Improving IT Support for UASs’ RDI Activities for Creating Together RDI Data Ecosystems

10 pages•Published: November 6, 2025

Abstract

Research, development, and innovative activities (RDI) and education are the core businesses of the Finnish Universities of Applied Sciences (UAS). The Finnish HEIs’ Digivision ecosystem project has well-channelled the digital transformation of higher education. However, Finnish UAS does not have the same kind of digital transformation project for RDI activities. The IT barometer of Finnish HEIs CIOs 2024 shows that only 2 % of UAS CIOs' near-term development courses of action support RDI activities, compared to 23 % of measures to support education, teaching, and learning. We set up an RDI data management working group and conducted a qualitative survey to determine where this bias comes from and whether it needs to be corrected. Digital and data ecosystems studies reveal that organisations' digital transformation guides them to share data resources, thereby building service and data ecosystems, e.g. (Altendeitering et al., 2024; Oberländer et al., 2025). Thus, we must improve our communication and collaboration capabilities and IT capabilities to support and create national and international RDI data ecosystems. Consequently, I have listed three courses of action and three means of improving UAS RDI data ecosystems.

Keyphrases: data ecosystem, digital transformation, it services, rdi activities, universities of applied sciences

In: Laurence Desnos, Raimund Vogl, Lazaros Merakos, Carmen Diaz, Janina Mincer-Daszkiewicz and Stuart Mclellan (editors). Proceedings of EUNIS 2025 annual congress in Belfast, vol 107, pages 344-353.

Links:	https://easychair.org/publications/paper/9NKGg
	https://doi.org/10.29007/gc45

BibTeX entry

@inproceedings{EUNIS2025:Improving_IT_Support_UASs,
  author    = {Ari Rouvari},
  title     = {Improving IT Support for UASs’ RDI Activities for Creating Together RDI Data Ecosystems},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of EUNIS 2025 annual congress in Belfast},
  editor    = {Laurence Desnos and Raimund Vogl and Lazaros Merakos and Carmen Diaz and Janina Mincer-Daszkiewicz and Stuart Mclellan},
  series    = {EPiC Series in Computing},
  volume    = {107},
  publisher = {EasyChair},
  bibsource = {EasyChair, https://easychair.org},
  issn      = {2398-7340},
  url       = {/publications/paper/9NKGg},
  doi       = {10.29007/gc45},
  pages     = {344-353},
  year      = {2025}}

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