Demonstrating digital transformation: building a coalition of the willing

About

City St Georges, University of London is one of the 24 pilot institutions that has worked closely with Jisc over the last year to test, affirm and contribute to the further development of Jisc’s framework for digital transformation, including the maturity model and action planning toolkit. Their holistic cross institutional project encompassed many of the successful attributes to digital transformation and the team will be sharing experiences of how they approached this project, the successes realised so far, challenges encountered and the next steps in their transformational journey.

City St George’s University of London’s president, professor Sir Anthony Finkelstein, joined the university in 2021 with a clear vision that higher education is in the process of being disrupted by digital transformation and the university needed to respond at scale and at pace. The first step in City St George’s transformation journey was realised as part of the university strategy in 2022, when what was then ‘City, University of London’ made a strategic commitment to invest in foundational information technologies to fix core systems and processes. However, the university was aware that while any ambitions for digital transformation needed to be placed on a firm foundation, it was vital to keep momentum and engagement going with the future possibilities for digital technologies and engage people in conversations about what organisational changes needed to occur.

When City St George’s heard about Jisc’s digital transformation toolkit, they were keen to use the organisational digital culture element of the framework to better understand perceptions of current digital maturity, which could feed into a future digital transformation vision and strategy. They felt it could also provide them with a baseline of current perception against which to monitor future change. The City St George’s senior leadership team will share their thinking, experience and commitment through a series of workshops and discussions during the day.

The 2024-2025 series of demonstrating digital transformation events mirrors the holistic nature of Jisc's framework for digital transformation. It brings together senior leaders with responsibility for taking forward digital transformation within their university including senior executive/director roles in digital, student experience, education, technical, digital and IT services, libraries, estates and facilities management, registry, data management, learning and teaching, research and innovation roles.