European Journal of Higher Education IT 2019-1

The role of an IT strategy is changing radically with the progress of digital transformation. This is natural as IT is moving from a supporting role closer to the core of the business. Higher education is no exception: IT is now visible in nearly all activities both within the business and also in the supporting functions.

As a result of the role change, there is a new set of expectations for a successful IT strategy. Moving into the core of business requires a new approach in target setting and in the way IT’s direction is defined. We briefly analyse the shortcomings of traditional IT strategies and how the additional needs have been addressed so far. While these approaches allow organisations to proceed with their digital development work, the outcome has often been a complex patchwork of strategy documents and related activities. To solve the issue, we propose a model where digital capabilities provide the underlying structure for bridging the gap between the new requirements and traditional IT delivery. This allows the inclusion of organisation-wide business aspects into the strategy while keeping the role of IT clearly visible. As a consequence, the use of digital capabilities in the strategy blends the business with technology in a seamless way, just like in real life. To illustrate the approach, we analyse how the proposed approach can be applied to the higher education sector. Examples of higher education are used throughout the paper. This demonstrates that the model works in practice and provides an example of using it in a complex and multi-faceted industry.

University domain/scenario use cases based on eIDAS eID & eSignature extended user service accounts are implemented in the EU CEF projects TREATS and StudIES+, integrating hybrid ID concepts (legacy & eID). eNotar services will offer to integrate legacy binding in process and document flows, transfers to other areas are considered (Industry 4.0, ABAC).

EWP (Erasmus Without Paper) is the European project co-financed in years 2015-2017 by the Erasmus+ Programme, Key Action 3 (Prospective Initiatives — Forward Looking Cooperation Projects). EACEA has prolonged funding for years 2018-2019.

In December 2018, three years after the start of the first EWP project, in front of 350 participants from across Europe gathered in the stunning aula of the University of Ghent, and many more following the event via live stream, the Erasmus Without Paper Network was officially launched. Teams representing SOP from Austria, QS Unisolution from Germany, SIGMA from Spain, MUCI from Poland, University of Ghent from Belgium, and University of Porto from Portugal conducted live demo showing exchange of mobility data between their Student Information Systems.

The event does not mark the end of the EWP project, but is the milestone turning the development stage into production. The most challenging activities are still ahead — industrializing the Network and its elements, integrating data transfer with business processes of student mobility carried at higher education institutions, increasing network coverage by accepting new institutions, supporting new partners in joining the network, on a political, organizational and technical level. This support will be offered by the Competence Center to be established in 2019.

While the network grows, new mobility scenarios are recognized and new APIs to support them are designed and developed. New use cases show up and get support, like reporting from HEIs to the Mobility Tool+, or integrating services offered by other networks (like ESMO or EMREX) into one digital platform for education sector.

The aim of this paper is to show the Erasmus Without Paper Network running in production and supporting student mobility in partner institutions. The components of the Network will be presented and their role explained. Planned tasks and activities of the Competence Center will be discussed. Directions of extension of the Network functionality beyond basic scenarios of the Erasmus mobility will be shown. Plans for the European-wide roll out of the EWP Network will be shared.

The ultimate goal is to show the benefits of the EWP solution and encourage higher education institutions to become part of it.

In this study, we demonstrate the concept of a new information ecosystem on science and higher education in Poland. We focus on a distributed architecture of services and a data integrating warehouse. The data warehouse is tailored to be well-suited to micro-services, the modern information system architecture. In addition, we show examples of descriptive and predictive analytics in the data warehouse, which assist policymakers in making decisions. The primary outcome of the study is a new architecture, which relies on combining the data warehouse and micro-services into one ecosystem of distributed services for science and higher education. We hope that our experiences and concepts will be beneficial to those who face challenges in redesigning of existing information systems.