The missing layer between your digital strategy and Monday morning
Launching the Higher Ed Service Portfolio Model to THETA 2025.
You know the pattern. The digital strategy gets signed off in March. By August it still lives in a slide deck. Your capability model maps what the university has, not what students experience. Every faculty names the same service differently. And the AI investment case gets argued without a shared map of where AI would actually land.
None of this is a talent problem. It is a missing layer.
From here on, services carry the strategy
King’s College London and FromHereOn built that layer together: the Higher Education Service Portfolio Model. It sits on top of the Higher Education Reference Models the sector already uses. Where those models describe capability, this one describes service. It names over 160 services and 1,000+ jobs to be done. It spans students, academics, researchers, and professional staff.
CAUDIT and its global partners now hold custodianship. The model is open to the sector.
What Monday looks like with a service map on the wall
Institutions using the model change their operating rhythm in three visible ways.
Experience journeys get a common spine. Student, academic, researcher, and professional staff journeys all reference the same named services. Design work stops re-inventing the map each time.
AI investment arguments get shorter. Priorities get scored against services, not pitched as slideware. The debate moves from "should we?" to "which service, first?"
Strategy-to-roadmap drops to weeks. Institutions have moved from strategic intent to an agreed transformation roadmap in six to ten weeks. Not another planning year.
That is the test worth applying to any framework: does Monday run differently? With a shared service portfolio, the Monday exec meeting starts from the same map, and decisions land against it.
Accelerating Digital and AI Transformation in Higher Education, Lightning Talk, THETA 2025, Perth.
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