The five-year strategy has been a familiar feature of corporate planning. But that model depends on confidence that the assumptions behind the plan will remain valid, and that confidence is becoming much harder to sustain.
It’s once the excitement has faded and the novelty of university has worn off, that the problems start to surface for students.
Deciding how much teaching should move online is not just about student preference, it’s about supporting students to learn in a way that works best for them. So how can universities build a digital strategy that works for all?
UCAS found that 71% of prospective students name making friends as their biggest worry about starting university – ahead of the academic side entirely.
Universities put a huge amount of effort into creating the best possible experience for those young people – but what happens once they have accepted a place?
Every university investing in digital learning, modern campuses and new ways of teaching is, at the end of the day, trying to deliver an amazing student experience.
Knowing something about a customer isn’t the same as understanding them or their behaviour. Our ambition shouldn’t be to create the most personalised experience possible. It should be to understand when personalisation actually improves the experience in the first place.
Organisations are now spending millions collecting information they may never use, storing data they don’t need, and creating risks they don’t fully understand. 68% of enterprise data is never used. 54% of it is never even accessed. We have to ask – has the data revolution has reached the point of diminishing returns?
Universities are fiercely, proudly distinctive. Their academic character, research strengths, student culture and civic relationships are not peripheral to what they do; they are central to the value they create. That distinctiveness has real weight: for students choosing where to study, for researchers deciding where to work, for employers seeking partners, and for the communities universities serve. In a sector where institutions are increasingly required to compete for students, funding, talent and reputation, protecting their differentiation is a strategic necessity.
The advent of AI has changed everything. AI does not enter a blank organisational canvas; it enters existing workflows, draws on existing data, affects existing decisions and depends on (or bypasses) existing controls. If those foundations are unclear, outdated or plain wrong, AI won’t make them better. It will simply deliver bad outcomes more quickly.
