Turning Principles into Operations
Implementing governance best practices in our federation can greatly improve how our federation functions, but we must make sure that the federation operates in a way that lives up to the principles we choose for our organization. The community as a whole must have input into re-designing operations to meet the principles and updated governance of the federation; here we offer a few high-level proposals that follow directly from our discussion above.
Services
In the document we argue the best model for our federated organization is services based. All partners in the federation provide services to each other to build the national platform, and collectively to the researchers. The Central Office is accountable to the researchers (through the Members) and so the Central Office is responsible for ensuring the Regions are accountable for meeting their agreed upon services.
We propose that the priorities for the national platform will be set through collaboration with the regions and the central office. These priorities will be defined by a service or more appropriately a set of services with the associated Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and interfaces. The SLAs must have clearly defined metrics for evaluating the effectiveness of the services provided.
Proposal: Services provided should come with agreed-upon SLAs ensuring quality and interoperability.
A federation colleague (e.g.: a region or the central office) will propose taking on the responsibility for providing some or all of the necessary service or services, allowing regions to build on existing strengths or meet regional priorities. These services should be assigned to the federation colleague who has the skills and the mandate to provide them. Ideally these assignments will be based on consensus, but for big ticket items where this is unlikely to be possible by some pre-agreed upon process led by the central office.
Once the agreement is made, the provider is free to implement the service in any way they see fit, but are held accountable for meeting the agreed-upon standards and metrics.
Proposal: Services should be piloted, with definitions of success decided upon before the pilot.
Most services should normally go through a pilot phase before being provided more widely. Deciding what success means for a pilot will necessarily differ from service to service, and consensus should be reached before the launching of a pilot what would merit a more permanent, larger-scale roll-out.
It’s worth noting that it may be perfectly reasonable for some regions or institutions to provide services locally that are not part of the national platform; there are some services which are not possible to provide nationally, or there might not be sufficient demand for outside of a given region, but one jurisdiction may be willing to fund nonetheless. Not every type of research support necessarily has to be shoehorned into a national platform framework.
Relationship between Federation Partners
While federations of equal partners must have a basis in consensus, each partner has specific roles to play.
Proposal: The central office should be responsible for nation-wide needs assessments and researcher satisfaction.
The central office must be responsible for the “birds-eye view” of the Canadian research community, working closely with federal funding agencies, national scholarly communities, and other research service providers who can identify gaps in the research ecosystem, or underserved communities. In that role, the central office should be responsible for performing nation-wide needs assessments, measuring researcher satisfaction, and ensuring the input of national researcher communities into the federation’s discussions.
Proposal: The agenda should be managed by the central office, and consensus should be found or built around priorities.
As a convener and facilitator, it will be the Central Office that drives the push for evidence-based consensus around national priorities, planning next steps, and where necessarily, building partnerships outside of the federation to accomplish the federation’s agreed-upon goals.
Proposal: The central office should be responsible for the monitoring and enforcing interoperability and other SLAs on the platform.
Coherence of the national platform, and adherence to interoperability and other agreed-upon standards, will necessarily be the responsibility of the central office. It is this body that will perform monitoring of these service levels, and testing interoperability. It is also the central office’s responsibility to ensure that there are accountability measures in place for service providers that are not meeting their SLAs. However, since failure to provide interoperability or service levels is a failure felt by the entire platform, not just the central office, other federation partners must also play a role in enforcing these standards.
The needs assessment and SLA or interoperability monitoring roles are vital, and generally will be the primary technical roles of the central office, as researcher-facing technical services and operations will generally be best managed by the regional organizations and sites.
Proposal: Responsibility for implementation and operations of researcher-facing services should generally belong to the regional organizations or an external partner.
Being nimble, and being able to quickly tell if a researcher-facing service is successful or if it should be changed, will normally require researcher-facing services to be provided organizationally close to the researchers. This will generally mean that such services will be housed in one or more regional organization.
On the other hand, internal services necessary for the administration and operation of the federation itself — CRMs, email, dashboards and monitoring, finance services — might reasonably be housed in any of a number of places.
Relationship with Other Partners
As the uses of computation and data broaden, and become more integrated into all areas of scholarship, investigators will increasingly need services that require coordination of remote and institutional computation and storage, networking, data management, and other research services. It won’t — and shouldn’t — matter to those researchers how this coordination happens; either across multiple organizational boundaries or within a single organization so long as the access to resources is seamless.
Proposal: The federation must work closely with other digital infrastructure providers and research services organizations in service design, service delivery, and future planning.
Several models for how this close collaboration could work have been proposed, and should be discussed by the community at large. As suggested above, however, structures matter less in and of themselves than they do for their effect on processes; and it is the process that is crucial here. Just as it is unacceptable for researchers to have to routinely cobble together resources to support their project within a researcher-centred organization, it is unacceptable for researchers to have to manage for themselves the even more complex task of coordinating resources across research support organizations.
In research, collaboration means much more than participants announcing to each other what they have done or what they intend to do; just so with research service organizations. A meaningful collaboration, one that can make the best use of each other’s strengths and resources, means frequent discussions through planning, implementation, and execution phases of a project.
Proposal: Each federation colleague must advocate on behalf of the federation as a whole and the federation’s researcher users to their funding partners and other external partners.
Unlike other large science infrastructure items like accelerators or telescopes, the importance of readily and widely available fundamental digital infrastructure like computation, data, network, and services atop those resources requires constant advocacy and education. Each federation colleague has a unique relationship with their funding partners and other organizations. Collaboration and a commitment “whole is greater than the sum of the parts” means that these opportunities should be met with a sustained, coherent, and collaborative advocacy and education effort, on behalf of the federation as a whole and all of the federation’s research users and not just the individual colleagues.
Relationship with The Community
Proposal: A renewed federation should renew its relationship with the researcher community, emphasizing transparency, engagement, and accountability.
Good governance requires that the Board of Directors of the central office be engaged and transparent with its Members, the institutions; but those institutions are themselves representatives of the primary constituents of our federation, the researchers and scholars. An updated federation as a whole, including the central office, should re-engage with that community in a collaborative and researcher-centred way, emphasizing two-way communication, adaptation, and transparency.