Bridging the Gap Between the Office of Research and Central IT: Strengthening Computing-Related Infrastructure Across the Institution
Damian Doyle
University of Maryland Baltimore County
Damian Doyle is the Senior Director of Enterprise Infrastructure and Support in UMBC's Division of Information Technology. He is responsible for UMBC's cyber infrastructure and central IT support services, including enterprise systems, cloud architecture, classroom technology and client services. Before overseeing UMBC's enterprise infrastructure Damian oversaw the IT security and networking functions within UMBC's Division of Information Technology. Damian serves on the board of UMBC's Center for Women in Technology (CWIT) and actively works with them to help raise awareness, recently launching a partnership between central IT and CWIT to provide internship opportunities for freshmen scholars within the program. For the past few years he has been an active member of the Internet 2 Cloud Computing Constituency Group and served on several working groups within Internet2. Damian holds a B.S. from UMBC in Computer Science and a M.S. from UMBC in Information Systems.
Abstract
Over the last several years, UMBC has received multiple MRI (Major Research Instrumentation) grants from the National Science Foundation. Due to the collaborative nature of these projects, we have built a strong partnership... [ view full abstract ]
Over the last several years, UMBC has received multiple MRI (Major Research Instrumentation) grants from the National Science Foundation. Due to the collaborative nature of these projects, we have built a strong partnership between UMBC's Division of IT and Office of the Vice President for Research to integrate these instruments into the campus in ways that could not be done by either unit alone.
Previously equipment of this size would be procured by the college or department awarded the grant, with oversight from the VP of Research but no collaboration outside of the academic college. This lead to multiple occasions where equipment could not be fully utilized by groups across the campus due to a lack of connecting infrastructure.
Within central IT, we were unaware of many of these grants until asked to provide service and support connecting them, often finding the design decisions that had long since passed precluded us from being able to easily integrate them into the campus cyber infrastructure.
More recently through the partnership between the Division of IT and the Office of the VP of Research the university has design these instruments to leverage the existing cyber infrastructure. Subsequently we were able to build upon these grants to obtain additional funding due to the cross-institutional collaborations.
We achieved this partnership by taking staff resources from one group, and having that person work in both groups, keeping their primary duties but also working to further this specific goal. Two years into this experiment we are now seeing very tangible results, a much smoother working relationship between the groups, and a fundamental shift in thinking where we are familiar enough to always be thinking of the needs and priorities of the other office.
Authors
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Damian Doyle
(University of Maryland Baltimore County)
Topic Area
Research Computing: Bridging the gap between Research Computing and IT
Session
D2-S2-05 » Tuesday Session 2 - 5 (11:30 - Tuesday, 19th June, MBC 2290)
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