Case Laurea

Discussions about establishing a development unit focused on steering digitalisation – a Digital Office – began in autumn 2024. After tendering the project, Laurea chose to partner with Digia.

Planning started right at the beginning of 2025. During the spring, the goals and operating model were defined, and the actual go‑live took place in the autumn.

Laurea was undergoing a major organisational reform and implementing a new strategy at the same time. One of the strategic objectives was to reduce organisational silos, and the Digital Office has strongly supported this.

With the establishment of the Digital Office, Laurea wanted to take a more strategic approach to managing digitalisation so that development projects support business management and benefit as many employees, students and other stakeholders as possible. One key area of development has been to consider return on investment from a broader perspective than usual – specifically, how changes impact employees, students and other partners.

Thanks to the Digital Office, digitalisation issues have, for example, become a regular topic of discussion in Laurea’s various operational management teams. Instead of addressing challenges in different parts of the organisation one by one, decisions related to digitalisation are now genuinely strategic choices for the entire organisation.

Operational and financial planning has always been a participatory process at Laurea, and the Digital Office has further strengthened this. Now all units are required to record their own development needs against the shared digitalisation roadmap, making it easier to compare, combine and prioritise them.

The Digital Office operates in close cooperation with Laurea’s IT management. The ready-made model provided by Digia has helped to define the roles of both parties and how collaboration is organised. At the same time, the Digital Office has provided a mindset and structures for how digital development, innovation and AI experiments are discussed within the organisation and across all different functions.

The Digital Office model is inclusive, and at Laurea it fits well into operational planning. The entire digitalisation roadmap has been built on function-specific interviews. When budgeting for the coming year began, planning progressed more smoothly because participants had already had the opportunity to consider in advance what digitalisation enables and how to maintain the strategic focus.

As part of establishing the Digital Office, Laurea defined clear responsibilities using the RACI model and selected change agents. Around twenty digitalisation change agents, or “digital lecturers”, play a key role both in planning for the future and in highlighting everyday best practices within teaching and research teams.

At Laurea, the goal was for a broad group of people to have a relatively comprehensive overall view of how digitalisation is being advanced at the organisational level and how the development pipeline is progressing. Through the digital programme, idea and development portfolios will ultimately be made visible to the entire staff.

From Laurea's perspective, the most important factor for smoothly establishing the Digital Office has been the support from top management and an understanding that this is not an IT project, but the development of business operations through technology. The fact that the objectives have been defined based on the overall organisational strategy has helped significantly. At the same time, it has clarified who all need to be involved in the Digital Office.

From the very beginning, Laurea has been committed to ensuring that development is not done for its own sake, but that every choice is driven by business benefits. As an operating model, the Digital Office has helped secure management support and build as comprehensive an understanding as possible across the organisation of what is being done and why.