Scenario #8 – Scholarly Centers
Draft - October 16, 2001
IT Centers of Scholarly Exchange
The IT Situation
Faculty from four graduate programs are independently conducting research addressing change factors confronting large urban centers. Each faculty member is an expert in area of study within his or her respective field. While all of the faculty have identified funding sources to support their efforts, they have not been able to secure a large grant because of the relative small nature of their individual research effort. Each of their respective departments provide limited IT support for their individual research efforts, leaving them to acquire and support their own hardware and software to sustain their research and database requirements. Learning of their common interest, the four faculty members met and concluded they could collectively bring more to their individual research efforts and begin to attract the large grant funding. They decided to create a multi-department research institute to further their collective efforts. The unique academic differences and physical location of the four programs create governance and geographic barriers that challenged the feasibility and deployment of the institute. In addition, there was not sufficient space on campus to locate the new institute. This was coupled with the addition problem of finding sufficient seed funding to establish the administrative and IT infrastructure for the institute.
The IT Solution…
As department and campus space was at a premium, the four faculty members decided to create a ‘virtual’ institute that did not require additional space. The ‘virtual’ institute would be enabled by improving the connectivity between the four faculty and establishing a shared database to further their research efforts. The four faculty met with the Campus Information Officer (CIO) and the Executive Vice Chancellor (EVC) to secure resources and assistance in establishing the multi-department institute. The Chancellor’s Office provided limited one-year seed funding for the needed hardware, software, switches and cabling required to establish the ‘virtual’ IT Center. The Office of Information Technology (OIT), Academic Technical Services (ATS) and Communications Technology Services (CTS) established an implementation workgroup to assist the faculty in addressing the IT requirements and start-up issues of creating the IT Center.
The four faculty used the seed-funds to upgrade their access to the backbone and established an integrated ‘data-warehouse’ to support their data storage needs. They also hired a Senior Programmer Analyst to assist in bringing the data together and improving its accessibility. This enhanced IT capacity, resulting from the pooling of their respective resources, followed with the creation of an institute web site that combined the efforts of the four faculty. This web site has subsequently become a sentinel resource site in the field and brought international acclaim to the four faculty, the institute and UCLA. The new institute formed a new student research lab for the institute to increase the number of students that had exposure to and opportunity to be involved in their research. A partnership was established with the campus undergraduate research program to strengthen the linkage between undergraduate education and research on the campus.