Accessibility Tools
Networking is the founding idea for the internet the basic medium of digitalisation. At the same time the internet would never have become such a dynamic driver of science and innovation without connecting people and institutions around the globe. However digital transformations are not limited to individual institutions. Changes are abundant and these dynamics are visible across the entire higher education system.
Scholars and students need to be able to continuously access use – and co-design – cutting edge digital technologies in support of the entire research life cycle. First and foremost this includes sharing insights on processes methods results and outcomes of research activities in teaching learning and knowledge exchange with wider society. Achieving such objectives requires capacity building. The advancement of competencies is important not only for scholars but also for the professional support staff that implement and operate services and infrastructure for scholars and students. For example shared (research) data spaces could be among the core applications resulting from cross-university cooperation.
Contemporary research is accessible comprehensible and reusable: through consistent implementation of the FAIR principles we could jointly create data ecosystems that take into account disciplinary specificities but are also inherently cross-disciplinary. Moreover we will be able to set up suitable data analysis spaces for a fair reciprocal legally secure analysis of data with appropriate protection. Generally it is high time to team up in order to enable and support all university members in gaining expertise to understand and shape digital transformations. At the same time we need to expand universities’ capacities to implement digital innovations that enhance and expand their provision of services and infrastructure.
Digitalisation creates opportunities and expands our scope of action but also entails risks and uncertainties. Here resilience calls for a responsible appropriate safe and secure use of digital technologies and resonates with information security data protection and digital sovereignty. The concept of digital sovereignty viewed from a university standpoint is not about the ideal of self-sufficiency as universities cannot themselves produce all the digital technology that they need from chips and hardware to networks software and cloud offerings. Rather universities will continue to strive for autonomy in the sense of strengthened capabilities to proactively develop their offerings and organisation and to respond to changes and threats in their digital environments.
Accordingly when it comes to financing universities’ digital transformations policy makers should design the additional budgets required with the key objective of conjointly devised and cooperatively usable results. Hence we should prevent a replication of efforts that fails to achieve sustainable operating models. When it comes to digital infrastructure cooperatively designed solutions should be taken into consideration wherever suitable. Universities should leverage synergies in the development of platforms and systems for transformative reorganisation and redesign of processes and practices that can be utilised in a modern digitalised administration. However universities are advised not to prioritise efficiency over enablement resilience and care in the sense discussed here.
European universities advocate human-centred digitalisation in a European way recognising our universities’ special role due to their diversity wealth of experience and high potential for innovation. Here digitalisation is characterised by respect for and responsibility towards all individuals in their diversity and the preservation and development of our cultural heritage. Therefore the design of digital offerings should follow principles such as openness participation sustainability and inclusion.
Finally some digital transformation processes are typically driven by platform providers for example research learning and sharing platforms. When taken up by large numbers of individual users in our case primarily students and scholars substantial network effects ensue. These users thus create value by sharing data and services leveraged by platform providers. Such developments present institutions in our case universities with special challenges with respect to their positioning towards those platforms that are important for students and scholars. Therefore we promote the strengthening of European initiatives that focus on cooperative digital transformation processes considering the viewpoints of enablement resilience efficiency and care. An active community of experts in higher education can jointly drive efforts to assess future opportunities and challenges with regard to digitalisation for universities and strengthen the position of the university system in these transformation processes as well as to help design appropriate activities to leverage the potentials in a coherent manner.
Ronald Maier is Vice-Rector for Digitalisation and Knowledge Transfer at the University of Vienna, Austria, and Professor of Information Systems at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. His research interests include collaboration engineering, connectivity, crowdsourcing and knowledge management. He holds a doctorate from WHU Otto Beisheim School of Management, Germany, and a habilitation degree from University of Regensburg, Germany.
