Technology and Transformation

The Higher Education sector, and Keele itself, is developing and changing at an unprecedented rate and technology enabled transformation is at the heart of much of that change. Competition in the sector, increasing student expectations and key challenges such as Net Zero all depend on IT & Digital enablers. IT Services in Keele has never been more fundamental to the success of the University.

Over the past 5 years IT Services that successfully built relationships with the University and become part of the core DNA of Keele. IT delivered an impressive range of achievements, from the network transformation and data centre projects, a new digital showcase building (IC7), established cyber security and other core competences within IT Services, and more future facing initiatives such as the first institutional High Performance Compute (HPC) cluster and the creation of the Digital Society Institute (DSI).

IT Services has made significant inroads into institutional technical debt, lack of processes and major technical risks, but there is much more still to be done. Over the past 12 months IT Services has conducted two external benchmarking assessments (Mozaic and Uniforum) to identify the gaps in the current structure and prepare for the next stage in the development and maturing of IT Services at Keele. 

The team have used the international models such as Business Technology Standard (BTS) to look at requirements, capabilities, roles and responsibilities with the goal being to move to a model at the forefront of the sector, built around BTS, Product Management and improved User Experience. This model will support and enable the University whilst recognising this is a small team compared to some other universities.

IT Services will aim to provide a reliable, secure, and innovative IT environment that supports the university's strategic goals of delivering excellent education and student experience,  research and civic engagement. This depends, in turn on excellent professional services and a coherent enabling digital infrastructure including continuing to reduce and ultimately remove existing long term technical debt. IT Services aims to enable our people, our students, staff and researchers to make more use of better technology and services and to do this IT is equipping to have better management of core services and of vendors, to increase the focus on user experience and on making sure people have the skills they need, without ever losing focus on the critical risks such as cyber security.

The roles being recruited are all new ones for the University and present an opportunity to really make a difference in an organisation.  They will establish a new level of maturity and serve as the foundation for the transformation of Professional Services and the development of the University.