Areas of the Digital Technology Implementation Strategy

1. Introduction

The integration of digital technologies into higher education has the potential to improve the quality of the education process, administrative efficiency, and research work [2]. The areas of the digital technology application strategy represent the categories of business processes within a higher education institution. Since the goal is to achieve maximum efficiency and effectiveness of business processes—which can be achieved by introducing digital technologies through strategic planning and implementation—these categories of business processes have become the core areas within the strategy. It is therefore possible to strategically plan the digital transformation of just one area, several areas, or all of them. In other words, the areas of the digital technology application strategy are categories of business processes that have an initial level of maturity and that we aim to improve through the implementation of a strategic plan.

Researchers have analysed and defined categories of higher education business processes differently in their models [4][5]. In this learning material, we will focus on seven strategic areas and explain how they are represented in selected digital maturity models.

The learning outcomes of this material are:

• i. explain the main idea of relevant frameworks for assessing the digital maturity of educational institutions (2/understanding);
• ii. categorize the business processes of a higher education institution into the corresponding areas of the digital technology implementation strategy (4/analysis);
• iii. describe current development trends of higher education institutions in different areas of the digital technology implementation strategy (2/understanding);
• iv. evaluate the digital maturity of a higher education institution (6/evaluation).