Evinact Director Jane Brimacombe shares her reflections from Stronger Together 2026, where conversations about AI, governance and architecture pointed to a bigger question for higher education.
What if higher education’s next big technology opportunity isn’t another technology at all?
That was one of the questions emerging from Stronger Together 2026, a joint Council of Australasian University Directors of Information Technology (CAUDIT) and Queensland University Directors of Information Technology (QUDIT) conference that brought together ICT leaders, specialists and practitioners from across higher education and research. The three-day event in Brisbane combined the CAUDIT Communities Conference and QUESTnet, with 90+ presenters across more than 70 sessions.
AI, cybersecurity, enterprise architecture and digital transformation were prominent across the program. But beneath those conversations, a more fundamental question kept emerging: are higher education institutions set up to get full value from the technology and capabilities they already have?
Higher education institutions have invested heavily in technology for years. Increasingly, the challenge is less about access to new capability and more about whether the foundations around it are strong enough to support effective use.
AI brings that issue into sharper focus. Its value depends on far more than the tools themselves. Data quality, governance, architecture, accountability and decision-making all shape what an organisation can realistically do with AI, and how confidently it can do it at scale.
That makes the conversation about technology inseparable from a wider conversation about organisational readiness.
AI readiness is organisational readiness
Higher education institutions are moving beyond experimentation and exploring how AI can become embedded across teaching, research, administration and student services.
As that happens, readiness becomes a much broader question.
Institutions need trusted information. They need clarity about who owns decisions and where accountability lies. They need governance that supports responsible use, architecture that allows capabilities to connect and people who understand how AI fits into the way work actually gets done.
In this sense, AI acts as a stress test for the organisation around it. Weak information practices, fragmented ownership and inconsistent processes become much more visible when institutions try to scale AI-enabled ways of working.
The opportunity is equally important. Institutions that strengthen those foundations are better placed to make deliberate choices about where AI can create value, rather than simply adding more tools to an already complex environment.
What we do in the shadows
Governance featured prominently throughout Stronger Together, but some of the most useful discussions focused on what happens when the formal rules, systems and decision-making structures don’t match how people actually need to work.
That’s when Shadow IT tends to emerge.
Shadow IT refers to technology, software or systems being used within an organisation without formal approval or oversight from its IT function. These tools can create legitimate security, privacy and operational risks, but they can also expose problems that might otherwise stay hidden.
If staff repeatedly turn to tools outside approved channels, it’s worth asking why they feel compelled to do so.
Perhaps an approved solution isn’t getting the job done. Perhaps a process is too slow or difficult to navigate, or responsibility for a decision is unclear.
Seen this way, Shadow IT can be an organisational signal. It can bring underlying issues into the light, revealing where technology, processes or decision-making frameworks aren’t keeping pace with user expectations.
Good governance helps organisations respond to those signals properly, not simply by adding more controls, but by understanding what’s driving the behaviour and addressing the cause as well as the risk.
The sector is building on shared foundations
Another strong theme was the growing value of common architectural foundations across the sector.
Higher education is complex and federated, and individual institutions have different priorities and operating environments. But many of the underlying challenges they face are similar.
Sector assets such as CAUDIT’s Higher Education Reference Model (HERM) provide a common language across business, information, application and technology architecture. Emerging initiatives such as the MortarCAPS Higher Learning Data Standard (MCDS) point to a similar opportunity at the data level, supporting greater interoperability and reducing the effort required to solve common problems repeatedly.
This points to a broader question for the sector: where does a common approach create value, and where does differentiation genuinely matter?
Rather than every institution developing its own foundations, there may be more value in sharing standards, models and approaches where the underlying need is common, while focusing institution-specific effort on the areas that truly set them apart.
Stronger foundations create more room to innovate
The opportunity for higher education is to strengthen the foundations that allow existing and emerging technology to deliver greater value.
That means looking at information, governance, architecture and decision-making as connected organisational capabilities. It also means asking where collaboration and shared foundations can reduce duplication without compromising the things that make an institution distinctive.
AI makes those questions more urgent because it exposes weaknesses quickly. But they extend well beyond AI.
Institutions that understand where they need to differentiate, where they can collaborate and what foundations they need to strengthen will be better placed to turn technology investment into sustainable value, and put themselves at the top of the class as the sector evolves.
