Broad Institute of MIT & Harvard
Overview
A New Kind of Research Institution
Biological science in the 20th century made breathtaking progress in
our understanding of life and provided this scientific generation with a
historic opportunity and responsibility to transform medicine.
To achieve this goal, we built a new kind of research organization to
dramatically accelerate the understanding and treatment of disease by:

Nurturing a deeply collaborative environment and
bringing together key thought leaders across labs
and scientific disciplines

Unleashing the creativity and ambition of a new
generation of scientists by giving them a nimble,
supportive and vibrant environment and access to
novel cutting edge technologies

Complementing individual creativity with the power
of industrial strength professional platforms

Tackling bold transformational projects at that
cannot be undertaken in traditional setting
2
A Brief Organizational History
2002: Two major research groups come
together
• Whitehead/MIT Center for Genome Research
• Harvard Institute of Chemistry and Cell
Biology
2004: Broad Institute launched
• Initial $100M gift from Broad Foundations
• A 10-year “experiment” in collaborative
science
2004 – 2009: Broad doubles in size
• Governed by MIT-Harvard leadership
• Administratively managed within MIT
2008: “Experiment” declared a success
• Broads announce new endowment of $400
million
• Combined $600M Current Use + Endowment
Gift
2009: Broad Institute, Inc. established
• 501(c)3 formed 9/08; Operations begin 7/09
2010: Carlos Slim foundation provides $65M
• New initiative in genomic disease research
• 1st U.S. collaboration to receive funding
2006: Broads double initial gift to $200M
• Unrestricted for Broad research and
operations
2007: Creation of new Stanley Center
• Founding $100M (increase to $150M),
10-year gift from Stanley Medical Research
Institute
From left: Eric Lander, Susan Hockfield, Drew Faust, Eli Broad,
Edythe Broad, Deval Patrick, David Baltimore
3
Board of Directors: Leaders in Academia
Drew Gilpin Faust
Susan Hockfield
President, Harvard University
Former Dean, Radcliff Institute of Advanced Study
Member, American Academy of Arts and Sciences
President, MIT
Former Provost, Yale University
Member, American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Diana Chapman Walsh
David Baltimore
President emerita, Wellesley College
Former Chair, Health and Social Behavior HSPH
Member, American Academy of Arts and Sciences
President emeritus, Cal Tech
Nobel Laureate
Former President, Rockefeller University
Founding Director, Whitehead Institute
National Medal of Science recipient
Member, National Academy of Sciences
Member, American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Phillip Sharp
Eric Lander
Institute Professor, MIT
Nobel Laureate
National Medal of Science recipient
Member, National Academy of Sciences
Member, U.S. Institute of Medicine
Member, American Academy of Arts and Sciences
President and Director, Broad Institute
Professor ,MIT
Professor, Harvard Medical School
Member, National Academy of Sciences
Member, U.S. Institute of Medicine
Jeffrey Flier
Dennis Ausiello
Dean, Harvard Medical School
Former Chief Academic Officer , BI-DMC
Member, U.S. Institute of Medicine
Member, American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Chief of Medicine, MGH
Jackson Professor Clinical Medicine, HMS
Member U.S. Institute of Medicine
Member, American Academy of Arts and
Sciences
4
Board of Directors: Leaders in Industry
Eli Broad
Louis Gerstner
Founder, The Broad Foundations
Founder, SunAmerica
Founder, KB Homes
Life Trustee, Cal Tech
Retired Chairman and CEO, IBM Corporation
Former Chairman and CEO, RJR Nabisco
Former CEO and Chairman, American Express
Ratan Tata
Arthur Levinson
Chairman, Tata Sons
Former Chairman,Tata Industries
Chair, Government of India Investment Commission
International advisory board member, Mitsubishi
Advisory board member, JP Morgan Chase
Chairman of Genentech, Inc.
Former CEO, Genentech
Director, Apple, Inc.
Fellow, American Academy of Arts & Sciences
Seth Klarman
President and Founder, The Baupost Group
Board of Managers, CareGroup/CJP Partnership
William Lee
Co-managing partner, WilmerHale
Former managing partner Hale and Dorr
Member, Harvard University Board of Overseers
Former trustee, Boston Medical Center
Patty Stonesifer
Chair, Board of Regents, Smithsonian
Institution
Founding CEO, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
Former SVP, Microsoft Corporation
Member, Council on Foreign Relations
Member, American Academy of Arts and
Sciences
5
Broad’s Mission
Transform the Understanding and Treatment of Disease
 To achieve this mission we are:
I.
Creating powerful systematic methods, tools and datasets for:
 Understanding human biology and disease
 Testing therapeutics hypotheses
 Developing novel therapeutics
II.
Applying them to leading-edge
medical challenges
III. Disseminating them to enable the
scientific community in academia
and industry
6
Broad Programs
Scientific communities across multiple labs and institutions, working
to address major challenges in specific diseases or disciplines
Cancer – understanding the basic molecular
mechanisms of cancer and applying this
knowledge to transform the practice of cancer
medicine
Cell Circuits – deciphering the functions
and interactions of critical molecular
components in cells
Medical and Population Genetics –
understanding how genomic variation
contributes to susceptibility to human disease
and to an individual’s response to therapy
Infectious Disease – understand the
mechanisms behind infectious diseases and
apply the knowledge to transform prevention,
diagnosis, and treatment of diseases
Chemical Biology – Integrates chemical
biology and genome biology to provide powerful
new ways of creating therapies to treat human
diseases
Psychiatric Disease – unravel the molecular
basis of psychiatric disease, with the ultimate
aim of improving diagnosis, treatment, and,
prevention
Genome Biology – uses genomic
technologies to identify and understand the
function, regulation, and evolution of elements
encoded in the human and related genomes
Metabolism – Understand both normal
metabolism and disease, including diabetes,
obesity, cardiovascular, with the goal of
developing new therapeutics
7
Broad Platforms
Professionally led and managed groups that create and maintain
industrial-strength capabilities and provide the Broad community with
unparalleled infrastructure
Biological Samples
• 32 professional staff
• 600K samples from 20 different species
Chemical Biology & Novel Therapeutics
• 100 professional staff
• 120K novel compounds, 24M wells screened
per year
Genome Sequencing
• 150 professional staff
• >200 T bases sequenced
RNAi
• 35 professional staff
• 300K shRNAs, 16K ORFs
Genetic Analysis
• 36 professional staff
• 200B genotypes, 235K whole genome
scans
Imaging
• 12 professional staff
• 24M images analyzed, CellProfiler
used 50K times last year
Proteomics
• 22 professional staff
• Functionalization of the genome
Metabolite Profiling
• 5 professional staff
• Characterization of model systems to clinical
studies with thousands of patient samples
8
Genome Sequencing Platform
In collaboration with the Broad community we generate genomic
data sets to advance discoveries in biology and medicine.
Sequencing
Technologies
ABI 3730XL
HUMAN
WHOLE
GENOME
Applications
MICROBIAL &
FUNGAL
WHOLE
GENOME
454 FLX+
Titanium
SEQUENCING
SUPPLIED
LIBRARIES
CUSTOM
EXOME
Illumina
HiSeq
Illumina
MiSeq
16S &
AMPLICON
VIRAL
GENOMES
MOUSE
EXOME
SOLiD
5500XL
MAMMALIAN
DENOVO
ASSEMBLY
RNA-SEQ
PacBio
RS
IonTorrent
PGM
HUMAN
EXOME
ANYTHING
ELSE?
JUST ASK!
Plummeting cost of data acquisition
$20,000/Mb
~100,000X
$0.1
$0.20/Mb
Slide courtesy Chad Nusbaum
Broad Institute of MIT & Harvard
IT Overview
Alarming Statistics
General Stats
Single Genome storage
~1 TB
Enterprise Storage
500-1000$/TB
# of genomes sequenced/in-flight
funded by NIH
>70,000
Broad Statistics
# of Illumina HiSeqs
51
Sequencing Capacity
~1 Terabase/day
Average data/day
10-15 TB
File sizes
1 GB – 1 TB
CPU cores in blade farm
>7100
Application servers
~500
Network storage consumed
>8000 TB (8 PB)
Total Broad capacity
~14 PB (10PB usable)
User Community
Large user community (2,071 users as of today):
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Employees (864)
Appointments (509)
Associated Personnel (446)
Associate Members (118)
Consultants (45)
Sr. Associate Members (37)
Temporary Employees (28)
Core Members (9)
Contractors (8)
Agency/Temps (7)
User Community
Distributed user community (6 locations + off-site):
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•
•
•
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301B (197)
320C (251)
5CC (61)
7CC (644)
190F (0)
12O (2)
Off-site (926)
IT Vision Statement
Create the best collaboration experience
to accelerate ground-breaking science
that transforms medicine
Collaboration Experience
Admin
Admin
Partnering
Collaboration Spaces
Applications
Compute & Servers
Storage
Networking & Comms.
Systems Support
Research
Non-Broad
Security & Integrity
Research
IT Mission Statement
Partner with the Broad community and
provide nimble innovative solutions
Automate repetitive work
Use Best Practices and Metrics to drive IT excellence
Have fun & make this a cool place to do IT
IT/Systems – Enables Research &
Administration
Administrative Computing - Lukas Karlsson
• provides general IT products, services and support
Research Computing - Matthew Trunnell
• provides research-specific IT services and support
o large scale computational and storage resources
o informatics consulting services
o database administration
IT Security & Network Infrastructure – Jason Friemark
• provides Broad-wide IT services and support
o network and data center operations
o Information security and integrity
Business Systems – Rob Damian
• Reports into CFO and provides IT services and support for HR, finance,
procurement, sponsored research
o SAP, ADP, eTime, Coeus, SciQuest, and EARS
Organizational Chart
Quick Wins/next 6 months….
Security
100% AV/spy/malware protection in Offices
Evaluate spam-filtering
Execute on security remediation per BOD
IT disaster & business continuity plan
Proof of concept on gTalk vid
Evaluate personal devices on Broad wireless
Identify conference room gaps and a/v needs
Evaluate project management software
Social networking software review/improve plan
Improve, eliminate, or replace eTime
Migrate to gTalk & google groups
Data & Storage
Collaboration
Roll-out & implementation of storage as a
service model
Implementation of i-Rods
Quick Wins/next 6 months….
Compute
Recommendations for unix/linux &
development environment enhancements
Analysis of compute queues & queuing and
plan to optimize/improve compute process
Quick Wins/next 6 months….
Compute
Recommendations for unix/linux &
development environment enhancements
Analysis of compute queues & queuing and
plan to optimize/improve compute process
Evaluate help process and adjust to
provide tiered support
Define customer satisfaction metrics and
survey
Services & Engagement
Maintenance & Operations
Proof of concept on PC walk-up clinic
Define lab-computing support model
Security Working Group Charter
Background
Scope
Starting as early as 1990, with the formation of the Whitehead Institute/MIT Center for Genome Research (WICGR), then
subsequent launching of the Broad Institute of MIT & Harvard in 2004 there has been a constant growth and evolution of
the information technology landscape. The Broad later split from being part of the MIT infrastructure in 2009 and has
continued to grow rapidly and organically. With nearly 1000 ‘Broadies’ and ~800 associate members, the infrastructure
and IT team to support it needs to evolve so that it can sustainable provide quality services back to the Broad community.
The current IT model and services focuses on flexibility and a refocus is needed to focus on the IT vision of providing
“The ‘Best Collaboration Experience’ to enable ground-breaking science that transforms medicine”.
In: Broad infrastructure and users that
access the Broad infrastructure and systems
Problem / Goal Statement
Interactions / Dependencies
Problem: The growth of IT systems at the Broad has increased the complexity of identity provisioning, authentication and
authorization. This results in a poorer user experience. Furthermore, growth of the lab environment and increase in
sophistication of malicious assaults requires that we have a robust security infrastructure that provides proactive
monitoring and prevention of attacks in the office and lab environments. To date, there is minimal protection in the labs
from virus and malware management. The agencies that fund our sponsored research are also increasing the
requirements to provide consistent, reliable security and continuity of services in case of problems.
Out: Security infrastructure outside the
Broad campus
Storage Working Group
Compute Working Group
M&O Working Group
Collaboration Working Group
Goal: Develop set of activities required to provide a reliable, easily accessible, and secure office and lab environment
that also addresses federal/commercial/audit recommendations.
Timelines
Key Deliverables
• Management of identity, authentication, authorization, access, and provisioning - Plan, methods and timeline to
improve password management and provisioning
• Upgrade plan and timeline to raise level of antivirus, spyware and malware protection to 100% in the office
environment. Evaluation of spam-filtering capability and options to improve.
• Plan and timeline to increase level of antivirus, spyware and malware protection in the lab environment.
• Executed plan and completion of security audit remediation items e.g. IPS/IDS, etc.. (per BOD memo)
• Phased plan to address FISMA certification needs and other needs pertaining to sponsored research and collaborative
research
• IT disaster recovery and business continuity plan
• Validation of backup methodology/services and communication of data-protection capabilities to the Broad
community
• Plan and timelines to implement technology and IT policies required to support protection of human subject data
• Identification of IT requirements to enable Broad research interest in becoming an ‘NIH trusted partner’
• Consolidated roadmap showing 3 year phased plan of implementing security-related recommendations showing
dependencies between projects and a high-level resource and cost estimate.
Define by
Potential quick-wins highlighted in
RED
23
Collaboration Working Group Charter
Background
Starting as early as 1990, with the formation of the Whitehead Institute/MIT Center for Genome Research (WICGR), then
subsequent launching of the Broad Institute of MIT & Harvard in 2004 there has been a constant growth and evolution of
the information technology landscape. The Broad later split from being part of the MIT infrastructure in 2009 and has
continued to grow rapidly and organically. With nearly 1000 ‘Broadies’ and ~800 associate members, the infrastructure
and IT team to support it needs to evolve so that it can sustainable provide quality services back to the Broad community.
The current IT model and services focuses on flexibility and a refocus is needed to focus on the IT vision of providing
“The ‘Best Collaboration Experience’ to enable ground-breaking science that transforms medicine”.
Problem / Goal Statement
Problem: The Broad is a collaboration powerhouse, however, that powerhouse is fueled by people that move information
around the institute to feed research. There are many information platforms for storing related information and data that
requires individuals to hunt this information down in a non-optimal way. In addition, since growing from several labs to
multiple locations, it is not as easy for members of the Broad community to interact and collaborate. This is compounded
when individuals are off-campus and need the flexibility of telecommuting. In a number of cases, the variety of
technology choices contributes to the inability to share information, in others, gaps exist where solutions are readily
available but not implemented at The Broad.
Goal: Plan and initiate technology projects to enhance admin:admin, admin:research, research:research and Broad:nonBroad physical, remote, and virtual collaboration.
Scope
In: TBD
Out: TBD
Interactions / Dependencies
Security Working Group
Storage Working Group
Strategic Partnering Working Group
Communications Group (B2B)
Timelines
Key Deliverables
Communications
• Review and revise audio conferencing capabilities to enhance ease of use of conferencing capabilities (physical
communication & conference lines) and quality of audio
• Perform POC on communications using technologies such as softIP telephony and/or GoogleTalk
• Perform POC on personal video conferencing for 1on1 and 1toMany meetings
• Evaluate further need for room-based video conferencing
• Evaluate risk and mitigate to enable personal wireless devices (non-computers) on internal network
Collaboration spaces
• Assess current state of ‘formal’ collaboration spaces i.e. conference rooms. Update communication material in each,
identify gaps in AV technology. Perform POC on easier viewing of/and scheduling of rooms.
• Work with Facilities Group to perform POC on enhancing existing ‘breakout’ spaces with AV technology for
displaying/sharing of information. Incorporate positive POC outcomes into 75AMES planning.
• Perform POC on use of virtual environments for information sharing/meetings
Activity and workspace management
• Work with research and admin groups to identify gaps and need for project management capabilities. Perform POC
using several project management technologies e.g. Daptiv, MSProject, @Project etc..
• Work with research (and admin?) groups to define plan to either upgrade or replace B2B social networking site with
goals to lower barrier to use, increase traffic, increase content flow – automated and manual.
Define by
Potential quick-wins highlighted in
RED
24
Collaboration Working Group Charter
Key Deliverables
Search, aggregation and sharing of information
• Baseline existing search capabilities that are Broad-wide or specific to informatics platforms and identify gaps and whether there are needs and requirements for a one-stop-shop
for information searching across the Broad community. Identify needs for different search modalities e.g. Text-based, people, federated, semantic, multimedia and directed search
Content Delivery and Management
• Baseline landscape of existing document management, wiki, and other content management platforms/tools for information sharing. Develop a plan to drive adoption and
development of the leading platform for efficient sharing and capability strengthening e.g. collaborative authoring, electronic signatures, document workflows, etc..
• Develop content migration approach to solidify use of leading doc/wiki sharing platform. Facilitate content migration.
Information flow
• Define the information flow within the administrative IT capabilities (e.g. operations, facilities, finance, hr etc..) and develop a plan to address gaps and simplify the administrative
IT landscape with an eye on improving the collaboration experience and reducing number of silos where possible – (Broad2.1 Administrative Architecture)
• Similarly, for the research environment. Map out and identify areas across Broad where information generated could be captured and published/registered internally and shared
Broadly. E.g. use-case – project/sample tracking and information generated for projects
• Explore use of enterprise information management tools to support democratization of data/information stored in silos e.g. Labmatrix, compositeSW, tibco, etc. as well as
approaches for master data and taxonomy management to enable use of constrained vocabularies for data classification and organization
25
Storage Working Group Charter
Scope
Background
Starting as early as 1990, with the formation of the Whitehead Institute/MIT Center for Genome Research (WICGR), then
subsequent launching of the Broad Institute of MIT & Harvard in 2004 there has been a constant growth and evolution of
the information technology landscape. The Broad later split from being part of the MIT infrastructure in 2009 and has
continued to grow rapidly and organically. With nearly 1000 ‘Broadies’ and ~800 associate members, the infrastructure
and IT team to support it needs to evolve so that it can sustainable provide quality services back to the Broad community.
The current IT model and services focuses on flexibility and a refocus is needed to focus on the IT vision of providing
“The ‘Best Collaboration Experience’ to enable ground-breaking science that transforms medicine”.
Problem / Goal Statement
Problem: The Broad knows how to generate data and fill storage media faster than most research institutes. After several
months, most data has been analyzed but is rarely deleted or archived. Being able to provide storage for new data and
recall past experiments is a constant challenge and usually requires experts intervening. In addition, storage of
information and results in relational databases requires constant management. With growing volume and complexity the
Broad community has a need to optimize the variety of databases and repositories. Finally, with evolving models of
archiving sponsored research data, there is a growing desire for The Broad to host and serve major data repositories and
we have not yet developed the methodologies, processes and capabilities to do this effectively yet.
Goal: Provide a flexible and logical way of data management through filers and database platforms that meet the
performance needs of the community
In: Storage of data/information on the
storage infrastructure and database
platforms.
Out: Storage of data/information on
computer desktops
Interactions / Dependencies
Security Working Group
Compute Working Group
Collaboration Working Group
Timelines
Key Deliverables
• Communication and Implementation Plan to role out storage as a service model
• Develop/enhance demand planning and monitoring of filer utilization
• Develop plan to increase archival of unused data/information
• Plan to increase outreach and refinement of database services
• Identification tools and resources required to improve database optimization and query tuning
• Implementation plan for easier logical data/file management (e.g. i-rods)
• Identification of areas and plans for where we can increase ‘self-service’ for the provisioning and management of
database and filer capabilities to the Broad community
• Plan to move storage infrastructure to 1SS/other location and elimination/reduction of dependency on 7CC data
center
Define by
Potential quick-wins highlighted in
RED
26
Compute Working Group Charter
Scope
Background
Starting as early as 1990, with the formation of the Whitehead Institute/MIT Center for Genome Research (WICGR), then
subsequent launching of the Broad Institute of MIT & Harvard in 2004 there has been a constant growth and evolution of
the information technology landscape. The Broad later split from being part of the MIT infrastructure in 2009 and has
continued to grow rapidly and organically. With nearly 1000 ‘Broadies’ and ~800 associate members, the infrastructure
and IT team to support it needs to evolve so that it can sustainable provide quality services back to the Broad community.
The current IT model and services focuses on flexibility and a refocus is needed to focus on the IT vision of providing
“The ‘Best Collaboration Experience’ to enable ground-breaking science that transforms medicine”.
Problem / Goal Statement
Problem: Access to the Broad compute platform is granted according to ‘contributions’ that each group make to the total
compute platform in hardware. However, some groups require additional compute cycles and others groups/individuals
contribute nothing to the platform and take resources away from potentially more important projects. In addition, the
maturity of the compute users varies greatly and more naïve users do not optimally use this resource. Finally, it is
difficult for compute users to predict how much compute is available or how long their processing will take, as well as
properly debug when jobs ‘fail’.
In: Compute farm clusters managed by
Broad IT. Access to cloud compute.
Out: Desktop compute. Non-Broad IT
managed compute. E.g. Harvard Orchestra
Interactions / Dependencies
Storage Working Group
Security Working Group
Collaboration Working Group
M&O Working Group
Support Working Group
Goal: Enhance existing compute services that increase ease-of-use, flexibility in compute choice and transparency that
will scale to the needs of the Broad community
Timelines
Key Deliverables
• Development of plan/identification of tools that will allow more transparency to available compute capabilities
including estimation tools on compute time required for a given tool/process/application
• Recommendations and implementation plan from a joint team of infx/se/IT on unix/linux infrastructure/OS
improvements
• Data-driven analysis of queue usage and recommendations on queue optimization for computational jobs – to include
prioritization process factoring in proficiency/maturity of users, Broad/non-Broad users etc..
• Technology evaluation plan for additional compute capabilities e.g. gpgpu, high memory, cloud, etc..
• Review of development environment and develop joint set of recommendations on development environment
improvements
• Development of systematic demand planning approach to provide better predictability in compute demands and
distribution
• Develop set of recommendations to improve fair-share model of compute allocation
• Evaluation of current method of compute procurement ‘condo approach’ and options/possibility to move to ‘pooled
purchase’ model
• Plan to move compute infrastructure to 1SS/other location and elimination/reduction of dependency on 7CC data
center
Define by
Potential quick-wins highlighted in
RED
27
Maintenance and Operations Working
Group Charter
Scope
Background
Starting as early as 1990, with the formation of the Whitehead Institute/MIT Center for Genome Research (WICGR), then
subsequent launching of the Broad Institute of MIT & Harvard in 2004 there has been a constant growth and evolution of
the information technology landscape. The Broad later split from being part of the MIT infrastructure in 2009 and has
continued to grow rapidly and organically. With nearly 1000 ‘Broadies’ and ~800 associate members, the infrastructure
and IT team to support it needs to evolve so that it can sustainable provide quality services back to the Broad community.
The current IT model and services focuses on flexibility and a refocus is needed to focus on the IT vision of providing
“The ‘Best Collaboration Experience’ to enable ground-breaking science that transforms medicine”.
Problem / Goal Statement
Problem: The majority of Administrative Compute resources are focused on the processing of Help Desk tickets with less
emphasis on moving forward specific projects to advance Administrative IT services. The current M&O model results in
the expert ‘tier3’ resources being brought in to work on tickets vs. the majority of tickets being handled by earlier (tier
1-2) support tiers. There is not a consistent ‘measure of success’ and a stronger emphasis is needed on user experience
and elimination of common-recurring issues/requests. There is a lack of service/operating levels agreements and there is
a high-degree of stress across IT staff to provide (undocumented/agreed) high-levels of support. Finally, there is no
documented/applied SLC for systems management.
Goal: Design/enhance a process & metrics-driven model leveraging industry best practices to provide tiered value-based
support that focuses on self-improvement.
In: Support of services within the Broad
campus. Broad systems/capabilities.
Out: Support in non-Broad facilities.
Employee’s personal PC’s/systems
Interactions / Dependencies
Storage Working Group
Support Working Group
Compute Working Group
Strategic Partnering Working Group
Timelines
Key Deliverables
• Evaluation of maturity of IT service management practices according to industry best practices such as ITIL. Develop
set of recommendations and plan to increase ITIL/best practices maturity
• Review of effectiveness of current ‘ticketing’ process and analysis of tier 1-3 incident and problem resolution and
development of recommendations to provide right balance of incident and problem management to each tier
• Develop recommendations and implement to improve ‘self-service’ help to the Broad community
• Improve/enhance processes and knowledgebase on incident and problem resolution
• Establish surveys and metrics to determine user satisfaction with IT support
• Identification of leading/lagging indicators of performance, coordinating across all areas of IT, that can be used for IT
operations management
• Identification/design of ‘Broad-compatible’ systems development life cycle that is lightweight to provide agile
systems development, transition to support, change management, and decommissioning
Define by
Potential quick-wins highlighted in
RED
28
Support Engagement Working Group
Charter
Scope
Background
Starting as early as 1990, with the formation of the Whitehead Institute/MIT Center for Genome Research (WICGR), then
subsequent launching of the Broad Institute of MIT & Harvard in 2004 there has been a constant growth and evolution of
the information technology landscape. The Broad later split from being part of the MIT infrastructure in 2009 and has
continued to grow rapidly and organically. With nearly 1000 ‘Broadies’ and ~800 associate members, the infrastructure
and IT team to support it needs to evolve so that it can sustainable provide quality services back to the Broad community.
The current IT model and services focuses on flexibility and a refocus is needed to focus on the IT vision of providing
“The ‘Best Collaboration Experience’ to enable ground-breaking science that transforms medicine”.
Problem / Goal Statement
Problem: There is not a consistent support model across IT and it requires having to ‘know the right person’ in IT to
effectively receive IT services at a desired level. In addition, there is not a clear articulation of services and
corresponding support levels. This has resulted in a multitude of solutions/systems with similar capabilities that does not
allow IT to provide sustainable support levels. This stresses the IT work environment, preventing work on strategic
projects that would benefit the Broad community. Finally, there are significant gaps such as support of the lab
environment that need addressing, capability gaps such as PC walk-up clinics, and a holistic portfolio of IT strategic
projects that is jointly prioritized with Broad stakeholders.
Goal: Design and implement a community engagement and IT operating model that establishes IT partnerships & demand
planning vs. reactive requests and addresses significant service/capability gaps.
In: Broad community, including associate
members. Services currently managed
within scope of IT.
Out: Non-Broad community.
Interactions / Dependencies
Storage Working Group
Compute Working Group
Collaboration Working Group
M&O Working Group
Work with admin groups that perform IT
e.g. Business Systems, HR, Development,
Communications.
Timelines
Key Deliverables
• Development/refinement of IT services catalog, identification of where service level and operational level
agreements are needed – development of OLA’s and SLA’s
• Design and proof of concept of PC walk-up clinics
• Analysis of existing communication channels/content e.g. BLOG, other and development of additional communication
channels/content e.g. user groups, roadmaps, plans
• Development of engagement model to enable effective demand planning, portfolio management and prioritization of
IT/Systems activities across research and administration.
• Development of support model for lab computing, definition of services and resource planning requirements
• Identification of training gaps for IT capability/service utilization e.g. compute, storage, desktop applications – plan
for development of training materials and rollout/enhancement timeline
• Adoption and implementation of IT innovation process methodology and plan to execute on portfolio of administrative
and research ‘problems/areas’
• Development of metrics for user satisfaction and plan to increase satisfaction in areas where needed
Define by
Potential quick-wins highlighted in
RED
29
Strategic Partnering Working Group
Charter
Scope
Background
Starting as early as 1990, with the formation of the Whitehead Institute/MIT Center for Genome Research (WICGR), then
subsequent launching of the Broad Institute of MIT & Harvard in 2004 there has been a constant growth and evolution of
the information technology landscape. The Broad later split from being part of the MIT infrastructure in 2009 and has
continued to grow rapidly and organically. With nearly 1000 ‘Broadies’ and ~800 associate members, the infrastructure
and IT team to support it needs to evolve so that it can sustainable provide quality services back to the Broad community.
The current IT model and services focuses on flexibility and a refocus is needed to focus on the IT vision of providing
“The ‘Best Collaboration Experience’ to enable ground-breaking science that transforms medicine”.
Problem / Goal Statement
Problem: The Broad has technology and information assets that are not being fully leveraged to create additional value
for the Broad community and exposure to the scientific community. Value is being lost that could be used to offset the
cost of performing research at the Broad as well as provide technological advancements that could further accelerate
research and collaboration at the Broad.
In: Information and technology assets
developed/created at the Broad. Existing
and non-existing vendors/partners
Out: TBD
Interactions / Dependencies
All working groups
Intellectual Property, Business
Development, Technology Transfer
functions within Broad.
Goal: Identify strategic partners that will enhance the value of information and technology assets at the Broad and
leverage value generated to enhance research & collaboration for the Broad community.
Timelines
Key Deliverables
• Generate base-line of existing IT software and hardware vendors used by the IT department and across Broad.
• Identify gaps at the Broad that would benefit from external partnering to enable the IT vision as well as the mission of
the Broad
• Identify Broad assets that have potential external value e.g. know-how, access to data, software
• Working with Broad business development/technology transfer groups, develop go-to-market plan against a prioritize
list of existing and ‘competing’ set of vendors/partners
• Meet with candidates, assess interest, develop term sheets where applicable
Define by
30
Questions….(if we have time)
CLAY
RAY