2026 CAUDIT Awards Finalists

Hamish Scorrar is a calm, practical and inclusive cyber security leader who has transformed the University of Otago’s Cyber Operations team. Since joining in 2025, he has led more than 60 incident responses, rebuilt capability, delivered major projects at dramatically reduced cost, and strengthened cross‑team collaboration. He introduced new training practices, improved processes, and created a culture of confidence, cohesion and continuous improvement. His critical thinking, humility and people‑focused leadership have restored trust in a previously struggling function. As one colleague noted, his approach enabled “effective response efforts, seamless collaboration, and flowed well into Governance Group activities.”

Antoinette Murphy is a strategic, people‑centred digital leader who turns complex university priorities into delivered outcomes. She leads cross‑functional teams through high‑stakes change with clarity, transparency and strong support, ensuring colleagues feel empowered and included. Antoinette has driven major institutional initiatives, including globally scalable online exams for 70,000+ students and the University’s Two‑Lane Assessment strategy. She balances innovation with sustainability, applying disciplined vendor management and long‑term financial stewardship. Known for calm, integrity and collaboration, she is a trusted partner to senior leaders and a positive role model who consistently lifts capability, culture and confidence across the University.

Peter Hughes is a calm, disciplined and inclusive technology leader who guided Adelaide University through one of Australia’s most complex higher‑education mergers. He coordinated more than 40 teams and 500 contributors, established core IT foundations, sustained service continuity, strengthened cyber‑resilient infrastructure, and supported leaders through cultural integration, delivering a stable, scalable environment for 70,000 students and 11,000 staff.

Reimagining Higher Degree by Research (HDR): Transforming Research through Intelligent Automation is a cross functional initiative between RMIT's Information Technology Services (ITS) Automation team, Research Strategy & Services, and the School of Graduate Research (SGR). The program redesigned and automated high volume HDR administrative processes to improve the experience of graduate researchers and academic colleagues while enabling staff to focus on higher value support and complex case management. Targeting research administration teams, academic staff and more than 2,700 HDR candidates, the initiative streamlined project and scholarship advertising, candidate milestone management and examiner conflict of interest checks. Since 2025, the program has processed thousands of transactions, returned almost 700 staff hours, significantly reduced processing times, and improved the consistency, accuracy and timeliness of HDR services. Beyond delivering operational efficiencies, the initiative established a scalable model for automation and AI enabled service transformation that is now being adopted enterprise-wide at RMIT.

Sydney Profiles is the University of Sydney's new academic profiles platform, launched publicly in January 2026. Built on Digital Science's Symplectic Elements, it replaced four disconnected legacy systems to transform how the University collects, manages and displays research outputs and other academic activities. Sydney Profiles leverages integration with trusted sources such as research identifiers and citation metric platforms for automated, timely research outputs data harvesting. This data interoperability has reduced manual entry from ~35% to ~1%, resulting in time savings and freeing up academics and research support staff to focus on higher-value work. Further, research expertise and impact is now more visible and discoverable to collaborators, industry, prospective students and media. Sydney Profiles is one of three core components being delivered under the myResearch Sydney program, a priority initiative to simplify the research administration lifecycle under Digital Sydney, the University’s master plan for digital enablement to support its 2032 Strategy.

Achieving world-class research requires a digital foundation that removes complexity and ensures research investment is directed toward discovery rather than administration and infrastructure. Guided by the University of Newcastle's (the University) Looking Ahead Strategy 2020–2025 (the Strategy), Digital Technology Solutions (DTS) has strengthened the University's digital ecosystem for research through the ‘Enable and Enhance the Research Lifecyle’ (EERL). EERL has improved how research information, outputs, and data are managed across the University through complementary solutions managed under two themes: - Opening access: Open Research Newcastle (ORN), providing a streamlined platform for publishing research outputs - Data Efficiency: Research Data Management (RDM), introducing structured storage lifecycle management to move inactive research data into more cost-effective storage while maintaining accessibility. Together, these initiatives have created a more connected, data-rich and sustainable research environment, reducing administrative burden, improving institutional data management, and enabling greater investment in research capability.

Staff and students at the University of Newcastle (the University) were navigating academic systems that were fragmented, providing an inconsistent user experience and dependent on manual interventions. It was recognised that current solutions were no longer fit-for purpose to ensure student retention and employability. The Academic Systems Program (the Program) was established to deliver digital solutions that would improve the student journey and better facilitate the achievement of workplace readiness in line with the priorities of the 'Life-Ready Graduates' pillar of the University’s Looking Ahead Strategic Plan 2020–2025. In line with this, three separate solutions were requested by Academic Division to enhance student experience: Adverse Circumstances, Timetabling and Student Placement Systems. These initiatives have collectively improved flexibility, accessibility, wellbeing and career readiness for tens of thousands of students while establishing a repeatable model for future student-focused digital transformation.

Adelaide University transformed the student digital experience across the full lifecycle, from discovery and application through to study and support. Delivered in nine months by newly formed teams from two foundation universities, the initiative created unique and connected digital experiences for current students and future students. Adobe Experience Cloud, Oracle CRM, applications, curriculum and student management platforms, underpin a student and learning solution connecting student services, enquiry management, targeted communications, study advice and specialist support within a seamless landscape. Together, these programs replaced fragmented systems and manual processes with a coherent, personalised and data-informed experience for prospective and enrolled students. The model was co-designed by IT, marketing and recruitment, curriculum and student experience, embedding collaboration from concept to launch. It has delivered material scale and impact, including high website usage, substantial enquiry and thousands of student support appointments and cases, while establishing a sustainable model for future student lifecycle initiatives.

Each examination period, the University of Melbourne delivers approximately 100,000 exam sittings, including more than 57,000 fully digital and alternate exam sittings across the Royal Exhibition Building, Wilson Hall and an alternate-arrangements centre. Digital Exams is a cross-functional shared-services partnership spanning Student and Scholarly Services, the Enterprise Services Group and the Chief Information Officer Group, delivering secure, reliable, equitable and well-supported large-scale digital assessment. The program covers exam-venue and network engineering, device readiness, live in-exam support, accessibility arrangements, load testing, venue logistics, examination design support, quality assurance and academic-integrity monitoring. In Semester 1 2026, the University also piloted Schoolyear’s Safe Exam Workspace to enable authentic, software-based exams. The initiative protects assessment integrity and fairness for tens of thousands of students while expanding what digital exams can offer. Target audience: all coursework students sitting centrally supported and alternate exams, and the faculties assessing them.

The Modern Workplace Program standardised 85 Microsoft Teams enabled meeting rooms and implemented Microsoft Teams phone across the University, enabling the retirement of the legacy Cisco Webex platform and the removal of 2,000+ physical handsets within 6 months. This transformed the way Victoria University (VU) staff connect, communicate and collaborate by replacing legacy technology with a sustainable Microsoft 365 ecosystem. The program also delivered a modern SharePoint based Staff Portal, replacing an ageing intranet, containing outdated and duplicated content, while strengthening governance, content ownership and information to be easily sourced by staff. It has reduced dependence on ageing hardware, network infrastructure and ongoing equipment replacement, while supporting flexible and hybrid ways of working. By consolidating digital services onto a modern cloud-based platform, the program has simplified the technology footprint, optimised staff experience and embedded sustainability principles into the design, procurement and delivery of Victoria University's future workplace environment.

In 2025, Adelaide University IT designed and mobilised the operational support model required to launch a new university on Day One. The IT Hypercare Program and Launch Hub brought together service management, onsite support, product teams, incident response, workforce planning and business engagement into one coordinated operating model. The work prepared three parallel technology environments for cutover, while maintaining services across the two foundation universities and building the support capability for Adelaide University. The 2025 activity delivered the governance, service pathways, support coverage, escalation model and transition to support disciplines that underpinned the January 2026 launch. The effectiveness of that preparation was demonstrated through the Hypercare period, with 675 systems cut over, 475,000+ users migrated, 82,000+ IT requests handled, 22 major incidents resolved and 47 critical incident response groups coordinated. Service performance also improved, including speed to answer improving from more than 12 minutes to 1 minute 14 seconds, abandonment reducing from 26% to 6.6%, customer satisfaction reaching 4.37 out of 5, self service adoption reaching 75%, and request fulfilment improving by 23%.

RMIT commenced the Curriculum Mapping & Management Tool (CMMT) Project to address pain points and inefficiencies in the curriculum management lifecycle, which impact our productivity, our ability to implement enterprise-level product innovation, and our ability to satisfy regulatory obligations. Fragmented curriculum information across systems was contributing to a lack of data accuracy and certainty, duplicated and redundant staff effort and ultimately a lack of insight into RMIT products and curriculum offerings. The CMMT transformed curriculum lifecycle management through standardisation and digitisation, ensuring accuracy of processing outcomes and resulting in productivity efficiencies. It introduced a solution for the design, development, review, and publishing of curriculum information, providing a single source of truth for product and curriculum data, enabling enterprise-wide product architecture innovation, and enhancing our ability to respond to regulatory and sector change, and new and emerging business opportunities.

Following a major cyber incident in 2025, the UNDA IT portfolio coordinated a whole-of-University recovery and resilience uplift. The activity combined rapid containment, staged restoration of critical services, manual continuity support, vendor coordination, governance uplift and lessons-learned planning. An independent post-incident review subsequently concluded that key academic milestones, including Orientation Week, teaching commencement and graduations, proceeded as planned despite significant operational disruption. The review also recognised the timely mobilisation of governance, effective coordination across teams and external partners, and a structured recovery approach that balanced immediate operational needs with longer-term resilience uplift Feedback from IT and business stakeholders shows the response supported students, staff and core operations while exposing and addressing deeper opportunities in resilience, data governance, communication, service management and sustainable technology foundations.