Slash wasteful IT spend and invest in academics instead – expert

UK universities should rip up a lot of their “back-end nonsense”, tackle managerial bloat and stop shelling out for different versions of the same technology to allow them to return to their core missions and heavily invest in academic jobs, according to an influential professor who has helped to pioneer a new approach to digital infrastructure in the public sector.

Higher education institutions are afflicted by the same problems as local councils, government departments and the NHS in that they are legacy organisations that have grown in silos and are all trying to reinvent the wheel, Mark Thompson, professor in digital economy at the University of Exeter, told Times Higher Education’s Digital Universities UK conference in Exeter.

This has fuelled a rapid expansion in bureaucracy, meaning that much of universities’ budgets for digital transformation goes on maintaining “business as usual” and that leaders “spend most of their time keeping the lights on”, he said.

“Universities have been going the wrong way for some time…in cutting academic [posts], courses and research, and at the same time we are ballooning administrative activity,” Professor Thompson told the conference.

Pointing out that many universities now employ more administrators than academics, Professor Thompson called for universities to refocus on their “day one” activities of teaching and learning. “If the number of people supporting this starts to dwarf the number of people on that front line, then there is something wrong.”

Professor Thompson, a former government adviser on technology who has led several digital infrastructure projects, including creating a uniform jobs board for the NHS, said a “fundamental restructure” was needed, with a particular focus on platform-sharing across institutions, especially for the parts that “nobody cares about”.

A “radical transformation” that reduced operating costs by 20 per cent could save the sector £10 billion, he said, and potentially fund 240,000 new academic posts, doubling the number of scholars in the country.

Given that most universities are having to cut jobs to deal with deficits, competitors are creating alternative models of education and the public is showing signs of “losing faith with the product”, universities were faced with an “existential situation” and could be “killed off” if they did not take action, Professor Thompson said.

But higher education institutions are still “laggards” when it comes to digital investment and managerialism, and silos were preventing them from pivoting, creating a risk that “we are just going to get the next generation of terrible, awful legacy infrastructure”.

Instead, Professor Thompson continued, what was needed was “collective, sector-wide transformation”, with shared platforms the “only thing that is going to save us”.

The creation of the NHS jobs board – which brought together opportunities from 215 trusts – was one example of a “potential way we could start ripping through this back-end nonsense that goes on in universities”, he said.

Professor Thompson added that there was a role for the government in facilitating more sharing across institutions and that vice-chancellors had to take responsibility rather than leaving it to their chief technology officers.

“Just imagine if we took all that budget that we spend again and again and again [and put it towards] building a true…sector-beating offering,” he said. “You can do it cheaply and quickly and you can share this stuff, but we have to stop buying salami-sliced versions of the same thing from our suppliers.”

tom.williams@timeshighereducation.com