The CaRCC Capabilities Model continues to evolve as a vital tool for research computing organizations seeking to assess and improve their operations. With the release of version 2.6, coming June 2, we’re excited to introduce significant enhancements that provide users with increased flexibility in conducting assessments while delivering more meaningful benchmarking insights.
What’s New in Version 2.6
Streamlined Assessment Options
The most significant addition in recent releases is the introduction of the Essentials subset, allowing organizations to focus on core capabilities without the time commitment of a full assessment. This streamlined approach makes the Capabilities Model more accessible to organizations with limited resources or those seeking a quick operational overview.
Building on this foundation, users now have the ability to select individual capabilities for inclusion in their assessments using the “Chart Your Own Journey” feature. This granular control enables organizations to tailor their evaluations to specific strategic priorities, operational focus areas, or stakeholder requirements.
Enhanced Data Views and Benchmarking
Version 2.6 introduces updated Data Views to explore community assessment data down to the level of individual capabilities, offering deeper insights into individual capability areas. This also means that benchmarking analysis is available at this detailed level, which can help organizations identify specific strengths and improvement opportunities within their research computing operations.
Note that capability-level data and benchmarking support are only available to users affiliated with an institution that is a current Contributor (i.e., that completed an assessment within the last three calendar years: 2022 through 2025).
Whether you’ve chosen the Essentials subset or crafted a custom capability set, the benchmarking data adjusts to provide relevant comparisons. This ensures that organizations can understand their performance relative to peers using similar assessment approaches.
Why we made these changes
Research computing organizations operate in diverse environments with varying priorities, resources, and strategic objectives. The enhanced flexibility in the Capabilities Model acknowledges this reality, allowing each organization to engage with the assessment process in ways that best serve their needs.
For organizations new to capability assessment, the Essentials subset provides an approachable entry point. More established organizations can leverage the individual capability selection or “Chart Your Own Journey” feature to focus on emerging priorities or areas of strategic importance.
The improved benchmarking ensures that regardless of assessment scope, organizations receive meaningful comparative data to inform decision-making and strategic planning.
Why participate in the Capabilities Model?
The Capabilities Model allows participating institutions to:
- Assess their support for computationally- and data-intensive research.
- Identify potential areas for improvement.
- Understand how the broader community views Research Computing and Data support.
Contributing institutions help build the Community Dataset, and enrich the resulting picture we have of our community. You will get access to the benchmarking functionality on the new portal that compares your assessment to the community at-large, as well as segments of the community (R1s, R2s, Public or Private institutions, etc.; on the new portal you can define your benchmarking peer groups!). As a contributor, you will also get access to more detailed reporting functionality on the new portal, to dig into the data and create custom visualizations. Although summary data is publicly available, only contributors have access to the capability-level data and benchmarking features.
Getting Started
Whether you’re conducting your first assessment or returning to update previous work, the enhanced features are designed to provide greater value with improved usability. Use our Quick Start Guide to walk you through the process.
Need Help?
You can also get help, including advice on how to approach your assessment, understanding the questions, and interpreting the results by emailing capsmodel-help@carcc.org, or joining our Capabilities Model Office Hours on the second Tuesday of each month at 1pm ET.
Subscribe to the capsmodel-discuss@carcc.org discussion list (click here to join), to hear how other institutions are completing their assessment and using it as part of strategic planning.
The CaRCC Capabilities Model is developed and maintained by a dedicated working group of research computing professionals. For more information about CaRCC initiatives and resources, visit carcc.org.This work has been supported in part by an RCN grant from the National Science Foundation (OAC-1620695, PI: Alex Feltus, “RCN: Advancing Research and Education through a national network of campus research computing infrastructures – The CaRC Consortium”), and by an NSF Cyberinfrastructure Centers of Excellence (CI CoE) pilot award (OAC-2100003, PI Dana Brunson, “Advancing Research Computing and Data: Strategic Tools, Practices, and Professional Development”).