johnm

This report on the excellent DCC roadshows http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue67/dcc-2011-03-rpt/ reminded me again of why we’re doing all this.

It became clear from the UKRDS study that DCC was a key source of data management expertise and the JISC MRD programme was highlighting a range of solid practical issues.

The UMF is now attempting to build on that by creating a sustainable supported infrastructure that will allow institutions to respond to the challenge of the data deluge effectively.

The scale of the problem is such that individual institutions simply cannot hope to cope alone. The sector must act collectively to acquire services that are affordable and the evidence is growing that commercial Cloud based services tailored to sector needs may not just be a good answer, they may be the only viable answer!

A tweet by Simon Hodson reminded me that that there is a DCC roadshow in Oxford 14th to 16th September you can register here http://www.dcc.ac.uk/events/data-management-roadshows/dcc-roadshow-oxford  and if you can’t claim to be an expert and carry some responsibility for policy or practical aspects of research data management, then you should.

For some reason it isn’t well know outside the specialist communities of data scientists and the like  that DCC are world leaders in this field (unsung heroes if you like!).  Their work has been adopted by the NSF in the USA and by ANDS the Australian National Data Service  who themselves are major players in the field.

The UMF programme acting on the recommendations of the UKRDS report (www.ukrds.ac.uk) has funded DCC to accelerate the deployment of its tools and training programme as that is seen as key to the effective exploitation of data management in the cloud.

Please involve DCC in any work you might be doing on research data management, you’ll be glad you did!

http://tinyurl.com/3hofpmb provides an interesting insight into apparent Cabinet Office thinking on the shared services agenda. I think those of us working on UMF would claim to be seeking ways to follow the principles outlined.

It seems to me however that there is a sense that HMG makes some slightly simplistic assumptions. The hardest part of establishing true shared services is using common systems and business processes and that’s not a trivial thing to achieve and can take a long time.

In HE we have some unique opportunities because of the scale of activity in research which can use common compute and storage infrastructure, moreover much of it can be virtualised and there are a number of key areas where common applications can be used and delivered though SaaS. There are analogous opportunities in Learning and teaching too.

If we are successful we will have been able to demonstrate all of the above in live service by March 2012 and we will have opened the shared environment to administrative applications too.

Many of our suppliers are beginning to see the power in Cloud delivery of their products and with their active co-operation and some innovative team work HE is poised to become a major demonstration of the power of shared services both to save money at the infrastructure level and to add value at the application and data management level.

Of course shared services in HE is not new JANET, Jisc Collections UKDA and a number of examples in the Library community will spring to mind and so we have no excuse, we know how to co-operate and that’s what shared services is all about.

I’m now going to try and use the blog to keep a regular diary of issues and progress.

While it has taken a frustratingly long time to get there,  all of the components of UMF Strand A are now in place and moving forward. The DCC programme of tools and training is in place, over 400 users of DMP on-line have produced over 500 data management plans in support of research projects and grant applicaions and its workshop programme is spreading the word on Data Management good practice across the UK.  The JANET brokerage is developing fast as resources drop into place and we’re getting some very positive customer and supplier engagement.

A major concern has been the potential complexity of procurement processes in the context of Cloud services. Traditional approaches simply don’t work in IT any more. By the time you’ve written the spec, gone out to tender, got responses and evaluated them, what you were trying to buy has become obsolete!

We are moving to models where we look for outcome or output specs which explain to potential suppliers WHAT we want to do and let them suggest HOW their products and services can help us achieve that. As a result we should be able to get close to buying standard products which is good for us and easier for suppliers.

Amazing as it may seem the EU procurement framework has a process to help with this and it’s called Dynamic Purchasing Systems and we’re about to try it out to get some Cloud services into the JANET portfolio for the sector to use. there’ll be more on our experiences with that in the next few weeks (commercial confidentiality permitting he says ruefully).

A key plank of our work will be developing communications infrastructure within institutions so that researchers seeking to buy IT infrastructure will slowly learn that by engaging with their central  IT support folks, they’ll be able to get servers and storage configured in hours if they have the money, rather than having to go out and buy kit and licences which can take weeks. Moreover they might be able to get a data management and compute application  to use and not even need to deal with the infrastructure at all.

Over the next few months we expect to start to see case studies on this and to present them at conferences too. In the meantime if you want to know how we plan to achieve these miracles get in touch at j.milner@jisc.ac.uk

On the 20th January the HEFCE Advisory Board agreed to launch the programme to develop a shared services infrastructure for HEIs.
This is quite a momentous decision as it paves the way for a HE cloud in due course. The initial focus will be on establishing a service delivery co-ordination capability by developing the JANET (UK) organisation and setting up a pilot infrastructure. The successful Digital Curation Centre will be funded to develop its capability to support researchers in coherent data management in the shared environment.

All in all I think we’re now started on a journey of great significance to quality of digital research in the UK.

If all goes according to plan, this will be the home of a blog on shared services and cloud applications for UK based researchers, just need the funding agreed…….