Most universities do not have a research infrastructure problem because they lack tools. They usually have the opposite problem: a different survey tool in nearly every department, each with its own logins, its own data exports, and no shared way to compare results across the institution.
The better question is not which single tool to standardize on. It is what stage of research infrastructure maturity your institution is actually operating at, and what the next stage requires.
Quick takeaways
- Research infrastructure maturity is a spectrum, from isolated departmental tools to a fully connected, institution-wide workflow, not a binary state.
- The most common bottleneck is not data collection. It is inconsistent routing logic, weighting, and reporting standards across departments.
- Centralizing infrastructure does not require eliminating departmental flexibility, but it does require shared governance over data structure and access.
- Institutions like Wits University have moved from fragmented survey and reporting workflows to a centralized environment with consistent routing and dashboarding.
Stage one: isolated, department-level tools
At this stage, individual departments or research units run their own surveys, often on different platforms, with no shared question bank, routing standard, or reporting format. Data lives in departmental silos, which makes any institution-wide comparison, like tracking student experience across faculties, effectively impossible without manual reconciliation.
Many institutions reach this stage by standardizing on a single vendor without standardizing how that vendor’s tools are actually used. Departments still design their own routing logic and reporting structures independently, which reduces licensing costs but does little to improve institution-wide data consistency.
Standardizing on one platform without standardizing how it is used only solves half the problem. The routing logic and reporting structure still need shared governance.
Stage three: connected, governed research infrastructure
At the most mature stage, institutions apply consistent routing logic, weighting methodology, and dashboard structures across departments, while still allowing individual research units the flexibility to design study-specific questions. This is the model that lets an institutional research office produce a genuinely comparable, sitewide view of student and stakeholder experience, rather than a patchwork of incompatible departmental reports.
What moving between stages actually requires
The hardest part of this transition is rarely technical. It is governance: agreeing on a shared core question set, a common weighting methodology, and clear ownership over who can access aggregated cross-departmental data. Wits University’s experience replacing fragmented survey and reporting workflows with a centralized environment, including advanced routing and integrated dashboarding, illustrates what that governance work looks like once it is in place.
Assessing where your institution actually stands
A useful starting exercise is mapping every survey tool currently in active use across departments, and asking a simple question for each one: could institutional research produce a comparable report using this data alongside every other department’s data, without manual reconciliation. If the answer is no for most departments, that is a stage-one or stage-two institution, regardless of how sophisticated any single department’s individual survey program looks.
Running the maturity assessment as a working session
The most useful version of a research infrastructure maturity model assessment is a working session, not a written audit. Bring representatives from institutional research, IT, and two or three of the largest departmental survey users into one room, and map every active survey tool against the three stages together.
This surfaces disagreements early, often between a department that considers its workflow mature and an institutional research office that cannot actually use that department’s data for a sitewide report. Resolving that disagreement in the room is far more productive than discovering it after a governance policy has already been drafted. QuestionPro’s Research Suite is designed to support that shared, institution-wide structure once the assessment is complete.
Frequently asked questions
Does moving to a connected research infrastructure mean departments lose flexibility?
Not necessarily. The goal is shared governance over structure, routing logic, and reporting standards, while departments retain flexibility in the specific questions and studies they run.
What is usually the biggest blocker to advancing research infrastructure maturity?
Governance, not technology. Agreeing on a shared core question set and clear data access rules across departments is typically harder than any technical migration.
How long does moving from stage one to stage three typically take for a mid-sized university?
This varies widely by institutional size and governance complexity, but multi-year timelines are common, since the work involves organizational change alongside any platform migration.
The bottom line
A university with excellent individual survey tools in every department can still have a weak research infrastructure overall, if none of those tools connect. Maturity is not about which platform a department uses. It is about whether the whole institution can see the same picture.
See how a connected, institution-wide research workflow could work for your university.
