A community member from a large mid-western research university recently sent the following note to the CaRCC Capabilities Model Working Group and it got us thinking about how best to incorporate researchers in the assessment process:
A small group of us here representing various RCD services (Library, IT, HPC, etc) have been working on coordinating our services, and are using the CaRCC Capabilities Model as one of our primary guides to do so. We have been updating our model to the best of our abilities but are now interested in broadening our scope and engaging with various researchers and facilitators on campus to hear their thoughts.
To do so, we would like to run interviews/focus groups. We are currently in the process of identifying interested parties and deciding how to run these sessions/interviews. The Focused Tools Engagement Guide and Script has been extremely valuable for this purpose, but we were also wondering if you have any further resources that may have been consulted in the process of compiling these materials.
Asking the right questions
The working group members liked their approach of using the different tools in combination to assess their program. We shared our experience that for gathering feedback from researchers, a few fairly open-ended questions tend to work quite well:
- How well do the current range of research computing and data (RCD) services meet the needs of your research team(s), and your domain?
- What specific RCD services or capabilities are missing that would make a significant impact on research in your domain?
- How do you see the RCD support needs of your domain changing in the next 3 to 5 years?
- Will researchers need significantly more (or less) of some infrastructure and services (e.g., HPC, cloud, GPU/TPU, storage, fast/big data movement support, or other emerging technologies)?
- Are new faculty and graduate student researchers likely to need a different mix of infrastructure and services (e.g., due to emerging techniques, new research initiatives, etc.)?
Including the right people
When conducting campus program reviews, it is good to meet with a representative set of faculty (and grad students) across the range of domains on campus. Note that some domains may be light users of computing (e.g., humanities and some social sciences) but that access to RCD services (including training and onboarding support) can be transformative to researchers in those domains. This is especially so with the growth in AI/ML tools across domains. We also find it useful to talk to folks in “Associate Dean for Research” roles for institutions that have them; these folks often hear from their faculty about current and emerging needs. Finally, we find it useful to ask similar questions of departmental IT staff as well as research support staff in large institutes and centers to hear what challenges they are facing.
We’re here to help!
Like the community member who inspired this blog post, don’t ever hesitate to reach out to us with your questions, ideas, and feedback. We greatly value interaction from our user community.
- Email capsmodel-help@carcc.org with questions or to request engagement from one of our trained facilitators.
- Subscribe to the capsmodel-discuss@carcc.org discussion list (click here to join). Hear how other institutions are completing their assessment and using it as part of strategic planning.
- Join our RCD CM Office Hours on the second Tuesdays of the month at 10am PT/ 1pm ET