VIP-Research

The VIP-Research System enables organisations to compare their research performance both externally and internally using a variety of criteria including; research income, research outputs, financials and postgraduate candidature, discipline information as well as student/staffing demographics. Using data supplied by Intuitive Innovations about organisations from across the world, you can use the VIP Research System to contrast your institution’s performance and, by means of the VIP-R visual presentation interface, identify strengths and any areas that may benefit from improvement. Where organisations wish to benchmark with other organisations, the system allows information from multiple entities to be contrasted on screen in either a graphical or tabular display. This can include information from various organisations across the world as well as groups of organisations such as the Ivy League, Russell Group, Go8, ATN etc.

Collecting data from the various research organisations around the world is a time consuming and difficult process. Intuitive Innovations' VIP-Research system removes the need for your key staff to collect that data and allows your senior management to focus their time on analysing and dissecting the information for decision making support.

The VIP-R system provides a graphical representation of data which has been collected over the past 10+ years.  In addition to this database of research related data on over 15,000 organisations worldwide, we also access more than 400 graphical and tabular data representations to assist senior members of research organisations gain a detailed understanding of their performance compared with their research goals.

Key features of the VIP-R system include:

Data Quality

Intuitive Innovations Pty Ltd is extremely mindful of the fact that its clients require the highest standards in quality of information to assist in their decision making capability. Intuitive Innovations Pty Ltd has a Quality Charter that clearly defines its core performance indicators in terms of data quality and maintenance. The foundation of this Data Quality Charter is a strict classification methodology to ensure that all information provided relates back to a collected core data component. Each piece of information is evaluated based on a grading system to ensure that clients understand the quality of the underlying data. The grading system is as follows:

• 1 star -   Supplied by a single public source and currently unverified
• 2 stars - Supplied by multiple sources
• 3 stars - Supplied by multiple sources and validated as a consolidated data component of an institution or government/regulatory body
• 4 stars - Supplied by a single source and validated against either primary institutions data or against government/regulatory authority
• 5 stars - Supplied by multiple sources and validated against either primary institutions data and/or against government/regulatory authority

By using this grading system displayed with the data, the client understands the quality of the data being displayed. All data supplied to the Intuitive Research Database stores the source of the data as well as appropriately data stamping it. If you are a client and would like to view the Quality Charter, please contact info@intuitiveinnovations.au.com or ask your II representative for a copy to be made available to you.

Infrastructure & Security

VIP-Research is built with Microsoft technologies and hosted on Microsoft's Windows Azure platform. The service is secure, utilising https protocols and is subject to Microsoft's Cloud Services Service Level Agreement, ensuring uptime of 99.95%. More information about Microsoft's SLA can be found here.

How can VIP-R benefit my organisation?

Today, the needs of senior management are becoming more diverse and challenging and include but are not limited to understanding

• where is my organisation positioned relative to others nationally or internationally
• what are my organisations strengths and weaknesses
• are other entities growing in specific areas of research and if so, what are they?
• has there been changes in my income/outputs/growth since implementing specific policies?
• what proportion of monies does my organisation have in specific areas and is it growing?

These items are only a fraction of the types of questions that can be answered by the VIP-R system.

Senior managers require immediate access to research information, to a system that can provide this data quickly and easily without having to spend time to learn how to use a new system.

VIP-R is this system. Consolidated data is retrieved from the VIP-R database using various sets of system data and potentially combining it with data supplied from the organisation’s own local dataset.  This provides you with the ability to:

• see the consolidated national and international information
• filter the various elements of the information
• drill into the data to understand the impact that the displayed element has on their organisation

The retrieval of this research data within each organisation is an arduous task. VIP-R provides updated data to this ever growing list of data that each university requires, as well as analyzing and categorizing the data into a format that can be immediately used to assist with decision making and reporting in all areas relating to research performance, QA, best practice and process improvement.

VIP-R includes hundreds of analyses customised to deliver information required by the specific roles involved in research within a university environment.

Custom Research Performance Reports

Intuitive Innovations has collected data for a number of international organisations worldwide for more than a decade. It has over 15000 organisations in its database and has more detailed data available about Australian and New Zealand entities. Datasets include:

• Research Income data
• Citation data
• Consolidated data including league tables
• Consolidated academic unit data
• Postgraduate data
• Teaching data
• Staff data
• Publications data
• Patents data
• Individual research data
• Discipline data and many other areas.

Much of the data includes both local and international information. This allows us to provide an expansive analysis of an organisation's research performance and capabilities. If clients have a need for a detailed graphical report of how they are performing against a series of national or international benchmarks, Intuitive Innovations can assist. By utilising the VIP-Research Database Repository (VIPRDb), we can deliver thousands of different variations of indices and graphical displays to focus senior management reports on the required aspects. Benefits include:

• Easy to understand report documents
• Clearly defined justification for transition
• Confirmation of specific aspects of research policy

Each report is

• customized to focus on the client’s own organisation and organisations with similar characteristics
• highlights entities that are growing and those that are not based on the primary focus of the report
• shows trends within the sector, within different sized organisations both nationally and internationally

Some of the reports styles include:

Alignment Report – Analyses an organisation’s alignment with their stated internal goals and foci, with its external/international comparators and with industry growth and focus based on discipline area.

Discipline Growth Report – This report shows which discipline areas are growing both nationally and internationally and which ones are shrinking. The report focuses on the areas that the client has expertise in as well as matching to where its more recent focus has been.

University Profile Report – This is VIP-Research’s most comprehensive report that looks in detail at an organisation in terms of its capacity for growth, its current research activity. Its research intensity and whether that is likely to be expanded, its, focus on quality and its alighnment (as per alignment report description. The report should assist the university in terms of strategy and planning by providing an external, objective perspective of its performance over the last 5 years and the likelihood of improvement as well as looking at where those areas could be.

HERDC/Block Funding Report – Apart from charting all of the key data elements, the report shows the winners and losers over the last few years including where those improvements have occurred.

League Table Report – Looks at a variety of the League Tables from around the world and compares where your organisation sits as well as looking at organisations around your organisation’s ranking and where they are growing/shrinking margin loan.

Our experienced staff, each having over 10 years experience in the research sector, can assist Australasian organisations with needs across a variety of specialist research areas, including the generation of these customised performance reports as well as research data translation (both internal data from core research systems as well as external data from other suppliers and sources) and benchmarking.

To find out more please contact us at info@intuitiveinnovations.com.au