Academic Operations Is Not an Administrative Problem. It Is a Strategic One.

The HERM model (Higher Education Reference Model), presented at EUNIS 2025, maps how strategic intentions translate into operational capabilities and institutional outcomes. Its core finding is deceptively simple: most HEIs have a coherent strategy but an incoherent capability map. They know where they want to go, but the processes and competencies required to get there have never been explicitly aligned. The result is what the model calls a 'capability gap' - the distance between what the institution says it can do and what it can actually execute at operational level.

Academic operations - curriculum management, programme approval, faculty scheduling, quality assurance, assessment coordination - sit precisely in this gap. They are rarely strategic priorities in their own right, and they are almost never the subject of deliberate process design. Jisc's 2023 framework for digital transformation in higher education identified fragmented academic operations as one of the most consistent barriers to institutional progress: decisions about programmes take months because approval chains cross five offices that do not share data. Course catalogs do not match what is actually taught because no single person owns the process that keeps them aligned. Faculty workload is managed by custom, not system.

Research presented at EUNIS 2025 from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, examining AI and governance in HEIs, documented how these process failures compound over time. When institutions adopt AI tools for curriculum management without first mapping and redesigning the underlying processes, they automate fragmentation rather than eliminating it. The AI speeds up the wrong thing. The approval that previously took three months by email takes three months more efficiently - but it still takes three months, and no one has addressed why three months was ever acceptable.

The QAA's 2024 assessment of the UK higher education sector named curriculum agility as a competitive imperative: institutions that cannot update their programme portfolio quickly in response to labour market shifts are not just inconvenienced - they are losing students to institutions that can. A programme approval process that takes nine months to redesign a module is not a bureaucratic curiosity. It is a direct constraint on revenue. When a skill gap emerges in the market and the institution cannot respond within an academic year, the window to capture that demand closes before the paperwork does.

The Deloitte 2025 Higher Education Trends report identified curriculum adaptability as one of three defining differentiators for HEI competitiveness in the coming decade. The institutions leading on this are not those with the most sophisticated LMS or the most AI-enabled assessment tools. They are those whose academic operations teams understand process design: how to map a workflow, identify where decisions stall, redesign the handoffs, and document the new logic so it does not depend on one person's institutional memory.

This is a human capability gap, not a technology gap. The tools to support better academic operations exist. What is missing, in most European institutions, are the staff who have been trained to design and manage those operations as systems rather than inherited customs. Building that capability - in curriculum coordinators, academic registrars, programme directors, and department administrators - is not supplementary to digital transformation. It is what digital transformation actually requires.