Higher Education is navigating a period in which digital capability is becoming inseparable from institutional capability.

Financial constraint, artificial intelligence, ageing technology, cybersecurity, changing student expectations and the need to improve organisational productivity are converging at precisely the point when universities have less capacity for expensive or poorly targeted investment.

This is reflected in recent sector developments. In May 2026, Jisc launched a digital maturity assessment for UK Higher Education in response to challenges including the rapid emergence of AI, entrenched technical legacy, evolving approaches to teaching and learning and changing student requirements. Significantly, the assessment is designed to support executive decision-making and encourage institutions to take an organisation-wide approach to digital transformation.

Against this backdrop, the roles of the Chief Information Officer, Chief Technology Officer and Chief Data Officer are becoming increasingly important to the strategic leadership of universities.

The titles and responsibilities will vary between institutions. In some universities these responsibilities will sit within a single Chief Digital and Information Officer portfolio; elsewhere they may be distributed between different leaders. The underlying strategic challenge, however, is increasingly consistent.

The question is no longer simply how universities manage technology. It is how technology, information and data enable universities to transform.

From technology strategy to university strategy

Traditionally, technology leadership could be viewed primarily through the lens of infrastructure, systems and services: keeping networks available, maintaining applications, delivering technology projects and providing reliable support.

Those responsibilities remain essential. But they are no longer sufficient.

Digital capability now touches almost every aspect of university strategy: recruitment and admissions, teaching and assessment, research, student experience, professional services, estates, partnerships and institutional decision-making.

Jisc’s digital maturity work illustrates this breadth, encompassing leadership and organisational culture, digital and AI capability, infrastructure and technical legacy, data and knowledge management, education and research, partnerships, sustainability and inclusion.

Digital transformation cannot simply be delegated to an IT function because it increasingly involves transforming the university itself.

The challenge of doing more with less

This transformation is taking place within an extraordinarily difficult financial environment.

Universities need to modernise ageing infrastructure, address cyber risk, improve student-facing services, invest in AI and data capability and deliver greater operational efficiency, while simultaneously demonstrating much stronger returns from institutional investment.

This creates an important challenge for CIOs and CTOs. The task is not simply to identify the next technology investment. It is to help develop a coherent institutional architecture that reduces unnecessary complexity, enables future change and prevents universities from continually adding new systems to an already fragmented technology environment.

Digital Universities UK 2026 captured this changing emphasis in its focus on moving from simply adopting technology towards designing with purpose, including the use of shared resources and greater cross-institutional collaboration.

Technology leaders therefore need to help their institutions ask:

• Which technologies genuinely differentiate our university and which could be standardised or shared?
• Where are legacy systems constraining institutional change?
• Are we automating poor processes rather than redesigning them?
• Can our technology architecture support our future operating model?
• Are transformation investments delivering measurable benefits?
• Where should we stop investing as well as start investing?

These are institutional strategic choices, not simply technical decisions.

AI changes the conversation

Artificial intelligence makes this leadership agenda even more urgent.

AI has the potential to influence teaching, assessment, research, administration, student services, operational productivity and institutional decision-making. Current approaches to assessing university AI and digital maturity increasingly consider technology alongside strategy, people, capability and institutional utilisation.

But enthusiasm for AI also creates complexity.

Universities face questions around information security, intellectual property, academic integrity, data quality, ethics, governance and skills. They must distinguish between experimentation that builds institutional knowledge and the uncontrolled proliferation of technologies that increase cost and complexity without creating demonstrable value.

CIOs and CTOs need to provide both ambition and challenge: helping their institutions understand what emerging technologies make possible while being equally clear about what needs to be true for them to be implemented responsibly and successfully.

Data as institutional infrastructure

The Chief Data Officer brings another increasingly important dimension.

Universities hold extraordinary volumes of information about students, research, finances, workforce, estates and organisational performance. Yet having large quantities of data is not the same as being a data-informed institution.

Fragmented systems, inconsistent definitions, unclear ownership and variable data quality can make it difficult for leaders to establish a genuinely shared understanding of institutional performance.

That challenge becomes more important with AI because the effectiveness of many AI-enabled applications ultimately depends upon the quality, accessibility and governance of the information on which they rely.

Recognising this, Jisc’s 2026 digital maturity work explicitly includes data and knowledge management alongside digital leadership, AI capability and technical infrastructure.

The CDO therefore has an opportunity to shift the conversation from data as something the university collects to data as a strategic institutional asset. That means asking:

• Do leaders have the information they need to make timely decisions?
• Do different parts of the university share an understanding of what the data actually means?
• Who owns responsibility for data quality?
• Are we collecting information because it creates value, or simply because we always have?
• Can our data support effective AI and automation?
• How do we create greater confidence and trust in institutional information?

The ambition should not simply be better dashboards. It should be better decisions.

Cybersecurity as institutional resilience

There is another area where the strategic importance of technology leadership has become particularly apparent: cybersecurity.

Modern universities are highly connected organisations, combining complex digital estates with extensive external partnerships and large communities of staff and students. Digital infrastructure increasingly underpins the institution’s ability to teach, conduct research and operate.

Cybersecurity therefore cannot be viewed solely as a technical problem managed by IT. It is fundamentally an issue of institutional risk, governance and resilience.

This wider understanding is reflected in current sector discussion, with Digital Universities UK 2026 explicitly positioning cybersecurity governance alongside privacy and ethical governance as part of enabling innovation, rather than simply restricting it.

CIOs and CTOs consequently need strong relationships with University Secretaries and Registrars, risk leaders, governing bodies and executive colleagues so that digital resilience becomes part of institutional governance, business continuity and strategic risk.

The challenge is to ensure that the institution understands its exposure, makes conscious choices about risk and has sufficient organisational capability to respond when disruption occurs.

The CIO, CTO and CDO as strategic partners

All of this points towards a wider evolution of these roles. Technology and data leaders need to be involved early in institutional strategy, rather than being asked at the end of the process to provide the technology or information required to implement decisions already made.

A strategically positioned CIO, CTO or CDO can encourage executive teams and governing bodies to ask:

• Does our digital capability support the university we are trying to become?
• Can our existing technology estate deliver the transformation we are planning?
• What technical debt are we carrying and what strategic choices is it preventing us from making?
• Is our data mature enough to support the decisions we are asking leaders to make?
• Where could AI and automation genuinely improve the experience of students and staff?
• Do we have the digital skills and leadership capability needed to realise the value of our investments?
• Are cybersecurity and resilience considered at the beginning of transformation rather than added at the end?
• How will we demonstrate that digital investment has created institutional value?

That last question is particularly important. The successful CIO, CTO or CDO cannot simply demonstrate that a technology implementation has been delivered on time and within budget.

Increasingly, they need to demonstrate that it has changed something that matters.

Technology transformation is people transformation

This creates an important connection with the Chief People Officer.

Technology rarely generates transformation by itself. New technology layered over old processes can simply digitise existing inefficiency. The real benefits emerge when technology investment is accompanied by process redesign, new skills, different behaviours and, potentially, changes to organisational structures.

Jisc’s approach to digital maturity explicitly incorporates leadership, organisational culture and digital and AI capability alongside technical infrastructure and data, reinforcing the idea that successful digital transformation is an institution-wide endeavour.

For this reason, some of the most important relationships for future digital leaders may be those they build with the Chief People Officer, University Secretary and Registrar, Chief Financial Officer and academic leadership. Each brings a different perspective to transformation: people and capability, governance and risk, financial sustainability, technology and data, and the university’s academic mission.

Bringing those perspectives together is far more powerful than pursuing separate functional transformation programmes.

From technology leaders to transformation leaders

The CIO, CTO and CDO therefore occupy pivotal positions within the future university.

Their task is simultaneously to maintain reliable services today, address the technical debt inherited from yesterday and create the digital and data capabilities the institution will require tomorrow.

Those objectives will sometimes compete. Innovation must be balanced with resilience. Standardisation with differentiation. Investment with affordability. Accessibility with security. Experimentation with governance. Speed with sustainability.

The strongest technology and data leaders will be those capable of navigating these tensions while translating between technical complexity and institutional strategy.

In a transforming Higher Education landscape, the CIO, CTO and CDO should increasingly be understood not simply as leaders of technology, information or data, but as architects of institutional capability and transformation.

Digital transformation is not ultimately about creating a more technologically sophisticated university.

It is about creating a more connected, resilient, productive and adaptable university, capable of using technology, information and data to deliver its academic mission differently and better.

And, consistent with the evolving role of the University Secretary and Registrar and the Chief People Officer, this represents another important transition:

from supporting institutional strategy to becoming transformation leaders who actively help shape the university capable of delivering it.

Sources

• Jisc, Launching our digital maturity assessment to support transformation across UK higher education, 6 May 2026.
• Jisc, Building a shared baseline for digital maturity across higher education, 2026.
• Times Higher Education, Digital Universities UK 2026.
• Times Higher Education, AI & Digital Maturity Index 2026.