Extended abstract presented at the CRIS2022 conference in Dubrovnik.-- Event programme available at https://cris2022.srce.hr/#section-program12 slides.-- Presentation delivered within the workshop “National Research Portal 101: The dos and don'ts of building a sustainable portal”This paper analyses how RIS Synergy, a digitisation project aiming to synergise CRIS across the Austrian research landscape, will meet this goal by building open, standardised interfaces and by laying the groundwork for a national research portal as a collaborative bottom-up initiative. As such, the project strongly reflects change management as a key theme throughout various aspects, such as the organisation and decision-making processes of a multidisciplinary consortium and the systems architecture. The following abstract provides an overview of the project along with key insights and findings that render RIS Synergy’s bottom-up approach an effective method to manage system interoperability and information exchange between different research institutions and funders