11 January 2022 
Matt Sisson, Projects and Membership Manager
In this blog, Nigel Thomas at Oracle looks at how the technology infrastructure at universities might make improving institutional efficiency and effectiveness difficult, and what one of the solutions might be.
In its submission to the government’s Comprehensive Spending Review, Universities UK highlighted the contribution of higher education to economic recovery after the pandemic. While, crucially, maintaining the highest quality and value by ‘making the most of the investments made by students and the public’.
Unfortunately, the technology infrastructure at many universities only makes the challenge of improving institutional efficiency and effectiveness more difficult. The technology environments actually impede their ability to sense change and respond quickly. Systems that were adequate in days past, with a refresh every five to seven years, are no longer sufficient. Expectations for technology change every six months. And the longer a university waits to add new capabilities, the more it costs to catch up.
While there is no simple fix for this problem, help is at hand in the form of cloud computing.
Cloud computing is a sharp departure from the status quo. Organisations lease their digital assets, rather than keeping software and hardware ‘on premise’, and then rent what they need. Sceptics argue there isn’t anything cloud can do that on-premise approaches can’t accomplish. Universities can buy or build software, install it in their own data centres, enable applications for different devices and make them available via web browsers.
And it is true, they can. But they rarely do. IT departments are too stretched with day-to-day maintenance activities. And these activities prove surprisingly difficult, expensive and time consuming on legacy technology. There is precious little bandwidth for development or strategic initiatives.
The cloud offers a way for universities to pursue opportunities nimbly and cost effectively. In 2018 Northumbria University launched its five-year vision and strategy. It set ambitious targets for improving the effectiveness of finance, human resource and planning systems. In choosing Oracle Cloud earlier this year, staff productivity and satisfaction will benefit from user experience improvements. And finance and HR applications that facilitate collaboration and evidence-based decision making from mining data.
What’s more, many unanticipated cloud benefits arise after a project is launched and staff discover novel ways to use the new technology. Oracle Cloud promotes continuous innovation as customers benefit through quarterly updates that comprise bug fixes, new functionality and enhancements based on customer requests. Customers take advantage of new features to improve business processes and innovate. At a pace and time that works for their organisation.
What are the implications of the adoption of cloud technologies? If the cloud’s only impact was on universities’ IT budgets, the implications would be relatively minor. But as we’ve seen, cloud computing offers advantages in, at a minimum, productivity, analytics and collaboration. Take the University of Greenwich, which will continue to benefit from the automation of key business functions including financials, procurement and project management. While a new performance management project will also be undertaken to enhance student number planning es.
Organisations that shift to cloud services can get sustained productivity gains rather than a one-time bump through an upgrade. How valuable are these advantages? It is hard to measure but here is some food for thought. How would you feel if other universities started pulling away from you in those areas simply by changing their computing infrastructure?
Please get in touch with Nigel if you have any questions, or want more information about Oracle’s work across higher education.
