Research, Development and Operations

I'm back from my hiatus. I spent a good 10 days on a whirlwind trip across the great plains of Nebraska and Kansas (with some Missouri time in there). It was a good break and time to spend with friends and family. Always a good idea in my book.

But, now that I'm back, been thinking a lot about a lot of things. In particular, I'm still going through the Atkins report, a report that was published by the NSF detailing what should be done to fund the CyberInfrastructure. There are a lot of good nuggets in this document. Below is one I thought elucidated some good distinctions between Research, Development, and Operations.


Research

Research is a competition of ideas. Allocation of resources starts with the program announcement and evaluation of the resulting proposals. This is bottom-up, stating the evaluation criteria with detailed initiatives arising from the research community. Overlap or duplication is acceptable where different researchers pursue competing visions for accomplishing similar ends. Post-evaluation is based on the intellectual quality and impact of the research outcomes.

Development

Development is a competition of plans. An overriding goal of development is to limit duplication of effort, and concentrate resources on a set of integrated and maintained software distributions collectively covering the scope of the ACP. Thus, development is partitioned and assigned to organizations based on the responsiveness to needs and credibility of their plan for pre-defined concrete outcomes. Post-evaluation is based on how effectively the plan has been implemented and also on how extensively the outcomes are adopted and used and on user satisfaction.


Operations

Operations is a competition for users. Operations serve end-users, domain scientists, and engineering researchers, responsively providing service and support. There should be two or more competitive operational options available to users. A primary point of post-evaluation should be the satisfaction of the users who are served, and to a lesser extent the number of users who are served, based on input from the user community.


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Kipp




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