16 December 2025 - UCISA PACED25: Innovate, Integrate and Inspire - Reflections from Liverpool – John Harris
UCISA PACED25 brought together colleagues from across UK higher education for three days of discussion, challenge and practical insight. What stood out throughout the conference was how closely the sector’s priorities are converging: financial pressure, the need for clearer sequencing of change, and a shift from technology-led narratives to people, process and capability.
The opening keynote from Lucy Everest framed the core theme well. Institutions are facing sustained constraint, yet expectations for digital services continue to rise. Her focus on integration, use of existing capability, and building on a clear digital strategy echoed across later sessions. The CIO roundtable reinforced this, with conversation centred on prioritisation, engagement with local communities, cyber security and what it really means to lead digital change at a time when demand consistently exceeds capacity.
A strength of PACED25 was the breadth of sessions that grounded big ideas in real institutional practice. The UAL “Doing Digital” case study showed what it takes to rationalise more than 3,000 VLE course pages into a single student-centred template, achieved through open working and extensive co-design. The University of Portsmouth described its move from Google to M365, not as a technical migration but as a programme built around people, support and adoption. Southampton shared the agile journey behind its new student app, and Limerick set out a structured change approach that has already achieved high engagement and established longer-term foundations.
Tribal’s Cloud v3 breakfast briefing, although outside the published agenda, provided a useful update on Tribal’s evolving cloud posture: a more secure, AWS-based and strongly managed model, with emphasis on architecture, guardrails, predictable service operation and future migration pathways for institutions already using SITS Cloud. Sponsor sessions from Codec, Clarivate, Freshworks, TimeEdit and Waterstons showed how AI, automation and open standards are being applied to admissions, timetabling, onboarding and long-term strategy development. Notably, AI was presented less as a solution and more as an enabler that depends on context, data and responsible implementation.
One session that stood out for many was delivered by Kevin Welsh from King’s College London, who shared an engaging account of developing cyber awareness through creative phishing simulations. It offered a practical example of digital skills development and complemented the wider conference focus on capability, culture and behaviour change.
Day 3 closed with Ben Sauer’s exploration of why general-purpose technologies often generate confusion and unrealistic expectations. His reminder to distinguish between experimentation and production, and to use frameworks such as Wardley Mapping and Cynefin when assessing maturity, provided a helpful counterbalance to some of the more future-facing discussions elsewhere in the programme.
Across all three days, the sessions that resonated most strongly were those rooted in evidence, real practice and clear outcomes. Whether discussing AI, platforms, shared services or change delivery, the common thread was that transformation depends less on new tools and more on sequencing, communication, integration and the ability to support people through change.
PACED25 was a timely reminder that the sector is grappling with shared challenges, and that openly comparing approaches, successes and missteps remains one of UCISA’s greatest strengths.
