by SEAN BRAWLEY and RICHARD COOK

Last week, at the Universities Australia Conference, Professor Mary O’Kane launched the Australian Universities Accord Discussion Paper, posing 49 questions to the community along with an encouragement to think outside the box for the long term future of higher education in Australia.

In her request for submissions she asked “tell us how to enable the system to do this and to do it quickly. Be bold and lateral in your suggestions. Draw on international evidence and individual experiences.”

At the University of Wollongong we have been considering these questions for some time in the wake of challenges and opportunities brought on by the pandemic and ongoing political, economic and social disruption.

As environmental, technological and societal trends accelerate and disruption events become more and more common, the shelf-life of university visions and strategies is becoming shorter and shorter.

In the past year Uni Wollongong has decided to embrace this accelerated rate of change, with the adoption of a three horizons strategy comprising a 10-year vision, five-year strategic plan and two-year roadmap. The latter focuses on enabling the institution to become more agile and proactive in leveraging strategic opportunities and mitigating emerging risks.

This work drew on international trends in higher education as well as best practice approaches from the not for profit and corporate sectors. However, it was not enough to simply follow the pack – we wanted an approach to enable the university to leap ahead and create a model for how universities may adapt to an environment of continual change.

During this process we reconceived how we thought about university portfolios by making a distinction between mission portfolios focused on our core strategies of education, research and engagement, enabling portfolios focused on supporting our operations, strategy and assurance processes, and delivery portfolios, which comprise our faculties and global campuses.

One of the first actions in our roadmap was creating a flat executive structure and aligning university functions to these reconceived portfolios, to reinforce responsibilities and accountabilities.

This led to the creation of a new portfolio focused on strategy and assurance that brings together new and existing divisions for strategy, data and analytics, governance and policy, risk and assurance, integrity, legal services, and academic quality and standards.

We aim to share our journey with CMM readers as we pursue our new model for enabling a more agile and resilient university.

 

Sean Brawley is DVC, Strategy and Assurance at the University of Wollongong. Richard Cook is UoW’s Chief Strategy Officer