A roadmap for successful AI adoption in Higher Education, from dxw:
Higher education institutions are actively experimenting with AI to improve operational efficiency, yet approaches vary significantly across the sector. Institutions face complex issues including output accuracy, data privacy, and academic integrity – with some organisations establishing centralized AI task forces while others maintain department-led initiatives that risk duplication and inconsistent policies.
Given this landscape, strategic engagement with AI requires drawing on experiences from across the sector and beyond. This is the first in a series of blog posts discussing the different aspects of AI implementation. Here we present two complementary frameworks – EVR’s 4D strategy and dxw’s iterative approach to grounded experimentation – that together provide a comprehensive roadmap for successful AI implementation in higher education.
Useful for any sector.
Via Neilly, Project vs Product Funding by Jennifer Pahlka:
Scott Colfer writes Most of What We Call a ‘Service’ Isn’t One (and Why That Matters for Product People)
In government and the wider public sector, we’ve built our identity around “services.”
Digital teams design them, measure them, apply the Service Standard to them.But most of what we call a service isn’t actually a service.
More often, the work we label as a “service” is really something else:
- An experience (like applying, enrolling, or updating).
- A capability (like payments, case management, or publishing).
- Or a technology system (like a website or platform).
The Service Standard itself, our flagship guidance, is rarely been applied to a true end-to-end service. Most of the time, it’s applied to fragments: experiences, capabilities, or tech.
And that mislabelling matters. You can end up treating a website like a whole service, or expecting a tech platform to deliver a citizen journey.
Interesting take: hands up people who’ve ever said “i cant wait for my local council to build an AI chatbot”
do residents actually want this?
wouldn’t they rather use their chosen AI – which already has access to and understands the internet, their preferences, their context? instead of our RAG bot that knows nothing about them and only works within our little bubble?
OpenReferralUK show and tell. I wrote on LinkedIn about it:
I genuinely believe there is a golden opportunity in the open referral stuff to use the service directory concept to flip the local public service operating model to matching people’s needs with those that can meet with – with local government getting out of the way.