By Simon Twigger, Principal Consultant
CHALLENGE
A leading hospital dedicated to the research and treatment of pediatric diseases recognized the critical need to develop an IT infrastructure capable of meeting its current demands and supporting the future growth of its rapidly expanding scientific community. To achieve this, the research IT team sought to partner with an expert in the field. BioTeam was selected to conduct a comprehensive assessment of their existing IT capabilities and to evaluate future requirements. The goal was to deliver a strategic scientific IT roadmap that would address the escalating technical needs of the hospital’s scientific researchers and core facilities.
APPROACH
Given BioTeam’s unique holistic approach to accelerating scientific discovery, our goal was to align technology and data, as well as, capabilities and culture, with the hospital’s mission.
Our approach:
1. Assess Current and Future IT Needs of Scientific Researchers:
Initially, BioTeam was engaged to focus on four strategic initiatives:
- Support services
- High-speed networking
- High-Performance Computing (HPC), storage and cloud
- Disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity
To do this, BioTeam conducted onsite interviews and surveys with researchers and core facility staff to identify current IT support deficiencies, unmet technical needs, and infrastructure challenges.
Because BioTeam approaches assessments from a holistic perspective, additional themes emerged beyond the initially expected issues. As a result, two new focus areas were added to the evaluation:
- Support for scientific instrumentation
- Organization and policies
2. Conduct a Scientific IT Gap Analysis:
BioTeam identified discrepancies between current state and future IT needs based on the assessment and on BioTeam’s deep expertise in understanding the needs of scientific research organizations. The focus was on scalability and robustness to support growing research activities.
3. Outline a Strategic Scientific IT Roadmap:
The unified scientific IT strategic roadmap delivered in-depth, clear, and practical step-by-step details on how to:
- Integrate all strategic initiatives
- Optimize processes, organizational structure, internal communications, and technology
- Prioritize and streamline the installation and support processes for scientific instruments
- Achieve the desired future state in all focus areas
- Improve communication between scientists and IT to streamline workflows and enhance overall efficiency in research efforts
OUTCOMES
BioTeam’s strategic scientific IT roadmap delivered prioritized recommendations to significantly enhance the hospital’s ability to support scientific research. The engagement not only addressed the hospital’s immediate technical needs, but also equipped the hospital with the strategic tools to anticipate and prepare for future challenges. Very importantly, the roadmap allowed the institution to prioritize investments by knowing where they needed to spend money and where they did not.
In shaping the strategic scientific IT roadmap, BioTeam placed significant emphasis on giving a voice to the researchers. By actively involving the researchers in the assessment process and ensuring their insights and needs were at the forefront, the roadmap effectively aligned IT strategies with research goals and senior leadership visions. This collaborative approach fostered unity and understanding across all levels, setting a strong foundation for the roadmap’s recommendations.
Key recommendations:
Leverage the existing technology Infrastructure:
While network bandwidth was more than adequate for current needs without an immediate capacity upgrade, BioTeam identified several issues in monitoring, reporting, network automation, network segmentation, and remote access that were slowing down researchers.
Other areas like HPC and Storage required strategic investments over the next three years to prepare for growth in demand and increased security needs.
However, a particularly vital initiative was the establishment of an Instrument Support Team. This team is essential to accelerate the installation of scientific instruments and provide effective on-site support, thereby minimizing downtime and significantly boosting the overall productivity and effectiveness of the research operations. This move was highlighted as a primary recommendation to ensure rapid response and continuous operational readiness, directly impacting the pace and quality of scientific research.
By accelerating the installation of scientific instruments and enhancing on-site support, this team significantly reduces downtime and increases the productivity and effectiveness of research operations. Such improvements directly translate into faster project completions and potentially groundbreaking research outcomes, boosting the institution’s reputation and competitive edge.
Establish data management policies for secure sharing:
Findings highlighted various internal and external data sharing challenges, particularly as related to managing basic research data alongside regulated clinical data. BioTeam recommended data management and storage policies that would:
- Allow research data to be accessed and shared under less restrictive policies than more regulated clinical data.
- Streamline both internal and external data-sharing processes, facilitating research collaborations while ensuring robust security and data privacy measures were maintained.
Build out a more comprehensive disaster recovery management plan:
Develop a more comprehensive disaster recovery management plan, emphasizing effective data management and archiving strategies. This involves understanding crucial data to retain, utilizing existing processes for reliable backup, and prioritizing these elements within disaster recovery to ensure timely and orderly restoration. Currently, the organization maintains multiple copies of archive data both on-premises and in Azure, along with primary storage replication, among other practices.
- While the current disaster recovery plan covered the technical aspects of a disaster recovery process, it did not consider additional aspects needed to build out a complete disaster management plan.
- The assessment of scientific needs identified the data recovery timeframes that the research groups needed to minimize disruption. It also highlighted that not many groups proactively plan for such situations and lack clarity of which data is critical to restore in a DR scenario.
Improve science-IT communication:
Throughout the process, a key recommendation from BioTeam was to improve the level of communication between researchers and IT, aiming to foster a more cohesive and supportive IT culture. BioTeam outlined organizational improvements and staffing skills required to establish and represent the perspective of the researcher and their relationship to the diverse teams and processes that provide support.
One of the recommendations was to create a steering committee to provide a communications channel between the research community, leadership, and IS. This group would also take the lead on key initiatives central to research operations.
BioTeam’s in-depth analysis identified key areas to improve researchers’ productivity and competitiveness. The resulting IT roadmap not only addressed immediate challenges but also recommended a foundation for scalable, future-proof solutions–ensuring that the hospital’s IT environment could keep pace with its expanding research initiatives in an increasingly complex and data-intensive scientific landscape.
