Newsmail #22, 2022-03-23

Dear all,

Today, the KTH president has announced a major restructuring of the entire University Administration, including all support functions. The announcement was made in a number of physical meetings, at 13.00, when all staff employed by the administration were required to attend. The restructuring basically means that all support functions, all administrative staff on school level, will merge with the university level.

The motivation behind the restructuring is to increase efficiency of the university administration and to improve the local support for the departments. One important reason for the change is that KTH has grown considerably during the last years, mainly based on external research funding, and the need for support has evolved, and it is now necessary to make sure that the university administration develops accordingly.

The current organization is based on a previous merger where local administrative functions at every unit and department joined a school-level organization. With the steps announced today, a lot of emphasis is on the local support for our researchers and teachers and how this can be secured with the new organization. 

I myself believe that this is a step in the right direction. We will see a more structured and well-organized university administration, we will have access to the entire support structure (and not be limited to only ITM support), and it gives us a chance to establish what “local support” means.

With that said, the university administration now leaps into a huge development work where the current needs are to be analyzed, plans and organizations are to be developed. In these activities, representatives for our daily work will be engaged, interviewed, quizzed. We will be invited to focus group meetings and to do evaluations. In these activities, it is crucial that we explain and express our support needs and communicate openly about our hopes and challenges so that the university administration can develop into an efficient support system.

Best,

Martin