Adoption of e-Infrastructure
Services: findings, issues and
opportunities
eUptake project team
e-Uptake Overview
 Led by ESRC National Centre for
e-Social Science in collaboration with the
National e-Science Centre and the Arts &
Humanities e-Science Support Centre.
 Aim to provide evidence base for targeted
interventions and strategic planning which
will enable widening uptake of e-Research
across all disciplines.
Approach
 Develop a broad empirical basis for
understanding barriers and enablers for
adoption of e-Research:
 Look beyond isolated, contingent or random
problems.
 Identify recurring, widespread barriers that
can be overcome by targeted interventions
and longer term planning.
Research Design
 Interviews were conducted with:
 UK-based researchers across all discipline
areas.
 Intermediaries such as research computing
services and e-Science Centre staff.
 Aim to develop a contextualised
understanding of barriers experienced by
researchers as well as of enablers.
Interviews Phase I
 ~ 50 interviews, 25 hours of audio recordings.
 Short questionnaire to provide baseline data:
 Personal information (research area, etc.).
 Use of services (level of usage, training, etc.)
 Interviews open ended, conversational.
 It was important to sample not only ‘early
adopters’ but also the ‘interested’ and
‘unengaged’.
Representation of Research Areas
Interviews Phase II
 25 established and aspirational HEIs plus
small, specialist research institutions.
 Aimed to have 2 interviewees per
institutions – one at strategic level, one
with direct user support role.
 Started to add e-Science Centres and
institutions such as STFC.
Interviews Phase II
 HEIs chosen on basis of THES 2007/08
ranking (applications x-axis, awards yaxis) and HEFCE funding (bubble size)
Analysis
 Transcripts coded up using a typology developed
from literature review.
 Typology evolved in light of emerging findings.
 Online database of findings to allow stakeholders
to browse or search corpus of findings.
 Data represented in XML format to allow
automatic processing and easy transformation
into different presentation formats.
Analysis & Typology of Barriers
 Typology used to analyse
findings and to facilitate
browsing.
 Based on initial literature
review, iterative refinement
in the light of data.
 Represented in XML format to
allow automatic processing and
transformation into different
presentation formats.
Database of Findings
Title
Description
Examples
from Fieldwork
Enablers
Explore online at: http://cnx.org/content/m20185/latest/
Database of Findings (II)
 Browsable, searchable
 Use of hyperlinks to cross-reference and
integrate with material from other CE
projects
 OAI-PMH and OpenSearch facilitate
re-use, e.g., in ENGAGE portal
 Openness crucial to sustainability
Barrier: Promoting Benefits of
Distributed Computing
 “I think there probably are barriers to people understanding
how they could use it, what they could do with it, and
seeing it as a true alternative to maybe poorly managed
desktop processing or using under resourced local
computers […] I’d imagine that […] there’s a lack of
understanding of the technical context, and maybe a lack of
understanding from the technicians that there is actually a
requirement […] Who can actually say or tell a researcher
actually you can do it better and I don’t think many
University IT departments even would appreciate how we
do that.” (IT services)
Barrier: Assessing Costs of Adoption
 “I can see that there are things there which we probably could be
able to use in the future but first we’d have to work out how, if you
know what I mean? There are projects, for example, like OGSA-DAI
and OGSA-DAI has some features which I can see they would be
useful if we had skills or if we had the time to actually be able to get
far enough into the technology to be able to actually utilise it
properly.” (researcher)
 “It was very difficult in the early days for me to see what Grid could
do for me kind of thing, and therefore […] It’s getting a lot better
now, but initially there was, for a very selected community, large
scale facilities and problems and it wasn’t really for me and it was
quite difficult to get over that barrier.” (researcher)
 “So you’re working with products that come out of research rather
than out of a software factory, […] it's difficult to decipher what the
risk is before you start.” (e-Science Centre staff)
Enabler: Roadshows,
Consultancy, Collaboration
 “[…] So I would suggest a sort of travelling roadshow – give
presentations, go round different universities, you know, show them
what’s available, show them how it could be useful.” (researcher)
 “[...] it would be good to have, some pilot funding to really spend
some time with […] to run a pilot experiment to see when there are
problems [that] could be addressed by some of the […] tools.”
(researcher)
 “You don’t say to somebody we’ve got this wonderful technology
would you like to learn how to use it and then they say, yeah, great,
and then nothing really happens after that if you know what I mean
[…].” (researcher)
 “[..] we had to do the focus groups and it meant that we could be
closely involved with all these people coming in and saying what
were the barriers to them using a national data service, but it was
the contact with the users that was great.” (information services)
Barrier: Communication
 “I’m not an e-Scientist and it’s one of the things that’s
sort of continually frustrating in the field is the assumed
terminology if you know what I mean? That there’s a lot
of terminology that’s come over from computing science
which is never designed for the rest of us who actually
do the science […]” (researcher)
 “It is hard though because sometimes you do come
across, people talk different languages and you know
you’ve got to learn to understand each others’ languages
really and understand what different people are doing.
And see how they can merge together.” (information
services)
Enablers: Introductory Text
Enablers: Training
 Short courses:
 Introduction to e-Research, data management,
campus Grids, Access Grid, web services, etc.
 Academic courses:
 Well-developed undergraduate and postgraduate
curricula, and (foundational) courses.
 Training support:
 Shared t-Infrastructure for running training and
educational exercises, etc.
 IPR framework to allow for sharing of
educational/training materials.
Barrier: No Contact with Support
at Proposal Stage
 “The big problem we face is people write their proposals,
run into problems, come to us, but in their proposal there
was never anything mentioned about computing support or
visualisation support. Actually, the computing side is not
actually that bad because they know they need some
computer power so NGS has a good chance to be in there.
The visualisation side, on the other hand, has a good
chance not to be in there because people think about that
once they actually have their big chunk of numbers and try
to get those out to [a] paper and they then notice oops I
have a problem here […] we could have told them if they
had got in contact with us.” (IT services)
Enabler: Embedding/Hybrid Knowledge
 “there is a need for more people to sit down with
scientists and work with them on their specific
applications […] people that understand both
applications and also understand how to gridenable them”(researcher)
 “at universities people who teach [teaching
training] courses would be a good target
audience because then they will disseminate
that to all the new academic staff who are doing
their training so and […] they’re responsible for
[improving] teaching quality and giving
academics new ideas and things.” (researcher)
Barrier: Consistency of Support
 “[…] we had hoped when [Access Grid] started that it
would develop and it become something that we could
just have it on our desktop, in fact we use it much less
now, we have switched to WebEx, because it’s so
simple, and we also use Access Grid only with those that
we know there is a very good Grid support, so it’s
wonderful for our collaboration with […] and with […] but
all of those centres have very good support […]”
(researcher)
 “I think the node here, there was an attempt to try and
make it pay for itself or make it generate money, and
people stopped using it and therefore the service was
very sketchy but we were still quite reliant on it”
(researcher)
Barrier: Consistency of Support
 “there’s just little things like for example it’s very
outdated versions of pythons scripts and then we put a
support request in ages ago and nothing ever happened
so but that was also round about the time that the […]
migration was starting to happen as well so I suspect
that things kind of got lost or got mixed somewhere”
Enabler: Local Support Infrastructure
 “I think general marketing and awareness can always
happen through the internet I guess but it was useful to
have […] our local […] computing support people saying
well okay we can’t do this yet but we are very interested
in that […] and I got a fairly useful impression there, so I
found that pretty useful for me and a couple of my
colleagues went along with me so […] I think it depends
whether JISC want to, if you like, market to the end
users or to its, you know, bulk providers in the university
of institute computing services because I think there’s a
different community there.“ (researcher)
Enablers: One-Stop-Shop
 Closing gaps between stages of engagement
through a more effective support infrastructure.


cf. EGEE Virtuous Cycle
Also OSS-Watch model
Summary
 e-Uptake is providing evidence of barriers and
enablers of adoption:
 This knowledge is being made available as a
resource to the community.
 Typology helps to structure corpus of material and
make it discoverable, re-usable.
 Interventions help address barriers:
 Interventions such as ‘Research in a Connected
World’ will be valuable for raising awareness.
 In the longer term, provision of a ‘fit-for-purpose’
support infrastructure will be key.
e-Uptake Project Team
 NCeSS:
 Rob Procter, Alex Voss, Marzieh AsgariTarghi, Peter Halfpenny.
 NeSC:
 David Fergusson, Elizabeth van der Meer,
Malcolm Atkinson.
 AHeSSC:
 Elpiniki Fragkouli, Sheila Anderson, Lorna
Hughes.
And Finally …
 Workshop on Community Engagement




Evidence-based interventions to widen uptake
Oxford, 20th May
http://tinyurl.com/CommEng
(Joint CE data session 19th of May)
 JISC CE/VRE Wrap-Up Events
 9th June @ NeSC, 18th June in London
 5th International e-Social Science Conference:
 Cologne 24-26 June
 http://www.ncess.ac.uk/conference-09/
 alex.voss@ncess.ac.uk