A transitional plan for digital and technology change

This is a challenging time for universities in a global context as they seek to fully harness the potential of being digital and teaching digitally. Over the last five years the University of the Arts London (UAL) has been on a transformative digital journey. UAL is an art based institution consisting of six world class (World University Rankings, 2020) colleges on 18 sites across an international city and a constituency of users that total over sixty thousand.
Since 2015 UAL has been moving towards a more defined governance structure for IT and Digital services, this has largely been developed by working collaboratively with the Colleges and Professional Services. It has become a significant strategic driver that UAL engages in a more strategic approach to the use of digital technology across its wide spectrum of activities. This paper presents a case study of how UAL arrived at its current transitional IT plan that promotes digital transformation.
UAL seeks to fully harness the potential of being digital to advance how we manage our digital services and how we think about the potential to leverage the digital landscape to advance UAL’s mission and values. This approach has to include both Learning and Teaching and operational rationalisation. In order to best position UAL for the next three years of growth and success it is essential that this Digital and IT strategy is fully endorsed and fully supported. Over the last twelve months a transitional plan has been developed to enable a transition towards a fully developed IT & digital strategy. The transitional plan sets out how to prepare for the next mid-term UAL strategy through greater business efficiency in the technology function, ensuring IT plays an enabling role in Learning and Teaching, Research and Knowledge Exchange. This plan has involved a necessary segmentation of approach across UAL which has followed the steps of Digitisation, Digitalisation and Digital Transformation (Andersen, 2018) to advance how we manage our UAL wide digital services and governance.

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