Why do university IT systems drive staff round the bend?

The University of Edinburgh was recently brought to a near-standstill by a switchover to a new payments system, with PhD students going unpaid, contracts cancelled and the overseers of multimillion-pound research projects unable to order basic necessities such as paper.

While an extreme example, the case demonstrated what many who work in higher education have known for years: the systems universities rely on to function on a day-to-day basis are often apparently not fit for purpose.

It is feared that such endemic problems with digital infrastructure will now hamper the sector’s ambitions to pivot to offer more online and hybrid learning, with technologies unable to cope with expansion drives into areas such as microcredentials and lifelong learning. In a survey conducted last year by Jisc, the UK sector’s main technology agency, 82 per cent of staff reported experiencing technical problems while teaching online.

“Over the years universities have spent billions of pounds on the physical estate but the investment in digital infrastructure and the digital campus hasn’t been commensurate with that,” said Neil Mosley, an online education consultant who advises universities on their use of technology.

“In many universities there remains a patchwork of old legacy systems that don’t provide the kind of foundations needed to meet growing ambitions about the digital and online experience and that make it increasingly difficult to offer a modern user experience for staff and students.”

The autopsy over what went so wrong at Edinburgh is ongoing but the underlying issues that appeared to play a part will be familiar across the sector. In an attempt to streamline and centralise processes, a new expensive bespoke system was introduced but did not work as intended, with staff desperately left to try to pick up the pieces and find workarounds.

Similar themes were echoed in the responses to Times Higher Education’s recent work-life balance survey, in which higher education staff frequently blamed systems and processes that were ostensibly supposed to save them time for adding to their workload.

“A review of IT systems and positive change would greatly help,” was one common response from an HR professional when asked to make suggestions on what universities could do to relieve stress.

“The bureaucracy always increases,” said another respondent. “It doesn't help that we use several different IT systems that don’t talk to each other or aren’t fit for purpose so we have to create in-house solutions at dept level.”

One particularly disgruntled respondent was a lot blunter: “In the 1980s I worked in call centres. I was using better systems then than I use at the university now. It has reached the stage where I am actively looking for other jobs because of the poor IT system.”

Amanda White, deputy head of education at the University of Technology Sydney’s Business School, said many systems universities use were built to do highly specialised things with little thought as to how they connect together.

Pre-pandemic, people were relied upon to join up the dots, she said, but after job losses during the pandemic this administrative burden has been added to the workloads of those who are left, often stressed academics.

Mr Mosley said the sector has struggled to offer competitive pay to attract skilled IT professionals to lead on making improvements to digital infrastructure and there is only a “small talent pool of those that can support some of the old systems in use”.

To fix the problems, he said, “It’s going to take significant investment, effort and upheaval to metaphorically dig up the road to create a foundation for a modern digital campus.”

But a survey of chief technology officers at US institutions conducted by THE’s sister publication, Inside Higher Ed, recently found around half of those polled do not expect their total budget for central IT operations to increase next year. Less than half indicate that digital transformation is a “high priority” or “essential” for leaders at their institution.

Things might be changing, however. Sarah Knight, head of learning and teaching transformation at Jisc, said post-pandemic there had been a “huge shift” among university leaders and much more recognition that the next stage of a university’s development is going to require “robust infrastructure and staff who are digitally competent”.

“Most universities are very aware they need to get this right. Investment needs to continue in relation to building those systems and improving those platforms,” she said.

Dr White said while many universities have decided the investment is needed, uncertainties over future income are weighing heavily, forcing institutions to make difficult decisions over where to allocate scarce resources.

tom.williams@timeshighereducation.com