 Rhaen, weithio. Rhaen, wrth gwrs, wrth gwrs, i'w rhai'r seisio ar y ddweud y digital. Mae'r ddweud yw'r cyffredin, mae'n gweithio'r ddweud yng Nghymru Covid-19, y pandemig. Mae'r unig, yw'r hollu, yw'r hollu, a'r hollu'r hollu a'r hollu'r hollu a'r hollu a'r hollu'r hollu i'w ddweud yng Nghymru. It was needed to do it at pace and at scale. It also had to do it with everyone in lockdown. Students were not isolated themselves. They were with families, they were with colleagues, friends and so on. One of the things that did come out of the pandemic was the prominence of digital and on line. I think we are probably more aware of that. And of course, that has now had an impact of universities when they started to think strategic thinking and one of the questions that the universities are probably asking themselves and some are asking themselves is do our strategies or does our strategy still meet the needs of the university in what is now still a new change in an uncertain landscape and what is now is the role of digital in helping us as a university to achieve those strategic aspirations. One of the things I want to do in this session is reflect on that, but the way I'm going to reflect on it is almost providing a personal retrospective going back in time about where this concept of the digital lens came about, that I've been talking about over the last few years, but also it should give you an insight into some of my understanding and thinking about strategy and strategic capitalisation and strategic operationalisation. So, I think when we're talking about strategy is defining strategy. So, like most things, I'll just go to something called, you may have heard of it, it's called a dictionary, physical dictionary. I went to this one and looked at the, what is the definition? And it was very succinct and clear that it was an overall plan. And it's like, okay, that's about really helpful. And then I kind of read a bit further, and it said, the art of planning in war, I was thinking, ah, conflict, that reminds me much more about what's happening in universities these days. And one of the things is when we start thinking about universities who are developing strategies, and it's interesting how they're a developing strategies, not a strategy, not a single plan, not a single strategy, there are strategies. If you think about your, does your university have a single strategy or does it have an IT strategy, a digital learning strategy, a teaching and learning strategy, a library strategy, a catering strategy, an estate strategy. And that's something just to think about as we kind of go through this. But Denise did ask me who I was. You should all be able to recognise me from my profile pic that I've been using now for nearly 25 years within that one. It's a meerkat. And I was using meerkats before to compare the meerkat.com, you know, so everything, ah, you must be that, no, those things. But I want to kind of go back in time and to kind of my background. And, you know, I went to this place called the University of York and I studied economics. Many peers of my age who were at this conference, I was talking to Peter Kilcoin, for example, who worked at Worcester College of Technology, and other people often talked about, oh, when I was in the 80s looking at technology, we had a ZX Spectrum or a BBCB and all these kind of things. And I was thinking, I think we had a Commodore Vic 20, which I thought was a complete waste of time and kind of left it and went and did other things. For me, technology wasn't exciting. For me, technology wasn't something that interested me. The thing that probably turned me on to technology more than anything else when I was planning to be a restaurateur and I discovered spreadsheets could do cash flow forecasts. Result. For me, that was one of the most illuminating aspects of technology. What do you mean? I don't have to use pencils and rubbers anymore. I can just change the forecast and suddenly it does all the calculations for me. Thank you Lotus 1, 2, 3. I really love that. And that sort of aspect of using technology became basically my kind of aspect of what technology is about. Technology isn't there for the sake of technology. Digital isn't there for digital. Online isn't there for online. It's an enabler. It's an enhancer. It's an improver. Technology enables you to do things. And so having worked in schools and six forms and colleges in the early 1994, so just a year after all was founded, I found myself working as a lecturer in business studies and management at what is now City of Bristol College, but back then was Brunel College. And I was teaching business studies and management. I was teaching strategy. I was teaching or leadership. I was teaching organisation or change. And like most other FE colleges at the time, they had a strategy, which they showcased at a annual development day. Here is our strategy. And like everybody else within my team, we thought, great, parked it, moved it aside because it really wasn't relevant to what I did on a day-to-day basis. As far as I was concerned, the college strategy was something that was announced at the development day and then we kind of ignored within that one. Why? Well, because the sort of things that we did was we chose our own annual objectives. How many people here choose their own annual objectives and their performance? Anyone here choose their own annual? You know, you get agreement and everything. So you're choosing in themselves. That's all we did. So the question was, did my personal objectives help meet my team's objective? Probably because we did try and work together on that one. But did it help the college achieve its strategic objectives? Highly unlikely because everybody in the college was all doing their own objectives. And if it did help out, it certainly wasn't by design. I still find it kind of ironic. At one point, I'm teaching people about strategy. And at the other point, as an employee, I'm ignoring it. And it's kind of where there goes within that one. But that theoretical foundation that I applied in my teaching certainly helped me later on. I think one of the biggest impacts on me was when I moved from education into the museum sector. And those of you who know Bristol at all may recognise the Imaginarium, which is a very posh name for a planetarium. This was one of those many millennium projects that were funded back in the late 1990s. And this was a hands on science centre, an IMAX cinema, a digital zoo and a real zoo. We had real animals and everything else like that. And I went to work there as their ICT education officer, and what my job was there was to help and develop programs that would, using technology, that would then help further the aims of that organisation. But it was interesting working in a completely different capacity and a completely different organisation. They had strategy. They knew how to implement it. I had to then make sure that what I was doing was helping to deliver on that strategy. It also helped me deliver with things like project planning. So having to write project plans, business plans and all those kinds of things, really clear. I mean, one of the most interesting projects I ever worked on was working with a company called, you may have heard of, Hewlett-Packard, a charity called Flora and Fauna International, the Antigone Government. And we were creating a website for children about the Antigone racer snake with them. I never got to go to Antigone, colleague of mine did. Wish I could have got there. But it really kind of changed things around. And then from there, I then went to work for something called the Westin Colleges Consortium. And really, what was this? Well, this was the group that was so difficult to describe sometimes. It's the group of FE colleges in the county that used to be known as Avon. So it was like South Blossoshire, North Somerset, Barfa North East, Somerset and Bristol now. And there was, I was talking about it yesterday when I realised was it seven or eight colleges because they kept merging. That was the part of things. And the challenge that I was given was to get all these colleges to use a shared VLE, a virtual learning environment. And actually, from a strategic perspective, from my kind of teams perspective, very simple strategy, very simple key on a key's and aims. So strategy was less important. But one of the interesting things was how do we get these institutions to embed technology? How do we get them to embed the use of the VLE? And one of the things that came out of working at the WCC was the importance of independence. So the fact that was one of the things that we want to do, for example, was create accounts on the VLE automatically, which means we needed to get data from the student record system, which meant that that data had to be entered into the student record system in a timely manner. And what we found in some colleges was that often students would fill in their application form and the data would eventually make it into the student record system about two months later, which is really awful if you're trying to do a six-week course on the VLE. So that thing, that aspect, so if you decide to do one thing and it has a knock-on effect on a whole range of other things, you want to change one thing, you're going to have to change everything. And that's something again that I learned from that was you just can't go in and say, we're going to do this without thinking about the connections, the interdependencies, what's the impact of this. So it's very easy for someone like me to come up on this stage and talk about you should do block teaching. It's great without thinking about the implications on a state's timetabling, student belonging, student wealth, a whole range of different things, or we need to get students to use this kind of technology or this kind of stuff. There are sometimes knock-on effects. I was just reading on the Twitter, literally, that someone had said, they just heard another student say they arrived at a lecture theatre and everyone else was using laptops and they felt inadequate because they just had pen and paper. That kind of aspect of how are you telling students what their needs are and the requirements are. It was awesome when I started working at the WCC that I started to engage much wider with the sector organisations. I'm looking at Sarah here, Ferll, some people may remember that, Bector, and there was this other organisation which again, I'm not sure many people are aware of, it's called JISC, but also another organisation called ALT. So having done some work with JISC, they said we want to let you to talk at the ALT conference in 2003, which was in Sheffield. Anyone want to go to that one, 2003 Sheffield? I made two mistakes in that one. One, I wore a suit so everyone thought I was a vendor, and the second one was I wore a suit. I know that's the same one, but it was quite important. So I feel quite jeff that me and John are both wearing shorts today. I have to admit, I was so disappointed with that conference. I thought it was awful. So much so that the following year, when it was an Exeter, which is just down the road from me, Western Supermer, it's like I ain't going. It's just what's the point. But having then asked in 2005 to do a presentation, and having met people through various meetings, just programme meetings and so on, which was 2005 in Manchester, complete change. It was just like, yes, this is a great community. This is a great conference. I'm learning a lot. I'm going to stay there. I've literally been nearly every year since then, there's few exceptions within that one. But it's working at the WCC, started also doing things with mobile devices. Anyone here remember the compact iPad? So are you going to put your hand up for everything? I know that within that one. So these were handheld mobile devices. So when Apple launched the iPhone and the iPod Touch in 2007, it was like, yes, there's so much stuff that people like John Kirk and John Traxlow have been doing in the mobile area. It reinforced this aspect of the kind of role of consumer technologies in the way that people in this area sometimes get a bit sidetracked. It's like, here's a question for you. When was the first tablet, tablet computer? What year was the first tablet computer introduced? Sorry? Higher or lower? Well, I might say. Give you a clue, the iPad came out in May 2010. Okay, so is Debra Ryan in 2010? No. The first proper kind of computing tablet was 1973. So it's 50 years old. This new technology is 50 years old. It was called the Dynabook. And actually on it, it had something called eBooks. So you could use this technology to write stuff into eBooks. I think the battery was probably only about 40 minutes, but at least then it were, you know, those sort of things. But it's interesting how one of the things I worked with WWC, we'd done all this work on different kinds of technologies. But actually, sometimes it's a consumer technology that takes precedence. And we still see that today. And even heard of Jack, Jack, Jack, Jack, Jack, Jack, or Jack, GPT. You know, things, that suddenly became big and AI, genitriw of AI became something that's really important. I'm thinking, a ddwy'r comethau fynd ar- andaeth i'r buswch a cyflwynwyr ffoelles. Rydw i'r buswch yn ffotograff ac yn y ddw i'n rhan i gyda peopleau. Felly, y dyma yna'n 90erach wedi'u gwaith o'r OCR. Ffeyddwch, dyfodd, yw'r documenten, a ddweud ar ddweud y treddwyr pan yw chi. Dyma'n ddweud e'r magig! Maen nhw ar- ae, a yna'n arnydd o ddweud y gallwch, o'r cwyrdd hyffodol a'r ffeirydd ac yn ddefnyddio gwahanol, y sector. We sometimes need to worry and think about that and as universities as we start doing our strategy. The thing with the WCC, I think in many ways it was probably a little bit too successful because then everybody wanted their own VLE. We didn't want to share one. We want our own, you know, like that. And there's also something called Moodle became along as well, which I think is probably a better VLE than we had. So I looked around and I've got a job at Gloucestershire College. This was because they have sites and now they have sites in Chattinham Gloucester in the Forest of Dean. And I was employed as their e-learning manager. But they also said, by the way, James, you also in charge of libraries. And I said, you know, I know nothing about libraries. They said, yeah, fine, you'll pick it up. No problem at all. But that was quite interesting to have a kind of different aspect of understanding what it meant to be a library within that one. But one of the things I had to do within this job was create a digital strategy. Always we called it back then an IELT strategy, Information and Learning Technologies within that one. And why did we have to do that? Well, if we did it and sent it to Bector, they would send us loads of cash. And so that's what we did. We wrote a digital strategy, handed it over to Bector, got some money and then, you know, it's like, but no one actually was interested in the digital strategy. You can go around and think, we've got to do all this. It's like, yeah, no, you know, it's like, we've got to do this. Yeah, no, and it was like going around and it's like, why does no one like my digital strategy? And it was like, please, please like my digital strategy. And I was like, no, no, we got because we got all these other strategies we've got to do. We've got a widely participation strategy. We've got to do an inclusion strategy. We've got to do a teaching and learning strategy. The other thing was our digital strategy was distinct from our IT strategy. So our IT team had their own IT strategy. And so whereas my strategy was focused on learning technologies, theirs was focused a lot on business technologies and the connectivity and infrastructure behind it. One of the problems that we then had was we then had competing strategies. So the IT strategy talked about bring your own device, encouraging students to bring their own devices to college to be able to use them to support their learning. And it's like, great, let's make sure that we're looking at how we can create mobile content, for example, mobile thinking about podcasts, MP4 videos that could be played on a range of different mobile devices, things like the PlayStation Portable, the Nintendo DS, as well as the Compact iPad and other kind of PDAs. And then the iPod Touch and the iPod Nano, when it came along. Yeah, it didn't matter how it is that our IT strategy said, we're going to put in a wireless network for staff only. Like, what's that about? Why are we only going to do that? You know, and it's like there was also other aspects was we didn't want students to access college resources through their own devices. And it's like, well, what does that mean? What is this whole thing about BYOD? But it wasn't just the IT strategy, the estate strategy said that every device had to be pat tested. Every device that came on to any electronic device or electrical device that came on to campus had to be pat tested. There was no legal, as you might be aware, there is no legal requirement for pat testing. If there's an organisation, you may have heard of it called the Health and Safety Executive. I actually phoned them and said, do we have to do this? And they said, no, why would you have to do that? Think about the last time, actually, how many people here have been to staining halls and they've got their laptop with them? Was it pat tested? By the University of Warwick? He probably says, I work here, yes, no, within that framework. But actually, there's a whole load of myths and legends that come around when you start talking about things. And part of that is down with policies. People say, well, we can't do that because it's the policy. One of the biggest myths in education is that policies are static things that cannot be changed. If you're not happy about something and you can't get it through because of the policy, get the policy change and that's what we did. And we're working out what those interdependencies were. I mean, I still remember our Estates director when we said we want to plug things in. I mean, you know, technically, that's stealing our electricity and it's like, what? I mean, we go within that one. So one of the other things about community and coming people together was I realised I wasn't alone. Coming to all, going to GIST conferences, going to programme meetings, going to other events within that, realised that I wasn't alone in thinking about strategy and thinking about how do we do this? And working much better with different teams and different colleagues across the colleges. In a later role, I had to write a combined IT libraries and learning technology strategy. We had a consultant who came in and she was absolutely amazing and helped me to rethink what it meant to do strategy. And one of her things that she said was very simply, whatever strategy you write, even if it's probably not a strategy, it has to come from and be derived from the core corporate strategy. So the reason I say this is because we had an issue where we had an IT strategy that said we need to have a strong and robust network, strong, secure, robust network. Why wouldn't you want that? You know, that's probably almost like a given rather than a strategic aspiration, you know? But the idea is that we need to maintain and things. But we also had a teaching and learning strategy that said we need to use technology to be innovative and experiment. And these things were conflicts. You have teachers coming and I want to use a piece of software, I want to use this device. And an IT team saying, no, no, no, no, no. And it's like, well, how can they're conflicting? So what we did was to ensure that we could still have things like a strong, stable and secure network. But we changed the phrasing to match what was in the corporate network. So the corporate network talks about we will be innovative in teaching and learning. And our IT strategy said, we will have a strong, stable and secure network that enables innovation and in the use of technology for teaching and learning. And suddenly my team was working with the academics in order to be together rather than opposing each other. And that made a huge difference in the sense of how we are then operationalised that plan. So one of the key things is linking whatever you're... And you can call it a strategy if you want, but if you've got a library strategy or a learning technology strategy, it should be derived from what the corporate strategy says. We want to improve student outcomes. We want to increase internationalisation. We want to widen participation. How is digital and online going to make that happen? How is the use of the library going to widen participation? So I wrote this IT strategy. We had some external auditors in. And what was nice was the auditor said, this was the best IT strategy they had ever seen from any FE college across the UK. There may have been any you've ever seen too, so I don't know, but within that one. But one of the things that came out from that was the importance of linking this, whatever we were doing within IT, libraries and learning technologies with what was happening at the corporate side. And what we were really doing at that point is applying a lens to the corporate strategy. This is how we're going to do, increase the quality of teaching and learning. In 2015, I joined an organisation called JISC. You may have heard of it. And I started working on digital capabilities. And Laurie Fipps at the time was developing the digital leaders programme. And he asked me to come and help and support him on that one. And this really started to give me an insight about how I could apply those lessons that I had learned over the years. Some of this came out about kind of reinforcing things. So anyone here have a dog? Anyone got a dog? You got a dog? Do you take it for walks? Yep, you feed it, groom it, all that. And you love your dog? Yeah, ask me if I have a dog. No, ask me why I don't have the time. And that to me is one of those things that just annoys me so much when people say, oh, we need to give lecturers time to do this. We need to give people time to do this. No, I don't have a dog because I don't have the time. You don't have any more time than me. You still only have, you don't live for longer than 24 hours a day and all those people make time. And that's the thing. And it's not about time at all. It's always about priorities. And who sets those priorities? Well, in theory, that needs to come from strategy. And so this is interdependency between strategy, priorities and time. If someone says we need to give people time to play with technology, what they're actually saying is not that we need to engage with technology or engage with platforms. You need to make it a priority for them and that comes from their objectives and that comes from strategy and planning. There's a whole load of those interdependentness. So helping people to develop strategy is so important. And the other thing I think, which is quite clear that came out of the digital leadership programme was digital is not a destination. Digital is not your target. Yay, we've achieved digital. What does that even mean? Even having the term digital strategy, we have achieved digital. Yeah, I know, great. What does that even mean and so on things? And of course, the other thing to remember is that any journey is not a straight line. You're going to fall off, you're going to come back. And the one thing to remember is how important, and this comes back to when I worked as a lecturer, when I worked at WCC, was digital was a tool that made my life easier. Why the hell am I writing out acetates each session when I could just do it through something called PowerPoints? And remember, digital can be an enabler. Digital can improve. Digital can be inclusive. So it's about taking your corporate strategy and applying a digital lens. How is digital going to help your organisation achieve its goals? How is it going to help it achieve its objectives? And it doesn't just have to be digital. You could apply an environmental lens, a sustainability lens, an inclusion lens, an accessibility lens. Because then what you can do is start to avoid those kind of competing strategies of library and IT and technology and so on. So the key thing, I think, with any kind of strategic direction is to start thinking about what does success look like? What do we need to do to achieve that success? Making sure we're aware of those values that we have. Because you can't just say, we could be the most successful university ever by just having one student. That's the thing that doesn't help things. Values, I think, are things ethics, privacy and so on. And then it's about operationalising your strategy, breaking it down into key tasks and objectives so everybody knows how their work is. There's an apocryphal story. John F. Kennedy was walking around Cape Canaveral, goes up to Janitor and says, so what do you do here then, mate? And this Janitor replied, I'm helping to put a man on the moon because they had a shared vision about what they were trying to achieve. If you went and talked to a financial assistant in your organisation, would they understand how their role is helping the university to achieve its strategic objectives? Would they be able to say that? If you went to talk to a library assistant, if you went to talk to one of the Janitors or the cleaners, the other thing I think with digital, which is really important, is shared understanding, the importance of everyone understanding what it means. So if you say the phrase digital transformation, if you say the phrase online learning, blended learning, I suspect if I asked you all to write a definition of the word blended learning, we'd have probably 23 different definitions because some of you probably wouldn't agree with yourselves. So I think one of the things kind of coming up to this at the end is digital is not a destination. Strategy is one of the key things that can make a difference. Any good strategy also needs to be responsive and dynamic. It's not something that necessarily remains fixed because we know with things like the pandemic, we know with the things like cost of living crisis, these things means that we shouldn't just be rigid to our strategy, but a good strategy should have that flexibility. It should be able to build in that kind of boundaries. But one of the things that we should try and avoid at all costs is competing strategies and thinking about how does your strategy help deliver the core strategy and what are where are those potential areas for conflict? So that's been my kind of very personal journey back 30 odd years of working with technology and education, working with strategy, working with leaders, working with institutions and helping them to improve. And I think one of the things is about embedding that change, anchoring that change is really important and strategy is a way to do that. I'm going to stop there. I could talk for another day probably on that one, but I'm sure you'll all want to have some lunch. So time for some questions. I have a question. Let's do it at hand. Are there any questions? Does it resonate with anybody? Maybe it's a different thing. Are there any kind of people smiling out there thinking, yep, those sort of things? So, yeah, go on. Sorry, ask the question again. I think it's a bit different. I don't think that's too good I was. That shared understanding is so critical. Do you go and talk to people, people, you know, you say, we've got to do digital. What does that even mean? You know, I remember talking about with one university and that, you know, one of their targets was we going to be a digital university. If you ask people what that meant, it meant so many different things to different people. And if you go into professional services and support departments, their vision was very different to what the academics were thinking and what the senior managers were thinking. Shared understanding, absolutely critical. And that means taking things apart and kind of moving it around. Denise. I'm just, what you just said, then, on the interest of, because some of the drum I was talking about is, and I'm so impressed that you did that about learning design, that you don't need one model. It depends on what you're teaching, what the model of the models and courses are. And then you're talking about flexibility and being able to not sort of see strategies. It was interesting how you said, if it doesn't fit, then, you know, they have to change it. And that might be better than sometimes. That's a fix that. Oh, it's in the policy or it's in a strategy and by a fix to it. So I thought that was a little bit of a... I do, yeah. I mean, I do think it's interesting how people sometimes focus on a policy and not recognise that actually someone has written that policy. And the other thing I often think about is quality validation. And validation is often systems and processes that were written 30 years ago. When I started working digital capabilities, I remember looking at job descriptions for HE lecturers. And I went for about 20 or 30. Only one mentioned technology. And it was a lecturer in nuclear technology, which is why it meant, you know, there was another one that said, a willingness to use the VLE. And I just thought, I just thought of the interview. Are you willing to use the VLE? Yes. Are you going to use it? I'm willing to use it. Doesn't mean I will use it. And, you know, but part of it was that interdependencies because those job descriptions had been created in the 1960s with the unions and they were never going to change. You know, it would cry out too much effort to change it. So people would then use the old one because it was quicker and easier and those old ones, those historical things. So if you want to like improve the digital skills of your, you know, teaching staff by ensuring that it's part of the kind of job description, you suddenly realise that it's going to cause a major headache because there's so many stakeholders are involved in that process. That interdependencies, it's absolute. And that's part, again, somebody saying, we're going to be digital without thinking about what does that mean for HR? What does it mean for recruitment? What does it mean for all these different things? Yeah. And I've seen so many people I've coached a lot of people but people said, oh, I like your structure and one person doesn't have a base. So I do think that people will see that as a, oh, I've got to do one. I don't know what to do. And a lot of people are elevated in positions about any fortune and expected to like this process. You know, I thought that's why it's really important to have lots of people that's working that way together. Absolutely. And I think the other aspect is about then that cross collaboration. How does the library help deliver on what you're trying to achieve with learning technologies or doing with IT? How does the teaching learning strategy enable that? One of the key things that did at Gloucestershire College was I stopped working in isolation and started working with the academic teams and the academic heads and working with them to help them to deliver my strategy by helping them to think about, okay, one of your targets is improving student outcomes. This is how technology can do that. This is how it can help. This is how it's going to enable now it can improve. Thank you, Dad. I've got 15 seconds to answer that. I'll try my best. One of the key things is if everyone's strategy is aligned back to the corporate strategy, what you should be able to do is take something out of the corporate strategy and work out what those things are that people are going to do to help achieve it and then to see whether they're in a conflict. That's one thing. The other thing is transparency. So often people write their strategies in isolation because they up against the deadline I was doing next week. I better do it and pick it up. I'll go and copy one from the internet. I'll borrow bills and so on and all that kind of stuff. So part of it's transparency, part of it is understanding what you're trying to achieve. But the number of times I've read like a corporate strategy, then with the library strategy, the ILT strategy and the teaching and learning strategy and you think, these are from four different organisations and of course they're going to compete. And I think those experiences I had where I wrote bring your own device policy that got approved by our board. But at the same point, the IT strategy which basically said, no, it ain't going to happen was also approved by the board. So there's also an aspect of, and this is the phrase that we use often used to just this digital leadership is people understanding what digital mean. Digital is one of those things that actually has problems in the sense of when you talk about doing one thing with digital and actually has so many knock on effects is that interdependencies which is why things like and I'm looking at Sarah here with the work that she's been doing on digital transformation. Transformation doesn't just happen. You need to think about if we're going to transform our curriculum if we're going to transform the way that we deal with students has so many knock on effects within that one. And that has implications. But if everyone's working in silos then that's going to never it's never going to happen. So transparency and people being very clear about using the same processes for writing strategy across the organisation will really help. Thank you. And thank you to the online audience as well. If there was anybody there.