Transforming education: Macquarie University’s digital leap 

“If you don’t invest, you’re going to lose.” That’s what Macquarie University’s Chief Information and Digital Officer says about embarking on a major digital transformation. We spoke with Macquarie University and IT infrastructure service provider Kyndryl about how they managed the modernisation of the University’s systems while keeping the lights on at one of Australia’s top educational, research and medical facilities.  

Macquarie University’s sprawling campus in Sydney’s Northwest is practically a small city. 

Education, research, healthcare and professional service facilities accommodate more than 44,000 students, 3,000 employees and 300 global companies. Macquarie University Hospital houses 181 beds and 18 operating theatres. The campus even has its own metro station. 

“The last 10 years saw a physical transformation of the campus, with huge investment in our facilities,” says Macquarie University Chief Information and Digital Officer (CIDO) Jonathan Covell. 

“The next 10 years will be our digital transformation. We’re taking the digital estate and making it match the world-class physical estate.” 

A perfect storm

Australian universities are facing political and economic headwinds. 

Domestic enrollments are going backwards for the first time in decades. The federal government is pushing for caps on international students. Technology-savvy students have high expectations when it comes to their digital experiences. 

“We were looking forward to the return of a strong and diverse international student cohort post-COVID-19, as well as having more domestic students returning to university,” says Covell. “But we’re facing sector headwinds, with a government cap on student immigration, for example.” 

“We’re also competing with the other Australian universities to attract quality international students. Fewer school graduates are taking up university study, and more people are going into trades directly. So, competition is heating up a lot.” 

According to Covell, digital transformation is often cyclical. However, today’s emerging technologies – especially AI – push modernisation faster. 

“Tertiary education is on the brink of a paradigm shift,” he says. “Education is being fundamentally reshaped. You don’t get an opportunity like AI in every career or every generation. You don’t get the opportunity to look at every single system and ask, ‘What can we do to make this better?’” 

“It’s the coupling of the economic pressures with the opportunities and challenges that come with AI that has created a perfect storm to deliver meaningful change.” 

“If you don’t invest, you’re going to lose.” 

Covell leads a team with a vast digital transformation mandate, including Salesforce integration for current and future students, a next-generation digital learning platform, enterprise service management for students, and a major finance system upgrade. 

“Transformation is a great buzzword,” he says. “But most people confuse it with digitisation. I would not consider the Zoom era or our switch to remote teaching during the pandemic ‘transformational’. They leveraged available technology. ‘Transformational’ is taking the technology we’ve never had before and using it in ways we’ve never thought possible.” 

Laying The Foundations 

Macquarie University turned to Kyndryl, the world’s largest provider of IT infrastructure services, to navigate the complexities of modernising while maintaining the mission-critical workflows of one of Australia’s top educational, research and medical facilities. 

“At Macquarie, we support education delivery, research, professional services and healthcare. That’s been a challenge because the businesses are quite different,” says Covell. 

“Cybersecurity is a key issue, as is data sharing. However, resilience and the ability to have network downtimes are also issues. Academics and professional staff are pretty resilient to that. Still, if you’re in a clinical setting and providing patient care, you really can’t have your patient record system unavailable even for short periods.” 

The University faced myriad challenges, including disparate underlying infrastructure, operating a bespoke cloud environment and complexity in vendors and platforms.  

“We needed to escape the burden of tech debt and be more agile to respond to business needs.”

Not only did these issues weaken the organisation’s security, resiliency and efficiency, they hindered flexibility and hamstrung the University’s vision. 

“To take advantage of new technologies, you have to get the foundations right,” says Covell. “We needed to escape the burden of tech debt and be more agile to respond to business needs.” 

“We did a large review and identified the need for a complete migration to a cloud-operating model. That’s where a lot of our work with Kyndryl kicked off.” 

Kyndryl was chosen to migrate Macquarie University’s digital infrastructure from disparate environments and multi-vendor support arrangements to a scalable cloud environment, a hyperscaler. 

“We needed to escape the burden of tech debt and be more agile to respond to business needs.”

Macquarie University CIDO Jonathan Covell

Thanks to strong partnerships with all hyperscalers in the market (namely AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud), Kyndryl could support Macquarie University regardless of its chosen platform. 

“We selected AWS, and Kyndryl helped us move about 80% of our workloads, deprecating a significant amount of old hardware,” says Covell. 

“This has helped us not only reduce risk and overheads, and has made us nimbler and more responsive to the business’ needs.” 

Roy Lovli, the Vice President of Consult and Practices for Kyndryl Australia and New Zealand, says the cloud migration was a fundamental step in realising Macquarie University’s ambitious vision of digital transformation. 

“All of Macquarie University’s programs are built off the foundation of the hyperscaler at the state that we deployed. But digital transformation is less about technology and more about experience. With hyperscalers and automation, technology availability is almost a given. So, the question is, how do you realign your technology and operating models to become more responsive to your  
customers’ needs?” 

Building a True Partnership

Lovli describes Kyndryl as a “custodian” of client experience and outcomes. 

“Kyndryl has 80,000 odd engineers to tap into,” he says. “That is a huge wealth of experience and expertise that we can extract to help customers advance and modernise their estates.” 

“But that deep technical capability must be infused with customer empathy. It starts with understanding where customers are today and where they want to be.” 

Lovli laid the groundwork for a meaningful partnership with Macquarie University by spending time with Covell’s’ team and understanding the business and IT drivers that were important to them. 

“We talked about where they were heading, their concerns, their fears, and allowed them to impart their culture. You can’t take for granted that one university will be the same as another. They’re all unique.” 

“We made sure we understood Macquarie University’s drivers and achieved alignment. Establishing that relationship upfront and ensuring there’s a common goal that you’re both working towards is important. That is how you build true partnerships.” 

Playbook for Success

Modernisation is a non-linear process with innumerable challenges. But with the proper framework, Lovli says, “You can overcome any adversity that comes along.” 

The first step is establishing alignment. 

“You’ve got to understand the purpose that you’re all driving towards,” says Lovli. 

The second is baselining the business.  

“It’s important to get an independent assessment of your organisation’s maturity level,” says Lovli. “We all tend to think we’re a little bit better than we are. But you need to start by understanding your current and desired states and then identifying the gaps and steps to get to where you want to be.” 

Third, adopt an iterative approach. 

“You don’t move from starting position to achieving your end goal in one motion,” says Lovli. “It is a real iterative process.” 

“We can change directions as long as we understand the ultimate outcomes the business is shooting for. We define the stages and iterate as we go.” 

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, maximise collaboration. 

“Kyndryl can go deep on industry and technology, but the culture of Kyndryl revolves around collaboration,” says Lovli. “We are obsessed with the customer and their experiences.” 

In Macquarie’s transformation, this extended to Kyndryl’s project team working out of Macquarie Park for nine months. 

“If you’re going through a modernisation agenda, you need to do it together. It can’t be a supplier or a partner doing it in isolation,” says Lovli. “Physically bringing the teams together was a way to drive better and quicker decision-making.” 

“It felt like a collaboration to get it over the line,” says Covell. “They were the partner, not just a vendor and the strength of the relationship was critical to the success of the University’s digital transformation.” 

For more information visit www.kyndryl.com