Interview

Tim Cahill: I wanted to start by getting you to give a sense of what research infrastructure at University of Western Australia encompasses in terms of breadth, scale, etc.

Andrew Page: The research infrastructure includes all of the elements which researchers need to support their research activities. You can think of this in terms of extending from what individual academics need to be able to carry out the research that they do, and some of those elements are going to be more generic: like computers to be able to write what they do, but others more specific to their disciplines. So, there's that category of research infrastructure.

There's also that which is larger, more expensive, or more complicated than an individual academic is able to host themselves. That might be shared across academics within a school or shared across schools and areas of the university. It extends all the way up to what you could think of as central research infrastructure, which is needed by individual academics, but it is more than any of them could fund or support. It needs that central support and so that's how you think about it organisationally.

In terms of breadth, UWA as a research-intensive university is also a comprehensive university, and so its research spans a large number of areas, and so we need to ensure that we have the research infrastructure that's appropriate for all of the academic activities that we have. In the humanities and social sciences, you may have areas like the digitisation centre to transform artifacts, there are collections such as those which exist within a museum. Then we can then expand into areas like engineering and science, where there's more equipment for viewing things like microscopy and characterisation or transforming objects. Then if you move into the health and medical areas, it's that hospital-related equipment. So, there's both organisational depth, but also organisational breadth.

Tim Cahill: And suffice it to say, the scale of research infrastructure at University of Western Australia is large and complex.

Andrew Page: It's large and complex. Traditionally the research infrastructure that we have has largely been in response to the needs of the academics who the university hosts and is supporting. The academics have come with the ideas and said, “we need this type of equipment to be able to facilitate these ideas". Sometimes we are talking about off-the-shelf equipment, other times we are having equipment where we have professors like Professor David Blair who says: ‘I want to discover gravity waves’. When you haven't yet discovered a gravity wave you can't just go and buy a gravity wave detector. It's about what equipment do we need in order to be on that journey?  The extent of that equipment needs to be responsive to those innovative ideas that the academics have. It's not just a matter of looking in product catalogues and choosing what's there.

Tim Cahill: Which is a good segue to my next question, which is if you can cast your mind back to before we started working together; What were the challenges that you were hoping to address by bringing a strategy over research infrastructure?

Andrew Page: I think the chief challenge is, it's not that we didn't have a strategy. It's clear we had a strategy because you could look at the behaviour of the organisation to work out what its strategy was, but from my perspective, it wasn't a clearly articulated strategy. But that strategy was: ‘How do we support a diversity of our academics by ensuring that they have the cutting-edge infrastructure that they need to deliver quality research’?

And so, our processes and mechanisms were structured that way. The challenge that we faced was, that model was suitable when universities (more generally in Australia), were funded at a higher level in a way to support the research activities that they conduct. Secondly, universities had greater flexibility to generate additional income when they were less regulated with things like international student caps.

And the cost of both research infrastructure and the experts needed to run that are expanding. You've got, on the one hand, an increase in cost space combined with a restriction in funds available to the organisation to be able to support that. Those two facts meant that we have to make more strategic decisions about the research infrastructure that we have. So, we need to make hard choices. How do we ensure that the investments that we make, we use most efficiently and effectively to deliver the highest quality and impactful research outcomes?

That was largely the challenge. How do we place some central organisation around the research infrastructure that we have, both in terms of equipment and in terms of staffing, but how do we do that in a way that does not undermine the academic driven, future focused nature of the research ambitions and also so that we maintain the comprehensiveness of a research-intensive university?

Tim Cahill: I don't know if you thought about this explicitly when we were initially engaging and talking about how we might support that, but we came to you with a particular approach, which is not necessarily the typical approach you would get from a consultant coming to discuss strategy design with a client. Was there anything in particular about how we approached that, or proposed to approach that, or upon reflection did wind up approaching it, that was helpful to solving that challenge?

Andrew Page: As I reflect on it, one of the observations I've had with working with various consultants, as a university, is that universities are, I suspect, probably unique, but certainly very distinctive organisations. People who come from other industries to work in universities, it often takes them a long time to understand what the heart of a university is, which to me is really it's academic staff who have a passion to train students in understanding current knowledge, acquire the skills to generate new knowledge, and to conduct research to push new knowledge ahead. As a result universities are unusual workplaces in that you'll find university staff will retire from a university and keep on engaged with research without being paid. There's almost no other organisation where people will continue to come to work when they're no longer paid. The secret sauce of the university is those people and their passion. Working with consultants, I find most of initial time is spent trying to teach those consultants why the university is quite different from all the other organisations that they've worked with. Then you’re usually three quarters of the way through the time that was allocated:

one of the advantages with working with you and your team was that we not only didn't we have to explain to you how universities operated. You were suggesting to us about different ways that universities could operate, which is quite refreshing or no, not quite - extremely refreshing.

But also, we didn't have to waste time explaining to you about why as a university we cared about research,why we had research infrastructure, how we used research infrastructure that was quite different from the way that a large corporation (or a mining company or oil and gas) might use infrastructure to achieve its ends. I think that was a really important thing for us, that it meant we didn't waste time having to train you up so you could get straight in. It also meant, the actual depth that we were able to get to in the process of coming up with a strategy was much deeper than we would've been able to get with some other organisations I've worked with.

Tim Cahill: One of the things I reflect on in the engagement was that throughout, and I think without exception, everybody we worked with from the university was very positively predisposed to the process, the way of working. The workshop environments were very enjoyable. People had fun, people felt listened to. The other side of that where you've been implementing has been relatively smooth because a lot of people I feel have bought into the process as we went through. I consider that a success of the process and the approach as well as the people involved and your leadership of it. But that's not something that is guaranteed in these kinds of engagements.

Andrew Page: How I think...oh... I know how I approached engagement with Research Strategies Australia, and I think it was echoed across all of the institution, is that we said, ‘Okay, let's trust you enough to go along with this’. We were institutionally open to go on a journey with you. That doesn't mean we weren't cynical and skeptical and challenging and all of those sorts of elements. Certainly, along the way I encountered lots of people saying, “What are we doing this for?” “No. We should be doing X, Y, and Z”. I had a number of conversations where I needed to say: ‘No, trust the process. If it ends up somewhere useless, it doesn't matter. We can just write our own strategy at the end’. It really was the whole reason for inviting you in was so that we could work with you to get the best out of you. It was about saying: ‘Okay, let's,not suspend our critical thought, but let's exercise trust in the process. And if the evidence supports that, we'll just continue’.

Tim Cahill: I do remember multiple times you mentioning in those workshops, let's trust in the process and giving those riding instructions. I do think that really helped,and to know that you were doing that behind the scenes as well. I do think that in many ways there's a before and after in the research infrastructure space.So maybe you can just reflect a little bit on the before, which you've described a little bit earlier, but also what the difference looks like now in terms of how things are operating?

Andrew Page: I think I can answer this in two ways. Organisationally, there are now more clearly articulated policies and procedures around research infrastructure. At the organisational level, there now are clear research policies articulated. We have proposed a new particular governance structure, which we are now in the process of engaging with the university about, and we've got acceptance by some areas and we're just slowly working through to say: ‘Who wants to be part of this process to work out where in the institution that this is, that we need to engage in a way that meets their needs?’ Because we don't want to impose it on areas that say: ‘Actually, we don't need this’. So, we’re trying to work out what the appropriate level is. We've got clear policies, clear governance procedures in place that more clearly articulate what the costing and pricing structures of our research infrastructure should be and that are taking into account the institutional commitments, What the needs are for the replacement of them, What else do we have? Processes in place about how to move, how to have organisationally a clear system if you want to. You know what infrastructure's available, if you want to book it, how you do that, how much it's going to cost. We can keep a track of who's using what, what equipment's being used to full capacity, what's not. And so, we've got a greater sense of that and are also now making a case for research infrastructure and an asset management system for the institution as a whole. We have a large number of institutional procedures that are just much more organised and efficient than they were. That's what it looks like from an organisational level and that's really that strategy unrolling itself.

I was trying to reflect on this - I would say the clearest example to me is our research facilities committee. A couple of years ago this was one of the most challenging committees I had to chair since we weren't really sure why we were a committee. The members would dutifully come along but didn't really understand what we did or whether there was really any impact of anything that we did. I as a chair felt frustrated. Members felt frustrated. One of the things we were able to do as part of this reflection on research infrastructure was re-imagine that committee, not only changing the structure, it now has a research infrastructure strategy that it can look at; its purpose is clear. Where we are now is we have members of that committee who have now signed up to a working group to more clearly articulate a 20-year vision for our research infrastructure and are identifying people outside of that committee who we need to bring into this process. What we've gone from is a committee that sort of didn't understand why it's there to one that's actively seeking to provide leadership within the institution. I think that to me captures the change that's happened with the strategy. It's really invigorated the people to come on this journey, (or an ongoing journey) of always reflecting on: What research infrastructure do we have? What research infrastructure will we need? And how do we ensure that we are operating the research infrastructure that we have to best effect and planning for the infrastructure that we need?

Tim Cahill: I think that process that we work on with you to embed and continuing to prosecute the strategic agenda of research infrastructure towards the end of the engagement - you mentioned to me before we hit record – but that process is actually proving itself very effective in delivering results under the research infrastructure portfolio now. I'd just be interested again in your reflections on how that is continuing to unfold throughout the university and actually deliver tangible outcomes? From memory, that delivery of tangible outcomes was relatively quick. We were doing that before we'd finalised the strategy really.

Andrew Page: I think that is one of the things that within the organisation, we weren't waiting for the outcome of our process with you to be getting on with the research strategy anyway. We had got to a point where there was institutional momentum, and so I was very worried we didn't slow that down. And there were other activities happening within the university that weren't part of our engagement with you. I just let those run and thought, “okay, let's work out how to harness those”, rather than trying to stop movement. How do we just keep everybody and then shape them in?

I think I would say if you read books on strategy, you'll find lots of people say that strategy is a verb, not a noun. It's easy to say, but I do think for me, that was the single most important lesson of working with you. Institutionally that's the biggest change in practice, what you helped us do: embed a process whereby the strategy was an ongoing trial and error, or an error correcting system.

That happened all the way through the process of developing the strategy where we would engage with people, put ideas out, check them, bring them back, work out, okay, what's your belief? And then how do we work towards enacting that? What will be the outcomes if that belief is true and so forth. Then having a strategy that we could present to people –so I had something I could take to the university executive, I could take to schools – that’s really important.

What has been also valuable is to be able to say the way we are implementing this strategy is through this strategy group. Here are the people who are on this group, they meet once a month, and what they do is they talk through: ‘What is on the strategy?’ ‘What's been happening, how are we tracking against that?’ To be able to say to people: ‘This is not the group who are doing the work. This is the group who are checking that the work is being done, and if there's something that you would like to put into the strategy, just let us know’.

Now our research facilities committee has a regular report from that group, and it's the opportunity for that committee to then feed back into that group. If they say: ‘Hey, we think you'd like to add this to the strategy’, we say: ‘Here's the way you can do that, you can put that in’.  This group won't do all the work. It will comeback to you to say: ‘How do we roll that out?’ An example is somebody came to us saying, ‘I'm not clear on all of these elements, what the deliverables are,and do we actually have we an appropriate measurement of all of these?’ I was able to say: ‘Okay, we'll take that to that group’. We then had a discussion around it and said, ‘Okay, what we need to do is identify clear measurable outcomes and timelines for each of these and include those’ and everybody then goes away and does that.

I think that not just talking about strategy, actually helping us to implement a strategy has been the largest legacy of what has happened since our sort of engagement with you. So, you've wound the clock up and now it's - I won't say continuing to unwind because that's not right - but I'm continuing to operate it.

‍Tim Cahill: Which makes me very happy because that's what we aim to do. I think you very much embraced or embodied that strategy as a verb approach to what we were doing. I think, again, I saw that transition into outcomes very quickly. Before we'd finalised any strategy, you were literally doing a strategy which was very satisfying to watch. With the last couple of minutes, can I just ask are there any other, you've talked about quite a few of them throughout, but, the impacts or the outcomes from the strategy thus far? Are you happy with how it's been tracking? Are there any big wins that you point to?

Andrew Page: The biggest win is (and a largely unmeasurable one) the degree to which the DVCR has been able to get research infrastructure on the agenda. I think within that we are not unique in this as a university research infrastructure is often not visible as the means of leading to impactful outcomes - since what we measure is those outcomes, not the process to get them. That has been the most significant win, but it's an intangible. The progress towards all of the other activities are elements that are in train, and having tools that we are now rolling out to all researchers (and this is just in process of being rolled out). There's now a costing and pricing tool, not to tell researchers what they need to charge for their equipment, but it just helps them understand what the costs are to help them inform a price so that after a few years, they don't have to come back to the university saying: ‘How do I get a new one of these?’ It just helps them plan and articulate so that we've been able to get that costing and pricing tool is probably the first tangible outcome. The next one will be that university-wide enterprise solution for research infrastructure booking. Since what we found was we had four instantiations of the same software. That's allowed us to then make the case to the company providing that: ‘Can we have the enterprise solution of this? Which will probably be essentially cost neutral, but we'll get more from it and be able to engage with that company and so that's the next one. The research infrastructure, asset management system is a much bigger task – 2026 I hope.

Tim Cahill: But again, to your earlier point, that’s all on the back of being able to raise the profile of research infrastructure in the organisation and get much better organisational visibility and buy-in to the agendas that you are setting now.

Andrew Page: Yeah, you're right because it helps all of the areas of the university like the finance, the strategy, and the planning needed to understand research infrastructure. Because the academics understand it, but sometimes other areas of the university don't and that just comes in any large and complex organisation.

Tim Cahill: And onto my final question but, would you recommend working with Research Strategies Australia to others?

Andrew Page: Yeah, I think yes is the short answer to that. I would reiterate an answer I gave earlier; which is that any good book on strategy says that strategy is a verb,not a noun. And that strategy is not just something that you put on your website - but a process that gets you from where you are, to where you want to be. Which is again, easy to say but really hard to do.

And I would say what Research Strategies Australia delivers is a strategy that's a process, not just an outcome. And so, if you're willing to go on that journey, you'll find yourself in a place where you actually no longer need Research Strategies Australia, and you'll just have a strategy that you are implementing.

Tim Cahill: And I think that's the highest compliment we can ask for Andrew. Look, it was an absolute pleasure working with UWA on that, and I thank you specifically for the degree of trust that you vested in us and our process as well as your leadership in sharing that with your colleagues and bringing them on the journey as well. I think that's been a huge part of the success of this engagement.

Andrew Page: Thank you. Yes, and I would echo that, I would give one caveat. This is, that actually none of this would've been possible without a supportive DVCR who had a clear vision and said to me: ‘Okay, the gate’s off you go run’. Having that support from a DVCR effectively means you've got support from the Vice Chancellor. I think that is really important to acknowledge and we are immensely grateful for the contribution that you've had. I think we would not have been able to be in the position that we are now if we had just engaged a standard consultant to say: ‘Help us develop a strategy’. Because I think we have a strategy that fits where we are as an organisation and helps us move to where we need. So, thank you very much and I hope to continue to remain engaged with you.

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