Universities can navigate uncertainty through decisive digitisation

Election day may have brought us a new government, but as expected, there are no clear remedies to the financial challenges currently faced by universities. The last six to nine months have been a particularly testing period for UK Higher Education (HE), with increasing operating costs, stagnated domestic student fees, and lower than expected returns from overseas students, all impacting growth and transformation plans. All of this is re-enforced by the recent higher education report from the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) which shines a light on these challenges; surpluses declining and cost pressures threatening the very existence of an increasing number of institutions. Additionally the 'Triangle of sadness' paper by Shitij Kapur, Vice-Chancellor of King’s College London, expands on many of these issues and causes in greater detail offering three steps that the sector needs to take. The overriding headline of our vice-chancellor survey in November 2023 was Navigating Uncertainty, and we now know how real that uncertainty has become.

My colleague Anton Horne has already shared a range of opportunities for cost reduction in HE, and this article will deep-dive on digitisation which the IFS report highlighted as one of the effective levers universities have in their control.

“Digital technologies adopted during the pandemic appear to have delivered some lasting efficiency savings.” IFS Report Higher Education Finances.

We’re not alone in thinking that digitisation offers opportunity. Earlier this year, 600+ delegates across HE attended Digital Universities Week (DUW) at the University of Exeter , where they explored digital transformation, generating excitement about digital opportunities and their benefits for students, staff, and institutions alike. So, what are those digital opportunities and how can they be unlocked and turned into institutional advantage?

Digitisation opportunities exist across institutions

These are some key opportunities we’ve developed, delivered or explored with universities:

• ‘One-stop-shops’ for students and staff to access data and services at every touchpoint
• Process automation for back office functions e.g., HR, finance, service desks
• AI tutors to support students 24/7/365 wherever they are
• Application of Gen AI to support applicant experiences in multiple languages
• Automation and AI for research services that support grant bidding, team collaboration and research team mobilisation.

There are clearly many other options available, but a list like this is only one step forward from just talking about ‘seamless end-to-end experiences’. The reality is that unless there’s a shift from discourse to delivering them, then no costs will be saved, no burdens reduced, and no experiences improved. So now is the time for action.

Shift from talking about seamless experiences to delivering them

Although over 90% of vice-chancellors rated better student and staff experiences as a top priority, are any institutions turning those words and intent into action?

Fortunately, some are. It was great to see examples of student #co-creation and new service delivery shared at DUW. 英国诺丁汉特伦特大学 involves students in digital co-design, ensuring accessibility for its diverse student portfolio, Exeter uses student personas to aid human-centred design and develop its new student hub, and 英国斯特拉斯克莱德大学 uses similar approaches to deliver its multi-functional student app which draws data from multiple platforms. These are creating better services for students, and better outcomes for staff and institutions.

In our recent award winning work for BPP (who serve ~ 21K students) we identified 300 pain-points encountered by students, clients, and employees that needed to be resolved. To do this, we co-developed and delivered a new application process, a ‘one-stop-shop’ for students, clients, and staff, and an underling digital and data platform to support them. Now delivered, BPP have seen account related queries reduce by 50%, and an application service that’s already reduced operational overheads by 30% in its first two months – in addition, all these services have received excellent feedback from their users.

These examples prove that when we shift from talking about ‘seamless experiences’ to delivering them we can achieve tangible benefits across institutions including financial returns.

There’s a need to move up a gear in automation and AI

Unsurprisingly, AI emerged as a core theme in our vice-chancellor survey, and at DUW one speaker drew attention to ‘Nothing University’, a satirical HE institution that prepares ‘students’ for an AI-powered future where doing nothing is the most in-demand skill. It’s a parody, but the message is loud and clear. AI is here, it can reduce burdens, and HE institutions need to adapt.

We’re now seeing the ‘green shoots’ of what’s possible with AI; some universities allow students to use #generativeAI for specific assignments, treating AI like a calculator with parameters for appropriate use. Generative AI is also being used to create teaching plans and AI tutors (like Tutello at Imperial College London) to support students’ end-to-end learning journeys 24/7/365. Explainable AI models can improve the traceability of academic sources, understanding of biases and relevancy to reduce the load on teaching staff and students. Use cases beyond teaching include research applications, corporate services like finance and HR, as well as student wellness.

Whilst there’s a temptation to discuss what could happen, organisations must take the next step to turn AI and automation aspirations into reality. To prove the art of the possible, we combined AI, automation, and process simplification to transform the mitigating circumstances experience for students, staff, and management, simplifying a stressful burdensome process for all – the resulting proof-of-concept has been successfully demonstrated to multiple universities with positive feedback, including: “From a student experience point of view, it's one of the more impressive uses of Gen AI I’ve seen.” A key lesson here was that the successful exploitation of digital opportunities requires process simplification and operational changes to succeed

AI-powered opportunities for cost savings come in many forms. For example, we are currently working with several universities to pilot the use of AI to identify contract related issues such as risk relating to cyber, information, compliance, reputation, strategic, ESG, and operational as well as cost saving opportunities (e.g., to detect where discounts have not been made, where promised value-add has not been provided, and where there are consolidation opportunities).

AI and automation offer enhanced opportunities to cut costs and create efficiency across universities, and of course this needs to be done ethically to succeed. But that will only happen when commitments are made to acting on those opportunities, turning them into reality, and then scaling them.

Develop enablers and infrastructure in synch with value release

Institutions need to be set up for successful delivery in order to succeed. This can require new skills and capabilities, new platforms and infrastructure, and new ways of working – all of which were explored at DUW.

Despite being centres of learning and world-leading research in AI and computing, HE institutions aren’t necessarily set up to build and leverage the digital skills themselves. And there are a multitude of skills to adopt; agile delivery, product management, user-centred design and user research, cloud development, and DevOps, so institutions need to consider their capability building strategies as well. A key point raised at DUW was the lack of in-house digital #talent, so it was encouraging to see digital leaders nurtured in-house – Strathclyde University, for example, fills internal digital posts with its own students and develops them.

New delivery methods and ways of working also need to be adopted and we are increasingly helping universities adopt agile delivery and product management at scale to deliver digital services and systems more effectively – UCL’s award winning agile transformation being a key example of this.

Even with skilled teams in place, data complexity often hinders – lack of integration, data analytics, cyber security, and data protection challenges all stand in the way. Speakers at DUW advised seeing data as an asset rather than a burden, improving data visibility, increasing interoperability, and improving leaders’ data skills to avoid opaque, ‘black box’ decisions.

A word of caution, however – universities need to avoid the trap of planning and investing in infrastructure too far ahead, or in isolation of new service delivery. Infrastructure work needs to happen in sync with the delivery of user-facing services, ensuring they are designed around users and organisational needs to deliver value incrementally and early – an overly waterfall approach will simply not achieve the outcomes and efficiencies at the speed in which they are needed.

No university is an island

In uncertain times, the future is often less daunting when faced together, an overarching message of DUW that also rings true for the vice-chancellors we surveyed. While HE institutions are technically in competition, they don’t need to go it alone. Developing collaborative capability takes leader ownership, core digital competency, and a ‘coalition of the willing’. By sharing experiences and learnings and extending that coalition beyond their own borders, could institutions crowdsource solutions, services and capabilities across the sector and beyond?

At DUW, an opening day talk from Mark Thompson from University of Exeter explored the potential for common platforms and standards, and how lessons from the Government Digital Service could be applied across the sector. Radical approaches that promise to be beneficial are often disruptive by nature, but when the stakes are high are high, disruption must be embraced. So, could current economic pressures become the catalyst for sector wide platform approaches? For example, up to 70% of finance processes are high-volume repeatable procedures that are common between organisations, so could shared service centres be created between universities on a national or regional basis to reduce their operational costs?

Fiscal pressures demand decisive digital acts, and the time to act is now

With no miracle cure delivered on election day, HE institutions need to act on the opportunities open to them now. Institutions and their governing bodies need to be decisive and make bold moves to grasp the opportunities presented including those through digital, AI and automation, and embrace and navigate the organisational changes and challenges that come with them. Those that do will both drive down operating costs and improve student and staff experiences, those that don’t will face greater uncertainty and rising challenges ahead.

Many thanks to Laura Brooks , Anton Horne , Ian Matthias and Laura Cox for their input, help and support in the creation of this article.?