Measuring the costs and benefits of RDM to support a business caseResearch Data Network workshop (Cardiff)

Graham Hay

18 May 2016

Outline for today

• Background to the project• Aims of the project• Overarching logic mapping• Measuring the costs of RDM• Measuring the benefits of RDM

Background

• No clear economic evidence to support the case for sustained investment in RDM

• Relatively little has been done to quantitatively measure the benefits of RDM

• Approach to costing is bespoke and fragmented

• Lack of clarity on how to model, codify and calculate costs and benefits

Aim of this project

• Develop a general framework for understanding RDM and identifying the costs and benefits associated with it

• Review and critique of the methods that have been used to estimate the impact (costs and benefits) of RDM

• Recommend methods Jisc and HEI’s can use to estimate the costs and benefits of RDM

• (if possible) present a quantified baseline for institutions involved in the Shared Services pilot as well as the wider community

Developing an overarching framework

Key points

• RDM is a complex domain!• “good” RDM vs. lack of “good” RDM• Aggregate costs and benefits for economic

evaluation – Omitted issues include:

• the disconnect between the stakeholders that bear the costs and those that benefit from providing RDM;

• funding provisions and who pays (or who should pay) for RDM; • how best to communicate and obtain buy-in from the numerous

stakeholders of the RDM process; and• how RDM activities should be distributed/organised within the different

stakeholders

• Nothing on timescales (yet…)

The ideal case: a CE logic mapping

Costs

Benefits

Challenges and difficulties

• Costing tools, and HEIs’ experiences, tend to be heterogeneous

• There are often large uncertainties associated with future costs

• There are practical difficulties to monetising all the benefits of RDM

• The benefits also are (often) diffuse, uncertain and long term

• How attributable are wider impacts of RDM?• What would HEIs have done in the absence of RDM

(the counterfactual)?

Refined CE logic map

CostsBenefits

Costing RDM

Recapping the logic map

Suggested cost framework

Amended cost framework

The activity-cost structure

• Importance of each activity

• Complexity vs. simplicity?

• Do any additional activities need to be included?

• Can we make any simplifying assumption on any of these parameters, or should we rely on observed data only?

Measuring the benefits of RDM

Recapping the logic map

Suggested benefits framework

Measuring the costs and benefits of RDM to support a business caseResearch Data Network workshop (Cardiff)

Graham Hay

gh@camecon.com

18 May 2016