What Researchers Wantfrom IT

Sandra Braman

ProfessorUniversity of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

ECAR Fellow

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Why it matters

• Research success is mission critical for many institutions

• Ability to do work is central to researcher identity, ambitions, goals– Will trade-off salary &/or switch institutions to

improve support

• IT a research collaborator, not service provider

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How do we know what we know?

• Direct & indirect info in– national reports (NSF, NRB, ACLS, etc.)– conversations with faculty– anecdotal & systematic reports from CIOs– scholarly publications on research trends– scholarly publications on research methods– trade press reports

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In this presentation ...

• I: Factors affecting researcher use of IT

• II: Issues raised by IT engagement with research

• III: Researcher needs & IT opportunities

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I: Factors affecting researcher use of IT

• Research culture

• Institutional issues

• Researcher incentives

• Research & teaching

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Research culture issues

• Rapid spread of computationally-intense research across disciplines

• Continuous & fast innovations in research methods

• The generational tide - driven by graduate students

• Disciplinary differences more important than institutional culture to uses

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Institutional issues

• Competition for resources• History of privileging certain faculty, units• Homogeneous service principle• Assumptions about activity in units• Inertia regarding institutional innovations• Opportunities for IT unit patents• Researcher ignorance of basic IT supports

(e.g., space, energy, back-ups)

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Researcher incentives

• Intellectual leadership

• Efficiency

• Support for other research goals

• Support for other institutional goals

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Research & teaching

• Faculty seek alignment of research & teaching

• Multiplier effect of graduate education

• Growing use of high performance computing in undergraduate courses

• Online education a stimulus

• Opportunities for IT collaboration with researchers in methods courses

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II: Issues raised by IT engagement with research

• Hiring

• Resource allocation

• Infrastructure development

• Hardware tailoring

• Software tailoring

• Long-lived data archives

• Research policy

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Hiring commitments

• Promises made at the hiring point regarding IT rarely involve IT units

• Too often institutions find themselves unable to deliver on these commitments

• Irrecuperable loss of researcher commitment to institution

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Resource allocation

• Research competes with administrative & teaching needs

• Support for FEW computationally-intense disciplines now must deal with MANY

• Principle of homogeneous support across campus now must address needs to tailor

• Often requires a shift in decision-making approaches

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Infrastructure development

• Growing gap in infrastructure sufficiency

• Economic & support efficiencies can be maximized through synergies across research projects & units

• Multiple models for achieving– Collaborative decision-making– Coordinated grant proposals– Intra-campus agreements

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Hardware tailoring

• Higher ed institutions increasingly falling behind in computational capacity

• But new techniques, such as mesh computing, can help

• NSF now looking at how to design OS to best support specific research designs

• New types of data collection equipment to be accommodated

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Software tailoring

• Needs range from simple scripting all the way up

• Again reliance on graduate students

• Software specialization as national institutional niche

• Finding researcher-authored software

• Software collections (specialized, obsolete, tailored, etc.)

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Long-lived data archives

• Many types of storage– project-specific repositories, institutional repositories,

disciplinary repositories, long-lived data collections of global importance

• Many types of storage venues– researcher, unit, institution, project home, discipline,

national proxy institution• Rising & complex preparation needs• Policy issues (access, control, raw vs. cooked,

etc.)• Currently experimenting with support

mechanisms

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Research policy

• Intensifying legal environment around research data

• Cyberinfrastructure raises new issues

• Implementation of traditional issues often now managed digitally

• Knowledge of issues & compliance with policies increased if IT-researcher relationship is strong

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III: Researcher needs &IT opportunities

• Participation in hiring

• Collaborative decision-making

• Grant-writing

• Training

• Software training & tailoring

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Participation in hiring

• Participation in hiring process serves IT units, institution as a whole, & the researcher– Inclusion on interview schedule– Collaboration in development of offer– Follow-up with new hires when arrive

• Bonus: Strong relationships with researchers

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Collaborative decision-making

• Multiple options not mutually exclusive– Single formal advisory council– Multiple working groups around research

problems, methods, platforms, or software– Open meetings– Survey input from faculty & administrators– Sustained informal relations, etc.

• Rare but successful when used• For resources & infrastructure

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Grant-writing

• IT units increasingly writing their own grants

• & collaborating in grant proposals with researchers

• Much development work to be done at middleware & ap levels for research

• Opportunities for intellectual property rights for IT units

• Intimate engagement with research

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Software training & tailoring

• Gap between graduate education & current research practices

• Research horizon continues to move• Intense & spreading needs for help in

– choosing best software for a research problem– tailoring use of that software to specific projects– additional programming to adapt as necessary

• Training can help in software customization• Institutional & inter-institutional synergies• Linkage with methods courses

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Conclusions

• Enduring issues such as capacity remain, but new needs have emerged

• Which needs will be most important for a given institution varies by– areas of research strength– extent of infrastructural development– strength of collaborative networks

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The New Big Two

• Researchers need more support for learning, adapting, & writing software specific to their research problems

• Researchers need help managing their data as it enters worlds of public presentation & long-lived data archives

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And . . .

• Participate in hiring process – and follow through on promises made

• Multiple utility from collaborative decision-making around research problem, method, platform, software, & resource allocations