Beyond Technology: The CIO, CTO and CDO as Transformation Leaders
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: 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: 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: That