Last week I was up in Birmingham for a conference. The HE Transformation Expo, which was a new event, and I was on a panel session entitled: Is Your Estate Working for You? Deploying Smart Campus Capabilities at Scale to Meet Efficiency Objectives.

We had a good session and an excellent discussion. We covered various topics within the session.

This session will explore how universities are embracing smart campus technologies to drive efficiency, sustainability, and enhanced user experience across their estates. As institutions face increasing pressure to reduce costs, meet carbon targets, and deliver seamless digital experiences, the integration of intelligent systems and data-driven decision-making has never been more critical.

It is quite clear that across the UK, all universities have an element of a smart campus, some more than others. Though it has to be said the focus of much of that “smartness” is in building management and the estate function. Over the last ten years or so I have been working in the Intelligent Campus space, which in essence is about adding further data sources to your estates data to provide not just better insights into the use of the campus, but also how the estate can be managed to improve the efficiency of the university as a whole, and enhance the student experience.

One new focus that I brought to the discussion was the research I have been doing over the last couple of years on collaboration, and the work that we undertook for the Transformation & Efficiency Taskforce.

Now and down the line there may be a need for more collaboration and sharing in the estates space. This will require a new paradigm in thinking about how your estate is managed, but also the data architecture behind the estate.