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There comes a time in every digital leader’s career when they fancy doing something different. Keith Woolley has a strong commercial background, but joined the University of Bristol four years ago because he wanted to grasp the opportunity to work in higher education.
“I never thought this was a sector I was going to move into,” he says. “But the COO [chief operating officer] at the time was a known entity and he offered me the role.”
What Woolley discovered on moving from the world of private enterprise to academia was that he’d taken on a completely different type of challenge.
“There’s an awful lot of diversity in the technology stack that you need to manage,” he says. “The interesting thing, though, is that a lot of decisions are made in collaboration. So, although you are responsible, you still need significant skills and collaborations to make sure you can get policy and process to stick.”
In his previous CIO roles, Woolley’s responsibility for policy, process and security ensured that he mandated change. In the university sector, he found a different set of relationships.
“You work in partnership and you come up with the best possible solution for all – and I think that was the biggest learning curve,” he says.
“I had to extenuate skills I already had in stakeholder engagement and management. I’ve found I spend a lot of time now co-creating, bringing people on the journey and also changing the narrative, depending on which community I’m speaking with. It’s all about the benefits you’re bringing to people, rather than mandating change.”
Providing opportunities
Woolley initially came into Bristol as CIO. He was appointed chief digital information officer when the university restructured, following the appointment in 2022 of a new vice-chancellor, Evelyn Welch, who Woolley says is keen to empower people and remove complexity.
“She looked at her leadership team and started to think about how we should be combining things rather than having silos of operations,” he says.
“It came naturally for me to pick up all digital areas as well as information, which means joining together the physical and the digital.”
“We are delivering boundaryless education and research. We’ve put a technology platform and strategy together that allows us to be able to collaborate anywhere in the world and securely”
Keith Woolley, University of Bristol
Woolley says this joined-up approach aims to create high-quality user experiences for Bristol’s academics and students, whether they’re on campus or online. While the university, like other academic institutions, bolstered its online offering during the coronavirus pandemic, the expansion of his remit to cover digital is about more than improving its online presence.