ICT for higher education institutions: Insights from university museums' performance management

The spread of Covid-19 has spurred the digitalization of higher education institutions (HEIs). While previous research has predominantly studied the impact of the pandemic on teaching and research activities, this chapter focuses on HEIs’ third mission, as activities including knowledge transfer and public engagement. A public management perspective is adopted to explore the implications of the contextual changes due to the pandemic on how people and activities are managed in university museums, as relevant organizations within the universities’ third mission. A case study has been conducted by gathering data from documents and focus groups involving key actors of the University of Pavia’s museums’ system. The findings highlight how the ICT-driven changes in the settings and activities performed by the university museums influenced the functional components of their performance management system (PMS). The results also suggest that placing ICT at the center of institutional strategies might not be enough to ensure the proper link between contextual changes and those systems that are supposed to manage people and activities within HEIs. To this aim, in the structuring of every HEIs’ governance, an adaptive educational environment should be promoted, pivoted on practitioners’ digital professionalization and skills development.