Dr Frankie Stevens1, Dr Emilia Decker2, Maureen Bezanson2, Supriya Dubey2
1Research Infrastructure Services, Australia, 2Southern Cross University, Australia
Biography:
Frankie Stevens is a seasoned digital leader with over 20 years in the Higher Education sector, specialising in research infrastructure, strategy, and innovation. As Director of Research Infrastructure Services, she drives impactful, future-focused initiatives that enhance research through advanced technologies. A skilled strategist and relationship builder, Frankie has led major infrastructure implementations and governance reforms to support data-driven research. She works closely with stakeholders across local, state, and national levels to promote collaboration and uplift digital research capability. Frankie is passionate about shaping a more connected, innovative future for research across institutions.
Abstract:
Southern Cross University has embarked on a transformative initiative to unify its research systems into an integrated, end-to-end information ecosystem. This effort prioritises transparency and accountability by seamlessly connecting grant management, ethics approvals, research data planning, IT provisioning, and data publication processes.
Motivated by growing expectations around research integrity, compliance, sustainable infrastructure and impact reporting, the university designed and implemented lightweight processes and technologies to create system connections that enable greater transparency, efficiency and accountability across the research lifecycle.
A key enabler was the development and rollout of a new research data management (RDM) planning system to reflect institutional requirements, integrate with existing platforms, and support evolving compliance demands. This system supports practical tracking of research data against grant and ethics approvals, ensures storage, HPC, and compute are provisioned in line with data classification, and enables research websites and published data assets to be linked back to authoritative project metadata.
The implementation also introduced new functionality for researchers, including dynamic RDMP workflows, visibility of approval and provisioning statuses, and streamlined pathways for publishing datasets in line with FAIR principles. Crucially, it was co-designed with researchers, IT, and research office staff to reduce administrative burden and improve usability.
This presentation will share how the university implemented minimal but robust governance practices and leveraged workflow triggers to connect systems, and surfaced insights for institutional reporting. It will reflect on early outcomes and lessons and offer insights for institutions pursuing coordinated digital research infrastructure.