Image: Galeanu Mihai, via Getty Images
National service turns to commercial software, abandoning years of work
A delay-plagued national research information system for New Zealand has had yet another reset, with in-house development scrapped in favour of “commercially available software”.
The long-awaited New Zealand Research Information System still does not have a clear delivery date. Designed to be a central clearing house of information on all research undertaken in New Zealand, it has been in development since 2016.
In an announcement on 22 August, the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment said that developing the technology to support the NZRIS had been “challenging”.
“A number of issues were identified which meant the IT system did not process data correctly, so we decided to pause the project whilst we investigated why these issues were occurring.”
This led to a decision to partner with the private research software company Digital Science. The NZRIS will now be adapted to run on an existing Digital Science product.
Internal restructuring
Dafydd Davies, who has been running the project for the ministry since 2019, will be replaced by Nicola Jenkin, the ministry’s manager for service design and reporting, in a move the ministry said was due to internal restructuring.
Davies said the changes followed “several months of hard work by the NZRIS team to understand the problems we encountered with the original IT build and investigate the feasibility of other solutions”.
The programme’s original delivery date was 2021, but in July of that year it was announced that it would go online in 2022.
In the latest reboot, the ministry has also established a new technical advisory group, including representatives of the Royal Society Te Apārangi, the Health Research Council, universities, Crown Research Institutes “and other funding agencies”.
The ministry has not given a public timeline for the development of the new system. Danette Olsen, general manager for science system investment and performance, told Research Professional News that “the NZRIS proof of concept will complete by the end of 2024. At the completion of the proof of concept, the ministry will assess options on how to proceed.”
The ministry says it will respond soon to questions about the process of making the decision, the costs of the development so far and how Digital Science was chosen.