14 August 2025 
Jane Harrison-White, Executive Director
AUDE is very proud, in a summer of reports and tools, to launch our new ‘digital roadmap', or to give it its correct and splendid name, ‘How to Digitise and Visualise Your Estate – Bringing Estates Intelligence to Life’.
Self-evidently universities are going at different speeds in their adoption of digital technologies to support estates decision-making. We can all only travel at the speed resources allow, and this is understood. But as we look ahead to an estates and facilities future that is ever more enabled by digital technologies, including AI, we now have colleagues that are a step or two further down the road that we can learn from. Hence a ‘roadmap’ that includes advice from some of those already walking this path – and AUDE is very grateful for the work of those supplying case study material for this guide, and the time of all of those that have helped us to create it.
This is an output from the AUDE Digital Estates special interest group which is co-chaired on our behalf by Richard Draper, (University of Oxford), and Paul Eyden, Matt Hoper and Brett Plant (all of the University of Warwick) – thankyou to all of them and the whole group’s membership for their work. We are also immensely grateful to the team at Provelio who have worked with AUDE members in this guide’s production.
The guide suggests a six-stage process to help us think about the shift from ‘static digital estates’ to ‘smart digital estates’ – characterised by different levels of data availability, integration and automation, for instance. The guide is not a long one, but may help you put some structure around your thinking. Where on a six-step process are you? Are you visualising your available data (through dashboards and similar) in ways that support your team and your university Council to take appropriate decisions? Or have you progressed further, perhaps to a stage where data feeds into the enhanced efficiency of predictive maintenance regimes?
We’re all here together. Let’s keep learning as a whole AUDE community. I’m very happy to recommend this report to you as it launches.
