Usability on the Edge: The Implementation of u:cris at the University of Vienna

Abstract

Delivered at the CRIS2014 Conference in Rome; published in Procedia Computer Science 33 (Jul 2014).Contains conference paper (7 pages) and presentation (24 slides).In 2011, the top management of the University of Vienna made a fundamental (and possibly trend-setting) decision to replace the old research information system with a contemporary vendor system. This paper highlights the reasons behind the decision and illustrates the implementation process, which is not only a challenge from a technical point of view. It is an even more challenging political task to involve all the stakeholders and especially those who have to live with the burden of recording research output - researchers and staff alike. Our experience shows that a legal reporting obligation, such as that dictated by the Universities Act 2002, serves as an incentive for users to populate a CRIS with up-to-date information only to a certain extent. Rather, a user- and researcher-centred approach is crucial for a CRIS to gain user acceptance

Migrating 120,000 Legacy Publications from Several Systems into a Current Research Information System Using Advanced Data Wrangling Techniques

“…Although the quality of research information in general has been widely discussed, and data quality has been a major issue in many CRIS implementation projects (see, e.g., [30][31][32][33][34]), issues related to the migration of legacy publication data have remained surprisingly overlooked. Bevan and Harrington [35] described lessons learned from implementing a CRIS platform at Cranfield University, which was accomplished within a year using Converis.…”

“…Buchmayer et al [31] reported a Pure implementation at the University of Vienna. Although not focusing on data quality, the authors noted that the implementation of master data synchronization involved a higher-than-expected workload, and the migration of existing data led to problems that had not been considered before.…”