This article was originally written in Spanish. Your browser can translate it automatically.
In a landscape where artificial intelligence and new technologies are rapidly transforming higher education, long-term planning can, at first glance, seem an increasingly complex task. For Leonardo Urrego, Head of the Planning Office at UNAD, the challenge isn't anticipating every change, but building institutions capable of adapting to them.
From this perspective, strategic planning stops being a static document and becomes a living tool, grounded in capabilities, continuous learning and evidence-based decisions.
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How do you design a 5- or 10-year strategic development plan in a context of accelerated technological change?
Planning five or ten years ahead doesn't mean trying to predict the future — it means building an institutional architecture capable of adapting to it.
A strategic development plan can't be a rigid document: it has to be a compass and a dynamic mechanism. It needs to define long-term purposes and mission-critical goals, but also build in review, updating and continuous-learning mechanisms.
At UNAD, this means planning around capabilities rather than just projects: strengthening analytics, artificial intelligence, pedagogical innovation, financial management, student support, internationalisation and digital governance.
That's why a strategic plan has to be flexible in its means, but firm in its purpose.
Technology can change every six months, but the mission stays the same.
What criteria should universities use to decide which innovations are worth investing in?
Given how fast new technologies appear, universities need to avoid two extremes: rejecting innovation out of fear of change, or adopting every trend just because it's fashionable.
At UNAD, every innovation is assessed against criteria such as its contribution to the institutional mission, its impact on the student experience, its financial sustainability, how well it integrates with the existing digital ecosystem, and its ethical, regulatory and data-protection implications.
Generative AI and agentic AI, for example, shouldn't be seen merely as novel tools, but as capabilities that can support academic processes, planning, analytics, retention and decision-making.
The question shouldn't be “what technology should we acquire?”, but “what needs do we want to solve, and what technology helps us solve them sustainably, innovatively, ethically and at scale?” That distinction is essential for telling strategic innovation apart from technological fashion.
How can universities build more agile structures without losing their strategic direction?
Universities tend to have heavily regulated structures that don't always keep pace with their environment. The challenge is making sure regulation doesn't block innovation, while still holding on to a clear strategic direction.
Institutional agility happens when a university combines governance with controlled experimentation. It's not about overhauling the whole structure every time a new technology appears, but about creating spaces where it's possible to pilot, measure, learn and scale.
At UNAD, that means working with strategic pilots, technical working groups, tracking dashboards, impact indicators and evidence-based decisions.
The key is that agility shouldn't mean improvisation. The university has to move fast, but with purpose. It has to innovate, but with traceability. It has to experiment, but while safeguarding academic quality, financial sustainability and public accountability.
How does managing technological uncertainty change at a university whose ecosystem is mainly digital?
At an institution like UNAD, where much of its operations, academic interaction and student experience take place within a digital ecosystem, technological uncertainty isn't a peripheral issue — it's a central matter of institutional management.
Technology is a structural part of the educational experience and is directly connected to the characteristics of its student populations. That's why managing it demands anticipation, investment, governance and a permanent capacity to respond.
UNAD's advantage is that its institutional model is already built on flexibility, technological mediation, territorial reach and support within digital environments. That makes it possible to understand technology not as an accessory, but as a strategic dimension of academic quality.
Agentic AI can become a real differentiator, because it allows institutions to move from platforms that merely store information to intelligent ecosystems that support, alert, recommend and inform decisions.
But the principle has to be clear: technology must serve the student, the teacher, quality and the public mission — not the other way around.
What's the key to building a future-proof university strategy?
My main piece of advice to planning leaders at other universities in the region would be this: don't build plans centred solely on technologies; build management models centred on capabilities and a clear sense of purpose.
Technologies change, get replaced and evolve. Institutional capabilities endure, and they're what allow you to adapt.
A resilient university isn't the one that buys the latest tool first — it's the one that knows how to learn from its own experience, anticipate, prioritise, govern its data, safeguard its sustainability and protect its academic mission.
A future-proof strategy needs five elements: a clear purpose, flexible planning, data governance, financial sustainability and innovation with a human sense of purpose.
A university that's ready for the future is one that turns uncertainty into learning, technology into institutional capability, and planning into a living tool for shaping life projects that give back to a better society.
The future can't be fully predicted, but it can — and should — be prepared for.
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Leonardo Urrego's reflections point to a central idea: faced with the pace of technological change, universities' response shouldn't be to try to anticipate every new tool, but to develop the institutional capacity to adapt.
Planning under uncertainty means holding on to long-term purposes while revisiting and reshaping the paths to reach them. That balance between strategy, innovation and adaptability may be one of the keys for higher education institutions to remain relevant in a landscape of constant transformation.
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