The urgency to comprehend the implications of digital intelligence on the management of education has never been greater. Universities globally are under the pressure of expanding access, assuring equity, and simultaneously competing in a climate characterized by rapid digitalization (Knight & Gašević, 2023). The Global Digital Education Management (GLODEM) Dataset responds to this demand by providing cross-country and cross-sector empirical evidence on the relation between readiness of infrastructure, technological capability, governance and adaptability to sustained transformative change (Nguyen et al., 2021). It has scope that covers 92 institutions proportionally sampled from the Times Higher Education World University Rankings. This ensures methodological soundness and global representativeness (UNESCO, 2024). The dataset informs policy discussions at the global, regional, and local levels owing to the ability to make direct comparisons across 20 countries and the differing resource endowments and governance frameworks in place. This aids scholars in analyzing different theories regarding adoption, digital governance, and adjustments to higher education institutions (Komljenovic, 2024). The dataset builds upon the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology by adding factors, such as the equity of the adoption infrastructure, the capacity of governance, and cultural adaptability, which have previously been omitted in the literature on technology adoption (Fernández et al., 2023). Unlike previous datasets, this one is distinctive because it combines scale, cross-border country classification, and empirical econometrics, thus being the first dataset to explicitly connect the drivers of adoption to tangible transformation (Inamorato dos Santos et al., 2023). Most importantly, the analysis shows that infrastructure is the strongest predictor of transformation, followed by capability, and governance with cultural adaptability serving a moderating role (HolonIQ, 2024). These findings bridge the gap between theoretical literature on the adoption of technology and global challenges on educational inequity and systemic injustice. This dataset enhances open science by providing reproducible, transparent, and publicly available indicators under a CC BY 4.0. It focuses on actionable insights: universities should ensure availability of bandwidth and digital repositories before implementing any high-level analytics; governance frameworks should receive as much funding as technology; text Multilateral agencies should consider cultural adaptability as a core prerequisite to technology transformation. This dataset contributes to theory by incorporating global governance, infrastructure equity, and institutional adaptability to the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology, which extends the framework’s descriptive adequacy and articulates an enhanced lens through which to assess the phenomena of digital transformation in higher education systems. It ties findings to global rather than merely local discourse.