Even though we already have a few weeks of the new year under our belt, I would still like to take the opportunity to give you a taste of what I have resolved to do this year in my role with the digitalization agenda in mind. For me, the issue of benchmarking is central to 2021. In recent months, much has already been done in the domain of digitalization, so now is a good time to measure ourselves against our European benchmarks and use these as a guide for the next steps in our transformation process.

A focus on measures and their broad development

As you heard at the end of last year in the .digital update, we are taking the objectives set out in the digitalization strategy as the basis for deriving new measures. These will then be implemented step-by-step. This process will keep us busy, particularly in the first half of 2021. These measures can be performed in all areas of TU Wien; ultimately digitalization will involve all areas. This is why the focus groups will play such a key part in this process: they map the overarching themes of digitalization from the various areas and carefully integrate them into their subject fields. From their previous work in their respective focus group, they have identified problem areas and future topics that may in turn lead to measures for the whole of TU Wien.

Some of these topics have already been picked up on and used as examples in the first phase of TU Wien's digitalization project, .dcalls. This made it possible to identify initial subject clusters, such as Jupyter infrastructure and Smart Campus, and work on them in pilot projects. The task now is to take another close look at the objectives in the respective subject areas for the digitalization strategy, compare previous experiences and learnings from the projects and clarify or redefine what is required. As we are no longer starting from scratch with many subjects, we can develop many of them more broadly this year: pilot projects can be used more widely at TU Wien, application enhancements can be oriented more towards services, and tried-and-tested solutions can be made available in a standard directory, many of these being in teaching.

We will, of course, identify other points of focus and prioritise topics. To ensure that we don't just work on the premise of an internal TU perspective, the benchmarks that have guided TU Wien in outlining its digitalization strategy will continue to make a relevant contribution to our work. The experience we have gained and the newly defined measures will ultimately provide us with reference points for issues that can be worked on through the next phase of the .dcall call for projects.

I am really looking forward to starting work on the forthcoming developments with you! We shall also continue to work together on the next steps in the digital transformation process!