The future of support services

The plan is for a new organization to be in place on April 1, 2027. 

In cases where collaboration concerns both education and research, the two departments are allowed to develop pragmatic solutions. 

Risk analyses will be carried out around the proposal. This is a new way of working and thinking about support. The starting point is that the support will be more operationally close to the academy in order to be adapted to the needs of the academy.     

You can get inspiration from and find good examples from others, but at the same time, each university is unique, so it is never possible to copy the organization straight off. For example, Linnaeus University is in the process of organising itself in an administrative level, and Malmö University already has such an organisation.

The organisational change in itself does not entail any cutbacks, but we do know that the university is facing major financial challenges. Therefore, we need to continue to develop and work in other ways, and this is part of that work. Hopefully, savings will be made through digitalization and AI, but there will also be parts of the support activities that will be removed while others are allowed to grow and develop.

With the new Division of Research, we see opportunities to gather expertise that can provide better support to researchers. In recent years, many investments have been made with the aim of increasing external funding, and this work continues. 

This will be done through the new board for the operational support that is proposed and that we form new dialogue meetings where the core business and the support business meet regularly. 

There will be work during the autumn to concretize exactly what it will look like, but it will involve dialogues at the department level with representatives of the departments and the various departments within the support services.

It is easier to make the organizational change itself, a little more difficult with the processes. But what requires a lot of work, and perhaps is most important, is precisely the cultural work. We will have to come back to exactly how this will happen, but it is on the agenda.

It is not yet clear in details, but we will continue to work on it during the autumn. When we chose to form FUS and close down a number of other departments, that issue was investigated and then the investigators suggested not to bring together student support and support for teachers/researchers/departments. 

There is of course a risk, but the idea is that the organizational change will lay a foundation for the savings.

The idea is to transfer money to education and research, and together with stronger research and education support, it is hoped that external funding will also increase.

Not at the moment, but it will of course be important how it is organized. The first step will be to see what will be brought there and then that the management of that department together with the staff who will be there work out how it will be organized internally.

So far, this is a proposal. But the idea is that the University Board will decide on an overall administrative level in September. Before that, we will conduct business analyses and risk assessments so that we can determine exactly what it is that we need to change. It is only when we have worked through the analysis phase that we can say which competencies belong in different parts of the organization. 

Yes, the new board will handle issues relating to the entire support service.