If there’s one thing this talk, from Stuart Bolton (Consultant) and Richard Rankin (Queens Unviersity, Belfast) brought to the fore it’s quite how important it is to get systems talking to one another. REF draws from HR, research and specialist data and requires that data to be of good quality and capable of being cross-linked in a reliable manner.
Here, as with so many similar situations, preparedness is key. If you have data in ship-shape order and with common coding across the board life should be a lot easier than otherwise.
Queens seem to have the situation licked and are even in a position to repurpose the data, via their CMS and Sharepoint, into information sources for senior management, research staff and for providing academic CVs. All marvellous stuff.
And the lessons learned here can be carried across to non-research areas as well. Get your data sorted and you can make a lot of it. Leave it in a mess and it’s no use to anyone.