want to embark on digital transformation.
Continuous collaboration to enable digital transformation
TechnologyOne’s Global Mobility Program has opened up new channels for continued collaboration, which has already started conversations about different ways of delivering IT services to which the UK higher education sector has traditionally been constrained. Without alternate commercial and delivery models, many institutions will continue on a trajectory of failure.