Building a More Connected Digital University
*Updated 27 March 2025*
UK universities do not have a shortage of technology.
Student information systems, virtual learning environments, CRM platforms, Microsoft Teams, contact centres, AI tools, communications platforms and digital services are already embedded across most institutions.
The challenge is increasingly how well those technologies work together.
Financial pressure makes that question more important. The Office for Students reported on 14 May 2026 that 35.8% of higher education institutions in England recorded a deficit in 2024 to 2025, with 42.7% forecast to do so in 2025 to 2026.
Universities are therefore being asked to improve student experience, introduce AI, modernise ageing technology and increase operational efficiency while demonstrating greater value from investment.
Digital transformation cannot simply mean buying more technology.
The next stage is building a connected digital university, where communications, applications, data, AI and workflows work together around the needs of students and staff.
What Does Digital Transformation Mean For Universities?
Digital transformation in higher education is the use of technology, data and process redesign to improve the way universities teach, communicate, operate and support students.
It can affect the entire student lifecycle, including:
- Recruitment and admissions
- Clearing
- Enrolment
- Teaching and learning
- Student support
- Welfare services
- International student engagement
- Communications
- Professional services
- Graduation and alumni engagement
The important shift is from treating each of these areas as a separate digital project to considering how they connect.
Jisc reinforced this direction when it launched its Digital Maturity Assessment in May 2026. The assessment was developed to help higher education providers respond to challenges including AI, ageing technical infrastructure, changing student requirements and the need to prioritise investment more effectively.
The Priorities For A Connected Digital University
| Priority | What Universities Should Focus On |
| Student experience |
|
| System integration | Connect student systems, CRM, communications and operational platforms |
| AI & automation | Reduce repetitive administration and apply AI to clearly defined processes |
| Staff experience |
|
| Accessibility |
|
| Security & resilience | Protect systems, communications and data while maintaining service continuity |
| Measurement | Track student outcomes, productivity, service performance and value from investment |
These priorities are closely connected. Improving one area while ignoring the others can simply move friction somewhere else.
Why Should Universities Focus On The Whole Student Journey?
Students do not experience a university according to its departmental structure.
A prospective student might research a course online, contact admissions, receive emails and messages, call during Clearing, complete enrolment digitally and later contact student services.
From the student's perspective, this is one relationship.
If the technology behind those interactions is disconnected, the experience can become fragmented.
Students may have to:
- Repeat information
- Contact several departments
- Change communication channels
- Wait while information is transferred manually
- Provide details the university already holds
- Navigate different portals and systems
Employees face similar problems when relevant information sits across separate applications.
A connected university should allow appropriate context to move with the student rather than expecting the student to bridge the gaps between departments.
Britannic's Customer Experience and Engagement approach can bring together contact centre technology, communications, digital channels, CRM integration, automation and AI around these wider journeys.
What Do Students Expect From Digital University Services?
Students generally value their university's digital environment, but significant barriers remain.
Jisc's 2024 to 2025 Digital Experience Insights survey, published in September 2025 and based on more than 15,000 higher education students, found that 86% rated their digital learning environment above average.
However:
- 60% experienced Wi-Fi connectivity problems
- 37% lacked access to a suitable device at some point
- 48% preferred blended or online learning
- 46% preferred studying mainly online when they were not in class
The lesson is that digital experience is not defined by a single platform.
Students need reliable access to learning, communications and support across campus, home and mobile environments.
That makes connectivity, collaboration, communications and resilience part of the student experience rather than simply IT infrastructure.
Why Does Accessibility Need To Be Designed Into Digital Transformation?
A connected university also needs to work for different student requirements.
The 2026 National Student Survey, published by the Office for Students on 8 July 2026, received responses from more than 360,000 final-year students.
Overall results improved, but disabled students remained less positive across every survey theme than students who did not report a disability. The largest differences were found in areas including organisation and management and student voice.
Universities should therefore consider accessibility across:
- Websites and portals
- Digital communications
- Voice
- Video
- Captions
- Transcription
- Messaging
- Learning resources
- Device access
- Student support
- Language accessibility
Accessibility should be part of technology selection and service design from the beginning, rather than an adjustment added once a platform has already been implemented.
How Can Universities Connect Disparate Systems?
Technical legacy remains one of the biggest barriers to digital transformation in higher education.
Jisc warned in March 2026 that outdated, heavily customised and poorly integrated systems were limiting university resilience, increasing costs and making emerging technologies such as AI more difficult to adopt.
Replacing every legacy platform is rarely realistic.
Nor is it always necessary.
Universities can first identify where existing systems could be:
- Integrated
- Simplified
- Automated
- Extended
- Better connected with communications
- Gradually modernised
An existing student system may continue performing its core function effectively while APIs and integration remove manual work around it.
A CRM might be connected to the contact centre so staff can access relevant student context during an interaction.
Microsoft Teams could be integrated with enterprise voice rather than requiring an immediate replacement of the whole communications estate.
Britannic's approach to Digital Transformation starts by examining existing technology, processes and operational friction before determining what should be retained, connected or replaced.
How Can Universities Reduce Administrative Work?
One of the clearest opportunities for transformation sits within professional services.
Universities process large volumes of:
- Student emails
- Applications
- Documentation
- Support requests
- Approvals
- Course enquiries
- Finance queries
- Accommodation requests
- Service updates
Where these interactions depend heavily on shared inboxes and manual triage, employees can spend significant amounts of time reading, categorising, forwarding and re-entering information.
Britannic's INBOX Enterprise can bring communications including email and digital interactions into managed workflows rather than leaving them inside disconnected inboxes.
A student enquiry could move through a process such as:
Received → Understood → Prioritised → Routed → Actioned → Measured
The aim is not simply to answer email more quickly.
It is to remove unnecessary administration from the process around it.
How Is AI Changing Higher Education?
AI is already part of university life for students and staff.
Jisc's 2024 to 2025 student research found that 34% of surveyed higher education students used AI tools as part of their learning, while 23% had access to AI platforms provided by their institution.
Among higher education professional services employees, adoption was even higher. Jisc found 39% were using AI in their roles, up from 25% the previous year, while 30% had been provided with AI systems by their organisation.
The Office for Students and Advance HE also launched dedicated research in May 2026 into how universities and colleges are responding to the opportunities and risks associated with AI. Areas under investigation include teaching, assessment, AI skills, access, operational efficiency and institutional policy.
Universities therefore need to move beyond experimenting with standalone AI tools.
Potential operational use cases include:
- Understanding student enquiries
- Categorising and routing requests
- Summarising interactions
- Identifying common service issues
- Supporting employees with information
- Automating routine administration
- Analysing feedback
- Identifying trends
- Supporting planning and resource allocation
Britannic's AI Engine can analyse large volumes of unstructured information and convert interaction data into actionable insight that can feed CRM systems and workflows.
The most useful question is not "Where can AI be added?"
It is "Which university process would materially improve if AI were integrated into it?"
Why Does Staff Digital Experience Matter?
Student experience and employee experience are closely connected.
If staff struggle to access systems, repeatedly enter the same information or manually bridge gaps between applications, that friction eventually reaches the student.
Jisc's 2024 to 2025 research into higher education professional services employees found that:
- 60% worked across hybrid environments
- 48% experienced Wi-Fi difficulties
- 35% experienced problems accessing systems required for their jobs
- 79% said technology improved their experience at work
Respondents specifically identified better system interoperability, improved infrastructure, training and clearer guidance around AI and automation as priorities.
These problems provide valuable clues for transformation.
Spreadsheets, duplicate data entry, manual copying and persistent application switching often show where systems or workflows need to be connected.
How Can Universities Better Support International Students?
International student communication introduces another layer of complexity.
Students may be in different countries, use different channels or be more comfortable communicating in another language.
Britannic's NetTranslate can provide real-time translation across telephone calls, Microsoft Teams and chat in more than 100 languages.
Potential higher education applications include:
- International recruitment
- Admissions
- Clearing
- Accommodation
- Student support
- Welfare
- Course enquiries
- General administration
The technology can provide another route for communication where language might otherwise create a barrier.
Human interpretation will remain appropriate for some sensitive, specialist or high-risk conversations.
The objective is to provide more accessible communication rather than requiring every student to interact in exactly the same way.
How Can Universities Build More Resilient Digital Services?
The more services become digital, the greater the impact when the underlying infrastructure fails.
Universities increasingly depend on digital systems for:
- Communications
- Teaching
- Enrolment
- Admissions
- Research
- Student support
- Collaboration
- Administration
- Campus operations
Cyber security is also becoming increasingly important.
Jisc reported on 26 February 2026 that recorded cyber incidents across UK higher education, further education and research increased from more than 11,000 in 2024 to more than 16,000 in 2025. Although major incidents fell from 17 to seven, Jisc warned that attacks were becoming more sophisticated.
Digital transformation therefore needs to incorporate:
- Cyber security
- Network resilience
- Communications resilience
- Identity and access
- Backup and recovery
- Business continuity
- Alternative connectivity
- Supplier dependencies
- Incident management
Britannic's NetX platform can provide resilient voice routing, control and failover across communications environments, while Britannic's wider networking, security and managed-services capabilities can support the infrastructure around critical university services.
The objective should not simply be a more digital university.
It should be a more resilient digital university.
What About Clearing?
Clearing remains one of the clearest examples of why university technology needs to scale around periods of extreme demand.
However, it should not dominate the wider digital transformation strategy.
Clearing combines several of the challenges discussed in this article:
- High interaction volumes
- Rapid scaling
- Voice and digital channels
- Student data
- Remote employees
- Contact centre capacity
- Resilience
- Reporting
- Automation
Britannic now covers this subject in greater depth within its dedicated Student Clearing Communications guide.
Universities reviewing Clearing should therefore treat it as one high-demand use case within the wider connected university rather than the definition of digital transformation itself.
The Britannic Connected University Framework
Britannic recommends considering university transformation through five priorities.
Experience
Start with the student or staff journey that needs to improve.
Understand where people experience delays, duplicated effort, communication barriers or unnecessary complexity.
Connect
Bring together the systems, communications and data required to support that journey.
The goal is to remove gaps that students and staff currently have to bridge themselves.
Automate
Identify repetitive activities that can be simplified or automated.
AI should be applied where it improves a clearly defined process rather than introduced simply because the technology is available.
Protect
Build security, resilience, accessibility and governance into the environment.
Transformation should not make critical university services more vulnerable or difficult to access.
Improve
Measure whether the change achieved its intended outcome.
Use student feedback, employee insight and operational data to identify the next opportunity.
Experience → Connect → Automate → Protect → Improve
This shifts digital transformation away from isolated technology projects and towards continuous institutional improvement.
How Can Universities Measure Digital Transformation?
Technology implementation should not be the final measure of success.
Depending on the project, universities could track:
- Student response times
- Administrative effort
- Number of manual process steps
- Student satisfaction
- Employee productivity
- Repeat enquiries
- System availability
- First-contact resolution
- Application switching
- AI adoption
- Accessibility
- Digital service usage
- Security incidents
- Cost to serve
- Value achieved from existing systems
Measures should be linked to the original objective.
If the goal was to improve admissions, for example, success should not simply be measured by whether a new contact centre went live.
The university should understand whether applicants received faster answers, staff handled demand more effectively and fewer interactions were required to reach an outcome.
University Digital Transformation Checklist
Before making the next digital investment, universities should ask:
- What student or staff problem needs to improve?
- What does the current journey actually look like?
- Which departments are involved?
- Which systems contain relevant information?
- Where is information being entered more than once?
- Where are employees using spreadsheets or manual workarounds?
- Can existing technology be integrated before it is replaced?
- Which processes could benefit from automation?
- Where could AI deliver a measurable improvement?
- How will AI use be governed?
- Have accessibility requirements been considered?
- Can students communicate through suitable channels?
- Are language barriers being addressed?
- Is connectivity reliable enough to support the service?
- What happens if a critical system becomes unavailable?
- Are cyber security and resilience built into the design?
- How will students and employees provide feedback?
- Who owns continuous improvement after implementation?
- What outcome will demonstrate that the investment delivered value?
If the intended outcome cannot be defined clearly, technology selection is probably happening too early.
Digital Transformation Should Connect The University
Universities have already digitised significant parts of teaching, administration and student services.
The next opportunity is making those investments work together.
Student services should connect with communications. AI should connect with workflows. Employees should not have to manually bridge gaps between applications. Relevant context should follow students across their journey. Security and resilience should protect the infrastructure underneath everything.
The strongest digital transformation strategy therefore does not begin by asking which platform the university should buy next.
It asks where students and employees experience friction, what outcome needs to improve and how existing and new technology can work together to achieve it.
Britannic works with education providers across digital transformation, unified communications, customer experience, AI, automation, connectivity, security and managed services, helping institutions integrate technology around measurable student and operational outcomes.
Universities reviewing their digital strategy can book a complimentary meeting with Britannic to identify where disconnected systems, communications or processes are limiting student experience, staff productivity and operational efficiency.
