The missing layer between your digital strategy and Monday morning

24 July

We took the Higher Ed Service Portfolio Model to THETA 2025. The full session recording is below.

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

Universities run on hundreds of services. Enrolment, timetabling, grant management, graduation, IT support. Nobody holds the full list. So every strategy conversation starts by arguing about what exists.

We built the list with one of Europe’s leading universities, working alongside institutions around the world. Every service a university provides, more than 160 of them, named once in plain language. Plus the 1,000+ things students, academics, researchers, and staff use those services to do. One map everyone can point at, from council to service desk.

It now belongs to the sector. CAUDIT, the peak body for university technology leaders, holds it. Any institution can pick it up and use it.

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.