With the higher education landscape so competitive, universities have a responsibility to not only be as appealing as possible to students, but continue to support them throughout their studies. A powerful drive to achieve this has led the University of Tasmania to undergo a major transformation, putting the needs of researchers and students first.
The University is well-known for its unwavering dedication to research. In 2025, it ranked number one for climate action, globally, for the fourth consecutive year, and is recognised as a leader in partner-driven collaborative research. So it stands to reason that the university has been tirelessly overhauling its research management systems, in order to support researchers as much as possible.
“Prior to this project, our research management systems were entirely bespoke, built in-house over a number of years,” explains Kathleen Mackay, CIO. “It was basically all built by one employee who was with the University for 32 years, and retired in 2024. That took us through quite a journey; from being a very small university to reporting over a hundred million dollars a year in research income, while various changes in government and assessment processing around research happened around us.
“We had this person who would build us anything we wanted, whenever we wanted, until he retired. At that point, we realised there was some quite dated technology that needed replacing, while there were also a lot of off-the-shelf products coming out that offered really significant improvements.”
Improving Life for Researchers
The University aims to enable researchers to make an impact for and from Tasmania. The real goal is to apply the research in tangible ways that make the world a better place. The issue is that the university had outgrown its ability to do that, with its previous internal system. It attracts excellent researchers who bring in a lot of money. But to keep doing that, it needs to offer great systems that make their lives easier.
Approaching this challenge led Mackay and her team to focus on multiple system changes. The goal was to impact the process of managing research admin in the best way. “We were able to leverage what a lot of other universities do in Australia. In terms of the types of products and vendors that are well supported,” says Richard Eccles, Associate Director (Enterprise Business Services). “Knowing who the strong players in the Australian market are helped inform how we approach this project from the technical side. Especially regarding the potential to integrate and automate.
“There are a couple of products we were looking at. There were components of functionality we needed as we were trying to re-platform. Overall, going through that process of spending the time to approach the market, asking questions and seeing demos led us to that evaluation stage to pick the right product.”
Promoting Inclusivity
One thing that’s important to the University is ensuring students have control of their own personal information. And how they represent themselves. Enabling people to change their name, email, or pronouns used to be a complicated process. But the university has ensured that it’s now significantly easier.
“The gender identifier piece is a good place to focus, from an inclusivity perspective,” says Dayna King, Executive Director Student Services. “I have a real, personal connection to gender identifiers because it’s been a way for the university to provide an opportunity for students to express themselves. I think we’re leading the sector on that front. We’ve integrated this ability for students to choose their own identifiers right from the point of application. They let us know how they want to be identified. And that flows through all the downstream systems, so students don’t have to do a lot of rework or telling their story multiple times.”