Resource Expenditure

As part of the initial survey institutions were asked if they could quantify the amount of staff resource required to produce the three REF tables. The estimates covered a very wide range and not surprisingly institutions that were heavily supported by sophisticated IT systems took the least time to produce the REF outputs. The University of Birmingham and Queen's University Belfast were examples of this but the ease of REF production needs to be seen in the wider context of the resource expended over a number of years to bring their systems online. In both cases the systems were not simply RAE/REF systems but served other purposes as well including:

• Grant/fund management
• Internal operational reporting and KPIs
• Research fund application tracking
• Research student management

Also both universities are institutions where research is highly valued and their ranking in the hierarchy of research establishments is seen as a key performance indicator. However the resource outlay was significant and though neither institution could quantify the output, both agreed that the system development had been a major project.

It is also worth noting that universities such as Plymouth which produced its return manually were not at the higher end of the spectrum of resource expenditure on the pilot. The resource expenditure appears to be affected by a complex relationship between the amount of research in an institution, the research management model and the systems that support research within the institution.