Tackling technical legacy in higher education

This blog was kindly authored by Dr Victoria Moody, Director, HE and Research at Jisc.

There is a misconception about ‘technical legacy’ in UK higher education: that it is a niche IT concern, best left to specialist teams to resolve. In reality, it is something far more consequential. Technical legacy – the accumulation of ageing, fragmented and often poorly integrated digital systems built up over years of time-pressured decisions – now shapes how universities teach, research and operate. It influences everything from staff workload to student experience, and from cyber resilience to the UK’s global competitiveness.

Technical legacy is increasingly recognised across the sector. Jisc’s recent briefing paper, Tackling technical legacy in UK higher education, has brought renewed focus to the issue, alongside a wider set of conversations between institutions, policymakers and sector bodies, including a series of targeted roundtable discussions taking place over the summer and concluding in autumn with a next steps briefing. Together, these signal a shift: from seeing technical legacy as an operational inconvenience to recognising it as a strategic constraint.

More than an IT problem

Technical legacy is not simply about old systems. It is the accumulation of fragmented infrastructure, short-term investment decisions and growing policy complexity over time. Across the sector, institutions are running layers of systems that once met specific needs, but now lack interoperability, making them costly to maintain, difficult to integrate and hard to evolve.

This matters because digital infrastructure is no longer an invisible underpinning, it is foundational. Technical legacy has become a sector-wide constraint on productivity, security and innovation, with direct implications for AI adoption, research capability and national competitiveness. Discussions at the first roundtable with higher education sector leaders reinforced the growing security and resilience risks associated with ageing infrastructure, as well as the rising costs in an already constrained financial environment.

Yet the funding and policy environment have not kept pace with this reality. Short-term, project-based investment has prioritised new initiatives, often without addressing the underlying systems they depend on. The result is a familiar pattern: institutions continue to add new layers, while core systems age in place.

The lived reality of technical legacy

The impacts of technical legacy are most clearly felt, not in strategy documents, but in the everyday experiences of staff and students.

For staff, it means navigating systems that don’t fully connect, adapting practice to tools that only partially meet needs, and working within constraints that are often taken for granted. Staff are often operating in a ‘firefighting’ environment, focused on maintaining business-as-usual rather than addressing underlying issues, limiting capacity for transformation.

That gap between institutional narratives and what actually happens is important. At a strategic level, digital transformation is often presented as coherent and intentional. In practice, it is more likely to be incremental, uneven and shaped by local context. Different departments may rely on entirely different combinations of systems, standards and processes, producing a fragmented experience beneath the surface of a single institutional identity.

For students, this fragmentation translates into inconsistency.

For researchers, it is challenging to sustain and innovate in vital research infrastructure.

What appears to be a unified digital environment is often experienced as a patchwork, where access, clarity and usability vary.

For those responsible for maintaining systems, the challenges are cumulative. Ageing infrastructure is harder to secure, more expensive to run and less capable of supporting new demands. Each workaround or integration adds another layer of complexity, increasing the risk of failure.

And for institutional leaders, technical legacy creates difficult trade-offs: between maintaining stability and enabling change, between investing in visible innovation and addressing less visible infrastructure, and between short-term pressures and long-term sustainability. Most significantly, it compounds.

A constraint on future ambition

The urgency of addressing technical legacy is heightened by the sector’s ambitions around AI, data and digital evolution.

Adopting new technologies safely and at scale depends on having secure, interoperable and resilient infrastructure. Legacy systems, by contrast, limit interoperability and increase cyber risk, making transformation slower, more expensive and more uncertain.

There is also a growing mismatch between policy ambition and institutional capacity. Expectations around data use, reporting and digital capability continue to increase, placing additional pressure on systems that were not designed for these purposes.

Without addressing technical legacy, there is a risk that new initiatives simply add further layers of complexity, reinforcing the very constraints they are intended to overcome.

Towards a shared agenda for change

Encouragingly, there is increasing alignment across the sector on what needs to change. Conversations now underway, from institutional forums to national policy discussions, including the recent Jisc roundtables, point towards a more coordinated approach.

Four priorities stand out.

Recognising digital infrastructure as an essential capability

Higher education’s digital systems underpin teaching, research and innovation. Treating them as core infrastructure, rather than discretionary spend, would better reflect their role and importance. The Jisc roundtable with higher education institution leaders emphasised that this is not just a question of recognition but of governance. Technical legacy must be framed as a corporate risk, requiring strong ownership alongside improved understanding of the scale of investment and long-term planning required. Institutions caught in a cycle of maintaining legacy environments are less able to pursue transformation, innovation and AI-enabled developments.

Enabling long-term, sustainable investment

Institutions need to plan beyond short funding cycles. This means supporting multi‑year renewal programmes and recognising maintenance, replacement and security as essential components of investment, alongside future-proofing and migration to new technologies. While many systems originate from capital-funded projects, maintaining and modernising them depends on rising operational expenditure, making them harder to sustain. Clearer, longer-term business cases are necessary to secure executive buy-in and align digital investment with institutional strategy.

Strengthening collaboration across the sector

Fragmented approaches to procurement and infrastructure increase cost and complexity, often reinforcing a lack of interoperability between systems. Shared services, common frameworks and coordinated investment can improve efficiency while reducing risk. Opportunities to act collectively must be taken, such as developing shared standards in areas such as identity and core systems, and strengthening sector-wide approaches to procurement. There was also strong interest at the higher education sector roundtable in benchmarking costs and improving transparency around contracts to enhance collective bargaining power and reduce duplication.

Building sector capability

A consistent theme from the higher education sector roundtable was the scale of the skills challenge. Institutions face shortages in specialist expertise, while teams focused on ‘business as usual’ have limited capacity to tackle legacy issues. Participants highlighted the need for shared talent models and greater alignment on roles and skills across the sector to avoid constraining transformation.

These are not new ideas, but they require sustained commitment to translate into meaningful change.

From recognition to action

If there is one lesson from the past decade, it is that technical change rarely succeeds in isolation. It is shaped by organisational priorities, governance and incentives, by what institutions choose to fund, protect and prioritise.

Addressing technical legacy therefore depends on more than upgrades or replacement programmes. It requires a clearer, shared understanding of digital infrastructure as an enduring capability that underpins every aspect of higher education.

The conversation about technical legacy is now well underway. The next step is to translate that shared understanding into coordinated, practical action across institutions and at the sector level.

How this challenge is addressed will have lasting consequences. The condition of our digital infrastructure will shape not only how universities operate today, but how well they can adapt, compete and innovate in the years ahead.