2023 CAUDIT Awards Submissions

Alicia has shown exceptional leadership qualities as our Senior Manager, Portfolio Governance and Change, a new position created in Q3 2022, through both leading and influencing the broader team of ITS and and project community. We needed to rebuild our PMO, our processes and frameworks and Alicia has been front and centre in designing, leading and collabrating with colleagues to achieve improvements. To the point that our last Finance and Investment Committee (Council sub committee) the new ITS Projects dashboard received high praise and has led to re-invigiorated confidence in ITS PMO delivery.

Dan took over as the manager of UQ’s CSOC in 2022, and his technical knowledge combined with his natural leadership abilities has helped develop and strengthen UQ’s Cyber Security Operations Centre. Thus, increasing the cyber security posture of the entire university. Dan is approachable, level-headed and calm in times of crisis – something particularly unique for a Cyber Security Manager during incidents! He has been pivotal in growing the CSOC team and fostering their professional development. He brings the CSOC team together, playing to their strengths, and encouraging them in building relationships with their various stakeholders. His proactively works to contain incidents and his team of 5.2 people protect approximately 7,410 staff, 55,044 students and respond to over 3000 cyber security events and requests from across the University community per quarter

Jack Cross is QUT's Associate Director, Information Security and was instrumental in leading QUT's cyber incident detection and response during its recent ransomware attack. Not only did Jack act as the incident controller for the contain, eradicate and protect phases of QUT's response, he also:

• Took preventative steps to mitigate loss that including rehearsals, establishment of a retainer with an expert firm, and worked with QUT's executive and the Risk and Audit Committee to ensure QUT delivered against an agreed dynamic roadmap to meet modern current and emerging threats;
• Ensured all relevant stakeholders, including other higher education institutions cyber units, were kept abreast of the incident to reduce the probability of them being successfully infiltrated by the same actor; and
• Continues to learn and build capability, notably the recent introduction of multifactor authentication, the establishment of a 24/7 cyber operations centre and refinement of account management and network segmentation controls.
   

Prior to Jamie joining University, Digital Services had very little partnership with most elements of the research and library community at UC. In 18 months, Jamie has transformed how we work with our research and library counterparts, bringing us together through new co-design groups and forums, developing out a shared vision and roadmap for the digital research and library experiences, and improving our service delivery culture and approach. On top of cementing trusted relationships, she has led a small team to deliver challenging projects and iniatives that improve the the technology platforms and digital experiences in this space.

Jodi’s leadership is outstanding and well acknowledged by her team. Her curiosity and innovation to continually improve and share this, along with development of her team is extraordinary, and she's gone on to build us a whole new continuous improvements form, OneNote structure for detail and a PowerBI dashboard to provision visibility of performance. In the absence of a dedicated reporting or analyst role, Jodi, through her work on citizen development, went on to establish a new set of ServiceNow Business Intelligence performance dashboards.

Mariela has been a team player all along, someone who has continually supported individual within and outside the team to halp achieve business outcomes. Mariela is a goal oriented individual who believes in collaboration and teamwork. Over the years, she has demonstrated her ability to work with several different stakeholders at a given time and steer the project in the right direction. She is a focused individual who prides herself and her team for delivery excellence. Mariela is well grounded person who radiates positivity. She has been instrumental in creating positive work culture within her teams thereby impacting individual attitudes and behaviours. Mariela’s contributions at UQ have become an inspiration for others within and outside of her team. She is seen as a role model and a mentor across the board at UQ.

Sean is the quiet achiever of the UQ CSOC team. If anyone (staff or student) needs assistance Sean is always the first one to jump in and respond. He always takes his time to actively listen to what has occurred, only asking necessary questions to ensure you are not feeling interrogated. Sean’s approach to actioning cyber security reports, fosters a safe reporting environment that allows individuals to feel comfortable reporting their concerns without feeling ashamed or embarrassed. He is a great role model for the junior & intermediate analyst in his team, he is always willing to share and pass on his knowledge.

CSIRO’s Cloud Right project introduced centrally-brokered, managed access to public cloud platforms Amazon Web Service, Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure. CSIRO is one of the first research organisations in Australia to establish secure, managed access across three public hyperscale clouds, keeping digital assets safe and secure within
guardrails, offering researchers the benefits and services only available through public cloud. Cloud Right used innovative technologies to minimise cyber and other risks to CSIRO’s data, and ultimately CSIRO researchers benefit from secure data, cost savings and efficiencies. These efficiencies removed set up effort for researchers, enabled collaboration with external partners, allowing faster time to science and faster time to impact. The project established a unique shared responsibility model to ensure CSIRO research is secure and accessible. Researchers benefit from efficient, managed and protected public cloud services and can now explore new technologies, which benefits all Australians.

Integrity and trust in the research process is an increasingly essential focus for universities, and the risk of a cybersecurity incident is front-of-mind for funders, partners, participants and other stakeholders. A significant cybersecurity incident affecting a research programme could result in irreparable damage to trust, and financial and legal implications. The CyberSecurity for Researchers programme has delivered specialist cybersecurity training and capabilities to researchers to provide them with the confidence and knowledge to ensure that the work they do and the data they collect is safe and secure. This capability is a competitive advantage for the University of Auckland and Auckland UniServices Ltd (the University’s commercialisation arm), allowing us to engage in research contracts that require assurance of sufficient cybersecurity capability and maturity.

In less than two years, the Digital Research team has transformed the way research and researchers are supported through digital innovation and quantum uplift in the provision of services.  The ways researchers are now engaged and supported has increased the value proposition and experience for each researcher. Research is a core activity for universities and at UTAS our research mission is to meet the needs of Tasmania and contribute nationally and globally in areas of distinctive advantage. To maximise the impact of our research it is essential that the technology requirements researchers need are fully enabled, allowing them to utilise local capability to address global challenges.

Platform O is a flexible online-based research tool that serves as an end-to-end eResearch solution for researchers and end-users. Its scope encompasses a wide range of disciplines, including research projects in medicine, nursing, exercise and nutrition, psychology, communications and technology. Designed to simplify participation and uplift engagement, Platform O allows researchers to build interactive, engaging and highly personalised programs without requiring coding or technical expertise. Its target audience consists of researchers seeking a user-friendly, responsive, and codeless platform to capture end-user engagement, feedback, and sentiment. With features like integrating third-party survey tools, online multimedia elements, and a personalised content/program algorithm, Platform O caters to researchers across diverse projects.

As the demand of computing and storage resources increases with the growth in computational research and availability of data, The University of Newcastle has partnered with Kablamo to create a new set of cloud-based research solutions. The aim is to provide a set of solutions which reduce time to research output, improve our sustainability posture, create greater visibility over research costs and build stronger relationships between IT and our research community. The target audience for the first iteration of the initiative is the School of Psychology, with the outcome being the transition away from traditional on-premise HPC to the new AWS Service WorkBench. This service has quickly enabled the Psychology researchers to access on-demand compute services that meet their specific research requirements, leading to faster research outputs. This was achieved over a six week engagement between Kablamo and the University.

ACU’s Innovation Centre of Excellence seeks to introduce cutting edge technology to ACU. By exploring technology such as the Microsoft HoloLens 2, the team has begun the movement to take ACU’s teaching and learning into the future.

With a focus on technology centric collaborative spaces designed to inspire and support the learning journey, Boola Katitjin sets a new standard for tertiary education. Connection with country The Noongar name Boola Katitjin translates to lots of learning and was chosen by Dr Richard Walley and endorsed by the MU Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Advisory Group. This name reflects both the different levels and functions of the building and the knowledge that will be passed on in this space. This Connection to Country is at the core of the building and reflected throughout, from the yarning circles in the welcome spaces, to the artwork seen throughout. Boola Katitijin aims to create a safe and welcoming space for everyone. Sustainability at the heart of Boola Katitjin As the largest mass engineered timber building in Western Australia, Boola Katitijin is designed to achieve the Green Building Council’s 6 Star Green Star Design and As-Built v1.3 rating. Some of the key sustainability features include a 450kw solar panel array, estimated to produce over 65% of the building’s operational energy requirements at peak conditions, and active design features such as raised access floor systems with HVAC from below, large breezeways and renewable timber for 70 percent of the building’s structure. The large stormwater harvesting tanks will collect water for reuse and excess stormwater will recharge groundwater through a large infiltration tank. The commitment to sustainability is also seen outside the building, with the landscaping allowing for more than 26,000 native plants to be installed around the building. Learning and teaching technology Boola Katitjin has been designed with students at its heart and will enhance the learning experience, providing students with a fresh space to learn, collaborate and socialise. The new learning spaces have been designed to put students at the centre of a social learning environment, enable innovative teaching methods with technology-enhanced features that encourage active and collaborative learning. As learners and teachers embrace the pedagogical and technological affordances that Boola Katitjin provides, we will together create memorable and impactful learning experiences. 60% of all teaching at Murdoch is now conducted in this building.

The Monash Study app is a personalised mobile experience designed for Monash University students. Developed in close collaboration with our students, this is a custom-built in-house app, delivering timely, relevant information that students can access at their fingertips. Before the Monash Study app, students needed to navigate numerous platforms to find critical academic information. Now, they can get everything they need, all in one place. 

Students can use maps to find locations on campus, set reminders for their upcoming events, get key
University updates through a targeted newsfeed, nominate their pronouns, view their academic results, sync their timetable to Google Calendar and add widgets to their homescreen so they don’t even need to open the app.

With over 58,000 sign-ups (out of 86,000 students) in the first year, and 7 million app sessions to date, the Monash Study app has become the students most-used study tool.

The Student Degree Planner (SDP) Project was initiated to improve the manual process of student study planning and degree audits by introducing a new digital Program Planner SaaS solution. This project implemented digital transformation and a tactical approach to promote growth for our University under the alignment of our Life Ready Graduates Strategic theme. The goal of the SDP Project was to replace manually generated PDF Program Plans found on Program Handbook webpages with digitised Program Audits and Pathways within Stellic, an emerging student success software platform. The new system guides all University of Newcastle (UON) students through the University's recommended program course progression according to specific program rules and includes a real-time degree audit function to ensure students stay on track to graduation. Professional and academic staff now also benefit from a single view of student progression, workflow management of exceptions, viewing applied credit, and running graduation eligibility reports.

The Student Welfare initiative was the first step into our Salesforce journey and ran from October until December 2022. This initiative falls under RMITs strategy Knowledge with Action, in the area of awareness & access, inclusive excellence and connected care. The solution delivered our goal of a 360 degree student view via omni channel, automated processes and reporting, adding extra support for our students. We worked with our delivery partner Slalom through the discovery, build, test, training and release phases. In the 6 months since going live the initiative had 550 Student Welfare cases and assisted students with over $193,000 of financial aid assisting with such matters as accommodation, living costs, study, commuting and healthcare. The students have been able to easily communicate for assistance through email to case and we have been able to track our workloads, response time, aid types and amounts through reporting. The Welfare initiative has been the perfect building block to launch our Student Outreach through campaigns and links directly with this through case management. The feedback from students and staff involved through this initiative is positivity and gratitude and we have already started logging improvement backlog ideas to increase the capabilities of the system.

The Student One Consolidation Project (S1CP) engaged and supported HE students and staff through an SMS implementation to enable VU students and staff to use a single SMS platform. VE students had migrated to StudentOne in 2019: the S1CP 'consolidated' the use of StudentOne for HE students in 2022.
 

Target audiances included:

• Business and Process Owners and Business Experts
• SMS Users including students, teaching and research staff and professional areas; data recipients and support areas. 

Program scope included:

• Retiring Callista: moving HE student processes, data and system integration from Callista to StudentOne * Reviewing & Reforming HE student administrative business processes and systems to improve student service, process efficiency and communications in additional to digitally transforming processes
• Aligning VU processes across different student cohorts, while allowing for compliance and market imperatives
• Reduce VU’s ongoing operational costs by consolidating systems and reducing license and support expense.

The University of Auckland (UoA) opened an eSports Arena on campus in November 2022 due to demand by students for a facility of this nature. The arena represents a first step to what esports can bring to the student experience and preparing students for the workforce. Esports, as an industry is growing phenomenally in New Zealand, with over 1.6 million Kiwi gaming households. Having an accessible eSport arena has already proven successful in contributing to an improved student experience, their engagement and ultimately their welfare, bringing the vibe back on-campus, leading to a better learning environment. Esports is a large industry, not only for gamers but supporting industries such as event management, media broadcasting, game development, creative arts, etc. By creating the Arena, the students get a flavour of what it would be like and can explore career opportunities that is beyond traditional roles in the market.

VU moved from excel based College registers to the digital Academic Integrity Register (AIR), and transformed its operational quality associated with a commitment to high standards in learning and teaching, reducing academic pain-points, and increasing procedural fairness for students. VU’s AIR is a cloud based CRM technology to record, report and support academic decision-making in relations to academic integrity concerns. The centralised register aligns with the Academic Integrity Policy/guidelines, is integrated with the University’s key applications, and addresses academic decision making through a centralised information linked to policy settings, a decision making matrix, and templates for communicating with students. The register supports the addressing of key risk, and emerging trends. The AIR has led to improved consistency in institutional responses to academic integrity breaches as intended by Policy and organisational expectations. This operational innovation enhances our confidence about meeting sector best practice including procedural fairness and operational excellence in addressing key risks for quality teaching and learning, with and from students.

The Academic Promotions & Progressions project at AUT has revolutionized the employee experience by leveraging the ServiceNow platform. This innovative solution streamlines the complex process of academic promotion and progression, offering a user-friendly experience for all stakeholders. Implemented in two phases, in collaboration with AUT's DVC's Office, ICT Services, and People & Culture, the project aims to enhance employee satisfaction and align with AUT's strategic goal of being a place where people love to work and learn. The tailored lifecycle experience built on the ServiceNow platform guides applicants, Heads of School, and the P&C team through various phases and tasks, ensuring timely completion and providing valuable insights. Applicants benefit from early engagement, comprehensive support, and increased transparency throughout the process. A survey of applicants revealed a 54% response rate, with 60% rating their experience as exceptional or very good. Continuous improvement ideas ensure ongoing enhancement to the applicant journey.

ACU is the first in the sector to perform a wholesale lift-and-shift of over 50000 student email and OneDrive accounts to create one single Microsoft 365 tenant for both staff and students. This initiative supports faster, easier, and more efficient collaborative opportunities, significantly reduces administrative overhead, and creates a more agile, responsive environment. This will allow ACU to pivot more quickly to embrace new opportunities, implement security measures, and respond rapidly to changing needs of staff and students. Performed in partnership with the organisation, this initiative has also introduced new ways of working together to better understand impact of changes and support both staff and students to adapt and respond effectively.

Athena is a cutting-edge platform, designed and developed by the Centre for Enablement (C4E) team at the University of Auckland. Athena aims to empower customer-facing delivery teams by enabling them to create, run, and manage end-to-end delivery of applications, integrations, and APIs. It stands as the University's first true platform-as-a-product offering. Athena embraces the principles of GitOps, automating the creation of project-specific infrastructure configurations. This automation increases productivity and reduces delivery time and effort by streamlining the movement of code from development to production environments. It enhances GitOps by providing real-time visibility into infrastructure code information for stakeholders, promoting reusability and cost savings in delivery and maintenance processes. Additionally, the burden of support and maintenance has been significantly alleviated, allowing teams to focus on innovation and value-adding activities. These changes have not only improved the software development process but also created a culture of
continuous improvement and innovation within the teams.
 

The Curriculum Design, Accreditation, and Publication (CDAP) project was launched to address ongoing usability, capability and compliance gaps within the Curriculum Design, Accreditation and Publication space. The intention of the project was to be business-led to transform the current way of working by replacing functions delivered by a number of disjointed systems and processes while introducing benefits afforded by a more modern system and interface. The project has delivered flexible workflows and curriculum management processes that are usable, logical and comply with all policies and legislation. By consolidating systems into a single platform, CDAP better facilitates the management of the curriculum lifecycle at Charles Sturt University. This enables teams to work more effectively together on the design, accreditation, and publication of courses and subjects, while also simplifying the maintenance of the curriculum. The stakeholder group for this project includes our faculties, academics, support staff, student support services, executives and the academic senate.

The Assignment Extension Tool initiative at Deakin University streamlined the process for students to digitally submit extension requests for assignments and provided a centralised system for teaching staff to manage these requests. This innovative tool eliminated the need for manual processing via email and PDF attachments, saving valuable time and resources. Approximately more than 150,000 extension requests are received each year, and the tool significantly improved the efficiency for teaching staff to manage these. Students benefited from a user-friendly platform that ensured all necessary details and documents were included with their extension requests. Teaching staff gained a centralised system to review, approve, or deny requests, eliminating the need for time-consuming management of emails, and back-and-forth communication with students trying to obtain missing information of supporting evidence. By implementing the tool, operational efficiency was enhanced, administrative burdens reduced, and the overall experience for students and teaching staff in managing assignment extensions was improved.

Murdoch University’s Digital Enablement initiative is a continuous evolution towards operational excellence in higher education. In the face of budget cuts, and the post-COVID
decline in student enrolment numbers across the industry, our primary goals are to foster cohesion within our organization, enhance efficiency and agility, and ensure we stayed
focussed on delivering the most critical work. Digital Enablement brings IT closer together with the rest of the organisation, creating seamless collaboration and accelerating the delivery of critical work. Our approach prioritises the highest value work alongside our non-ITS stakeholders (Product Owners), allowing us to allocate resources more effectively, pivot rapidly should requirements or priorities shift, therefore optimising outcomes. Through a continuous improvement mindset, we tackle immediate challenges but also prepare ourselves for future uncertainty. By embracing Digital Enablement, we have established a resilient foundation operating model that empowers our institution to thrive in an ever-evolving higher education landscape.

In 2021, the University of Auckland (UoA) launched the Rautaki Matihiko | Digital Strategy, supporting the University’s Vision and Strategic Plan. To effectively execute the strategy, an initiative commenced in 2022, focusing on developing measures and key performance indicators (KPIs) to monitor progress against the digital strategy objectives. The initiative has successfully addressed historical technical and process-related challenges, establishing cross-functional collaboration across subject matter experts from Digital Services Leadership, Application Product Owners, and other departments. Leveraging Power BI reporting, the initiative automated the data collation from the data warehouse and 17 other data sources. As a result, there has been a noticeable improvement to digital experience across the organisation where managers and leadership team now have insights into performance trends that supports data-driven decisions. The success of this project has prompting other key areas, such as Finance and HR, to engage with the team in tracking their strategic objectives.
 

In March of 2022 the University of Canterbury (UC) Cybersecurity Operations and Consulting Team were non-existent. A couple contractors provided ad hoc support and monitoring across a hastily deployed SIEM instance, digital projects were only afforded light-touch and very much token security reviews.

Now in June of 2023 the Team is led by UC’s Information Security Manager (ISM), permanent internal roles are complemented by Managed Security Services, the team works to an Agile methodology, Services are structured with in-place and effective operating models, targets, continuous improvement plans. Most importantly UC is now providing effective 24/7 security monitoring and incident response capabilities across UC’s Digital Landscape and are effectively ensuring that UC builds secure Digital Systems.

In early 2022 feedback from senior stakeholders across the University strongly indicated that the manner in which ICT projects were delivered was no longer fit for purpose as post-pandemic campus operations resumed. ITS embarked on an initiative to improve the capabilities and frameworks used to define and deliver ICT projects, and leveraged an external P3 specialist to guide and assist in the development of frameworks and artefacts based on good practice. It soon became clear that the initiative needed to extend to include the establishment of enterprise-level oversight and governance processes, and later change management frameworks. The initiative was highly collaborative, with project specialists from across ITS, Student Services, Business Analytics & Planning, Finance and Property Services at the core, and wider engagement with project sponsors, senior management and executive members as each element was tested and rolled out.

Project Halo is a three year program of work designed to deliver upon the cyber security strategy of bringing Monash University within its cyber security risk appetite. The scope includes 73 uplift projects n accordance with 6 guiding principles and in alignment with the 5 functions of the NIST CSF.

Two notable features are the breadth of the work and the amount of organisational change the program introduced. The projects stretched across many cyber security domains, technologies, processes and departments, and each project had a strong drive to deliver change. The combination of these two features resulted in an ambitious program of work that required constant agility and innovation to deliver.

The program is in its final stages and is on-track to deliver the goals of the strategy and key metrics of risk management and NIST CSF maturity. The University has already benefited from many improvements in its daily operations.

The Enterprise Desktop Fleet Management (EDFM) project was a Proof of Concept (PoC) to bring standardised, enterprise-wide procedures to Queensland University of Technology's (QUT) computing asset lifecycle. QUT partnered with vendor Compnow to change how computing assets were managed, from an ad hoc, individualised and disorganised landscape to a streamlined automated model that was equitable and efficient and could be scaled to meet different area needs. The model covered all stages from procurement to retirement of a device. The project commenced with a single albeit large faculty, the Faculty of Health, and expanded to other areas of the university. All staff computers in these areas were impacted, be they staff academic, professional, full-time or part-time. So successful was the PoC that this model has been endorsed to roll out across the whole university as its preferred asset model for the future.

The Recruitment and Retention Nudge Campaign initiative was launched with the aim of delivering significant applicant and student experience enhancements, while simultaneously reducing manual staff overheads, through the automation of ‘nudge’ email communications / touch points. 

Recruitment nudges target applicants to nudge them through the recruitment pipeline, for example by automatically encouraging them to respond to an offer, provide required documentation to allow for application assessment, or enrol in units.

Retention nudges target current students to nudge them back on track where, for example, they have failed to log into the Learning Management System for 7 consecutive days, or their course completion rate is falling below a set threshold as part of progression monitoring. 

Nudge campaigns are delivered by multiple fusion teams, leveraging enterprise platforms including the Student Management System, the Learning Management System, Advanced Analytics, Integration, and the enterprise CRM.

The Digital Workspace Project within the Information Technology Services team at the University of Tasmania has integrated a digital wayfinding and space reservation system. It addresses challenges of locating spaces and understanding timetables across diverse campuses. Users can easily navigate and reserve spaces through mobile devices, benefiting from 3D navigation, personalised recommendations, and real-time location data. The project faced challenges in legacy infrastructure integration, stakeholder engagement, accessibility, and spatial data accuracy. However, innovative solutions and collaboration overcame these challenges. The project has brought transformative benefits, including improved productivity, reduced stress, and enhanced inclusivity. It supports the University's strategic mission by connecting users with places and services, providing a seamless and efficient digital workspace experience.