Managing Cyberinfrastructure Centers in a Demanding Era: The Development of Science Executives

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The goal of this project will be to develop and test a "science executive" education program. Science executives are the senior scientific personnel charged with leading the centers that enable large-scale science and engineering. Centers are broader than projects and must endure within institutions such as universities, national labs and institutes, government agencies, and firms. Center leaders are usually scientists or engineers with strong project management skills who learn how to manage and lead on-the-job, through trial-and-error, much as entrepreneurs learn. However, they often lack knowledge that would improve the effectiveness of their centers. In the same way that entrepreneurial organizations benefit from professional management as they grow, science and engineering centers will benefit. Such centers are not "normal" organizations, so typical business executive education models will not apply. Science and engineering centers are complex hybrids with nested social networks, transitory roles, ever-changing, "drifting" arrangements, and work that is increasingly interdisciplinary, collaborative, geographically distributed, and computation and data intensive. Focused preparation is needed in organizational governance, innovation management, resource provisioning, workforce development and turnover reduction, process improvement, and strategic leadership. This project adapts organization science as embodied in executive education to the needs of CI center executives.Specifically, the project will involve: (1) identifying the points of leverage within centers where improved executive leadership might affect science and engineering outcomes; (2) discovering and develop a curriculum for disseminating "best practices" based on organization science to equip science executives with the skills, tools, and techniques; (3) delivery pilot sessions of effective, focused training to science executives through a modified "science executive education" strategy; (4) conducting workshops and tutorials to evaluate and improve the curriculum and to disseminate knowledge gained throughout the project; and (5) actively promote and seek the involvement of junior-level personnel and traditionally underrepresented groups, thus encouraging the career progression of current and future science executives with an explicit focus on broader inclusion.