With a focus on digital development.

Increasing the digital pressure

How should the University of Gothenburg organize, prioritize and finance increased digitalization? There are some important future challenges for management. The Vice-Chancellor has now appointed a working group to deal with digitalization. – Anyone who believes that all the problems associated with digitalization will soon be solved risks being disappointed. But we promise to increase the pressure when it comes to matter of digitalization, says Jonas Landgren, Senior Lecturer in Informatics, who is leading the working group.

THE ONGOING PANDEMIC and the email crash last autumn are some examples of how important it is to have well-functioning digital solutions, in terms of both education, research and administration, Jonas Landgren points out. – It is fantastic how the University of Gothenburg’s employees quickly adapted and managed the transition to online activities at the beginning of the pandemic. We could have closed down and furloughed staff, but instead we found different ways to handle the situation. Later, when the email stopped working, we got through that too and quickly switched to Teams. This shows that the University of Gothenburg is a resilient organization, even though of course all the changes have involved a lot of work.

Digitalization affects all activities: lecturing can be done in new ways, research is organized differently, certain tasks cease and others are added. – Digitalization means change but also friction; we must manage and streamline what we already do, while also testing and exploring new opportunities.

However, the working group’s mandate is not about starting new digitalization projects, Jonas Landgren emphasizes. – Such projects can be found all around the university. And of course we will work together with the expertise we already have, for example at the IT unit, which offers plenty of know-how, and at PIL, which has tremendously good ideas about how education can be enhanced.

Photo: JOHAN WINGBORG

Jonas Landgren is responsible for the new working group that will accelerate the digitalization at GU.

ONE REASON WHY management decided to review digitalization was an investigation by Johan Magnusson and Tomas Lindroth earlier this year. It showed shortcomings both in terms of the digitalization strategy and the financing model. Many people also lack central support for their digitalization requirements, which has led to so-called shadow IT, i.e. the purchase, development and use of IT that is not centrally sanctioned. – Shadow IT is a phenomenon that we probably cannot avoid, but we must ask ourselves why it occurs, Jonas Landgren points out. Is the support insufficient or too slow? Can decisions be made further down in the organization? Should we introduce new tools in other ways? It may also be that we are not good at explaining why some changes need to take time.

This shows that the University of Gothenburg is a resilient organization, even though of course all the changes have involved a lot of work.

JONAS LANDGREN

Do other universities face the same digitalization challenges as the University of Gothenburg?

– Yes, we encounter similar issues everywhere; maybe we can collaborate on certain solutions. But the reason why the University of Gothenburg is so good at dealing with change is partly due to the fact that we are decentralized. The past two years have entailed a lot of change, and it is impressive how well the university’s employees have carried out that work.

Eva Lundgren

FACTS

On September 1, the Vice-Chancellor decided on a project organization for digitalization. The work of developing proposals on level of ambition, strategies, forms of governance and priorities within digitalization will be led by a steering committee. The operational work will be led by a working group with the task of producing a project plan for identification and prioritization of the various areas of digitalization. The working group is led by Jonas Landgren, Senior Lecturer in Informatics. The initiative is one among many consequence of the investigation, Portföljstyrning som magiskt tänkande (Portfolio Management as Magical Thinking) by Johan Magnusson and Tomas Lindroth.