Focus Area 2: Research Experience

Objectives & Outcomes

• A research and IT leadership structure to assess,  advocate, and plan for required research IT capabilities.
• Research IT groups plan, promote and deliver services with greater coordination and collaboration.
• Compliance with federal cybersecurity regulations and standards (e.g., NIST 800-171) across all research-specific IT devices.
• Increased capacity of compliant compute and storage available to researchers and students.
• High levels of satisfaction with processes to identify, request, and obtain research IT support.
• Maximize time available of research IT groups to provide specialized services.
• Develop and retain additional IT staff to support the specialized technology needs of researchers.

Key Strategies

• Create an administrative leadership role in the VC Research Office to advocate for the technology needs of the research community and integrate research IT planning and services university-wide.
• Appoint a working group to identify pressing gaps in research IT capabilities and design on-going structures and processes to govern research IT services. 
• Coordinate delivery of IT services among specialized and shared research IT support groups (E.g., research concierge, shared service catalog, etc).
• Expand capacity to meet growing needs for on-prem and cloud compute and storage, security compliance, and proposal development.
• Make research IT software and services easily discoverable through onboarding, education and training, and through service and support guides.
• Expand research data management services, workflows, and storage capabilities to meet researcher needs and facilitate compliance.

Fiscal Year 2024-2025 Initiatives

• Name and establish funding for research IT leadership
• Establish a Working Group and Faculty Advisory Group to create a Research IT strategic plan
• Create research IT and data service catalog (rcd.ucsb.edu)
• Implement a backup solution for all campus researchers *
• Pilot an on-premise research computing package (virtual machine & storage infrastructure) providing fast data storage, computing, and archival capabilities for researchers
• Expand availability and use of secure research data and compute environments that comply with federal cybersecurity regulations and standards (e.g., NIST 800-171) *
• Catalog university research data based on IS-3 protection and availability levels
• Standardize protocols for identifying and protecting research data based on IS-3 protection and availability levels
• Implement a clean laptop program for international travel
• Pursue UC system collaborative research compute and storage efforts
• Expand on-premise virtual machine infrastructure to other small UC campuses
• Create a graduate research consulting community and division-specific faculty technology ambassadors
• Assess research use of virtual computing platforms

Roadmap - Priority Themes By Year

Fiscal Year 2024-2025 Initiative Progress Tracker