Collaboration: the key to developing digital strategy

Introduction

“Taking the temperature” is a familiar phrase for reassessing our understanding of customer needs or how they approach specific tasks. In that spirit, we recently held a short series of focus groups with digital leaders. We wanted to better understand how they approach developing their organisation’s digital strategy. The challenges they face in articulating these strategies, and which Jisc resources they use. We also wanted to explore whether their needs are changing and if so, how we can improve our support to meet those needs.

Approach to Developing Digital Strategy

It became apparent that digital strategy development is increasingly a collaborative process. Stakeholders from diverse teams such as curriculum leaders, IT infrastructure managers, technicians, and learning support staff are contributing to development of the digital strategy. This inclusive approach helps remove barriers that can delay defining a strategic digital direction and, in some cases, hinder efforts to promote digital practice. This stands in stark contrast to our previous experience, where organisations often assigned the task of writing the digital strategy to just one or two individuals. Unsurprisingly, those individuals frequently felt isolated and frustrated when trying to engage stakeholders.

Digital leaders are taking an active role in shaping digital strategies that do more than adopt technology. They ensure digital initiatives reflect the institution’s mission and values. By fostering collaboration across teams, they create a shared sense of purpose. This makes strategy development a collective effort rather than a top-down directive. This resonates with the approach we use in our Vision for change workshop where we bring stakeholders and encourage them to express how they see the digital future in their organisation.

Improving, but challenges remain

This is encouraging, but challenges remain. Resistance to digital change persists, especially when teams struggle to agree on the best way forward. Bridging the gap between strategic vision and operational reality can also be difficult.

While digital ambitions are well-articulated, turning them into practical, achievable actions is not always straightforward. This is an opportunity to do more together, by bringing people into planning and preparing for change discussions. This collaboration ensures that resource allocation and digital capability gaps can be addressed rather than holding us back.

What More Can We Do?

Digital leaders value our role as trusted critical friends, particularly for impartial advice and guidance. They also appreciate occasions to learn from peers and want more opportunities to share ideas with others working on digital strategies. Our Digital leadership and culture forum is already working towards this. In the New Year, will be exploring how we can increase opportunities to learn from each other.

Conclusion

Reflecting on these insights, it’s clear that digital strategy development is evolving. It’s moving from being driven by a few digital enthusiasts to a more collaborative process that reflects wider organisational and stakeholder needs, though digital enthusiasts remain vital. Our next step will be to reflect on how we can continue supporting the progress digital leaders have made in collaborating with their stakeholders and engaging them with transitioning organisational digital strategy into action.