9 - Requirements Gathering for a Research Data Service

Summary

Aims

The aim of this chapter is to explore how to identify the requirements for an RDS in an institution. It will help you think through what you would want to learn about user needs from an RDS and how to gather such information.

Finding out more about an institution

Throughout the book so far we have prompted you to talk to researchers about research and research data as a way of starting to build your own deeper understanding of the issues. This is solid groundwork for developing an intuition for what types of service are needed.

At some point you may well want to gather evidence more systematically as a foundation for making decisions about services. Of course, one cannot simply ask about what services people want. It is hard for ‘users’ to imagine what services there could be. We will be thinking more about what they need, based on an examination of existing practice. But in any case systematic data will be invaluable for working out the appropriate service for the needs of your institution. Systematic evidence will certainly help you in influencing others about the direction the service should take. As it will be an inherently collaborative challenge for a number of professional services working with researchers themselves, you will need an evidence base to persuade others what the service should look like.

There are a number of other advantages to undertaking such a study. It might seem that senior research leaders in the institution will already know the situation in their faculty or department. Actually, they are probably as uncertain about current data practices as anyone else. They will probably be extremely interested in the results of any study. They can help themselves to identify potential problem areas. Undertaking the formal task of having a project to study user needs will help assemble stakeholders and get them working together. It will identify problem areas but it will also help you identify pathfinders and examples of good practice.

An evidence-gathering process itself will also be a means to inform users, alerting them to the existence of an institutional issue they may not have thought about. As the first step in a change management process an evidence-gathering exercise could itself have a powerful effect.