ZKI Top Trends Survey 2026

The Strategy and Organisation Working Group of the ZKI Association conducts an annual online survey among university IT managers (CIOs, data centre managers, IT directors). The aim is to identify key issues and developments in the IT sector at universities and research institutions. The survey consists of a core survey with ten continuous questions and changing focus questions. The core survey for 2026 has been revised from twelve questions to ten. It covers current challenges relating to trends and digitalisation, regulatory requirements (data protection, IT security, accessibility), the use of AI, strategic priorities, IT governance and competence building in IT organisations. The focus questions for 2026 address three related topics: digital sovereignty (independence from global technology providers, European alternatives), financial leeway (budget development for strategic IT decisions) and cooperation (joint solutions, shared services, use of public infrastructure as a balance between independence and economic efficiency). A total of 351 people took part in the 2026 survey, including 243 from Germany, 55 from France, 21 from Switzerland, 12 from Italy, 10 from Austria, 9 from the Netherlands and one from Finland. The results are available in two formats: an interactive dashboard allows you to filter the data yourself by country, type of university and size. In addition, edited evaluation documents with diagrams and analyses are available in German, English and French. You can find the evaluation documents here. You can access the interactive dashboard for the survey results at https://hu.berlin/tt26 Last year's survey results can be found at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14883642