Emorys Plans and Challenges in Supporting Our Research Community

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Emorys Plans and Challenges in Supporting Our
Research Community

• Rich Mendola, Ph.D.
• Vice President of Information Technology and CIO

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The One Year History of Emorys Research IT
Division

• Justified seed funding for dedicated Research
  Division
• Hired seasoned leader to run it
• Built relationships and quick wins in
  investigator community
• Demonstrated leverage and return on investment
• Justifying additional funds to expand division

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My teams assumptions

• The scale of research is getting larger and more
  collaborative every day and many functions make
  sense to deliver at scale
• Security needs to be baked in at the ground level
  and cannot be an afterthought
• The Research IT future state needs to be
  balanced between distributed and centralized IT
  resources

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Research IT Division Highlights

• Formed April 2007
• Seed Funding 1m/yr for 3 yrs

• Current FTE count 13
• Current Project Count 42

• Selected Accomplishments
• Leveraged grants and partnerships to secure an
  additional 800k in FY08
• Established the CTSA Biomedical Informatics
  Program
• Launched 1024 core High Performance Compute
  Cluster
• Rolled out low-cost, high-capacity NAS storage
  offering
• Designed and developed Predictive Health Data
  System
• Launched Collaborative Workspace proof of concept
• Created Research Laboratory Informatics Vision
  and Advisory Group
• Partnered with Atlanta VA on information security
  strategy for research

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Research IT Strategic Framework

• Emory Strategic Initiatives
• Predictive Health
• Global Health
• Computational Life Science

Visualization
Atlanta Clinical Translation Science Institute
Service cores and research centers (CSI,
Genetics)

• WHSC Centers of Excellence
• Cancer
• Transplant
• Lung
• Cardiovascular
• Neuroscience

Infrastructure
File Storage
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Emory Macro-level Challenges

• No academic biomedical informatics program
• Lack of maturity in research administration
  products
• External and internal competition for limited
  discretionary dollars

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Other Challenges We Have Faced

• Distributed model preferred in many cases
• Zero-sum mentality for all expenditures
• I dont need an HPC cluster
• Security viewed as a burden
• Building an IT governance process that is both
  representative AND engaged
• Justifying sustained funding

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What Has Worked Well

• Working directly with high profile investigators
  to demonstrate quick wins
• Adopt an Informatician shared hires
• Buying rather than building a collaboration
  product, so we could get started quickly
• Our move to common services across University and
  Healthcare (email, storage, identity management)

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Closing Thought

• Change is hard because people overestimate the
  value of what they have and underestimate the
  value of what they may gain by giving that up.
• James Belasco and Ralph Stayer