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6. Collaborate – find the best ways to connect and co-create
Digital transformation should act as a “river” that allows different parts of the university to converge to support a connected future. To extend and strengthen horizontal connections across traditional faculty or departmental siloes, our recommendations include that leaders:
- Make cross-campus connections. Develop a centralized way to oversee all the experiments and transformations that are underway and make sure learnings are shared across groups. This may mean permanently adapting organizational structures to formalize these new connections or creating cross-departmental working groups on specific projects.
- Keep connections going after launch. Help people keep the transformation front of mind by maintaining the cross-departmental connection points that signal a new way of being and working at the university.
- Identify and harness the power of influencers. Identify invisible informal influencers via organizational network analysis. These important communicators can then be mobilized to support the transformation.
For the HE sector to achieve better outcomes from digital transformation efforts, investing in people is key — even more so than investing in the right technology. The crucial tasks for leadership are to obtain buy-in from faculty and professional staff, to nurture collaboration across the institution, to drive rapid and widescale adoption, to provide emotional support, to build digital skills and mindsets, and to regularly bring the university together to celebrate wins, share learnings and re-energize everyone to keep the momentum going.