On the digital journey: It never stops. It has many chapters, and many starts, stops, and restarts. But what I’m proud of over the years is there’s a few key initiatives that come to mind on cloud adoption and being a cloud-first capability. One of the proudest moments, now that we have it up and running, is RACE Hub, which is our supercomputing facility based on cloud services. We provide supercomputing power to our research community, on demand anywhere at any time. Along with that, we’ve significantly improved our operational efficiencies, and we’ve been focusing on student satisfaction and improving their experience with student systems, digitizing their college experience. I’d also flip it to the academic side and our professional teams as well. So digital literacy is as important to us as it is for everybody. There’s been a lot of leaning into that digital literacy in the programs we’ve been running across the university.
On aligning with the mission: Technology underpins and enables the university strategy, based on knowledge with action. What’s really important is the tech strategy has to be built with agility. It’s important to continue to walk together with stakeholders, understanding the true impact that the strategy will have on them and their experiences. So it’s forever evolving. There are regular reviews to understand the various needs of our student, research, and academic communities. And we also supply industry. So it’s also having industry embedded in what we’re doing as well. We’re in our first phase of a nine year strategy and there are a few things there we’ll continue to progress to the second stage. But ultimately, it comes down to getting the basics right. If you can do that and build trust with your communities, then you get to enjoy that conversation of creating and innovating together.
On cutting-edge innovation: We’ve been focusing on AI and have implemented a number of different capabilities. One is in your typical smart campus or we describe it as the Living Lab. There’s so much opportunity about automation, AI, and IoT that we’re looking at, but also on pedagogy and students — how do we assist our students in their learning experiences, complemented with AI capabilities as well. Then we look at the other side where we’ve got our research communities, and they’re doing a far better job at research and innovation. We work closely with them to see how we can accelerate some of their research, take out some of the administrative burden, and automate remedial tasks. So we’ve got AI intrinsically built within capabilities that we’re already leveraging, and good investment in our machine learning and analytics platforms that I’ve worked closely on with my peers. We then have automation to look at how we operate. Think of a university and a university’s size, especially RMIT. It’s a significant footprint and scale. So to be able to automate and find efficiencies in those buildings, there’s quite a bit of automation that needs to be applied. Another big part of that also plays in our own technology and how we accelerate development and delivery, and take ideas from pilots, to proofs of concept, all the way into production so end users can benefit from capabilities that have been designed.