Digital culture change

Digital culture change is not a one-size-fits-all approach but rather a dynamic way to engage people and technology within a transformative framework that enhances stakeholder learning within higher education (HE) and organisational effectiveness. The Covid-19 pandemic underscored the need for flexible digital strategies, highlighting challenges related to digital inequity and the limitations of uniform transformation models. To drive a meaningful approach to change, senior leadership at the University for the Creative Arts (UCA) created a Digital Enabling Strategy to support decision-making, efficiency and stronger connections for delivery and academic success. Creating the strategy included commissioning institutional research guided by Jisc, a digital technology agency, and a strategic leadership review to replace previous Information Technology (IT) planning. This staged approach involved engaging the broader community of academics, students, professional and technical staff as stakeholders in change. Key principles that surfaced from the research included creating a more collaborative digital culture, strengthening existing technology structures, fostering leadership for change, and resisting regression to outdated models. The leadership review supported implementing an enabling three-level framework (centralised, distributed, and distinctive) that could tap into the institution’s unique value propositions for both campus and online experiences. It is encouraging that the institution has, through this process, been able to reassess core creative and business aspirations through a digital lens, identifying opportunities for innovation and mixed modes of participation, planning and engagement. By embracing an enabling strategy that set out to appraise and reset digital readiness in a small specialist higher education institution, distributed leadership can now build a digital culture that is inclusive yet adaptive and robust enough for competitive change.

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In: Laurence Desnos, Raimund Vogl, Lazaros Merakos, Carmen Diaz, Janina Mincer-Daszkiewicz and Stuart Mclellan (editors). Proceedings of EUNIS 2025 annual congress in Belfast, vol 107, pages 1-10.

The topic for EUNIS 2025 was Connecting Communities and Empowering Creativity.

Paper under Governance, Policy and Institutional Strategies.