Rebasing and making friends along the way

NeSI has rebuilt its infrastructure platform over the last year, from a signed RFP last Christmas to production services now supporting researchers nationwide. Across that journey, the team have adapted and evolved how we work. The motivation behind these changes involved a shift in how NeSI thinks about infrastructure, and is builds in new levels of flexibility, adaptability, and responsiveness. The outcomes from this investment in infrastructure are ultimately about people, their expertise, and our collective cultures.

In this talk I’ll review the motivations behind NeSI’s reformulated infrastructure platform, covering off the “Rebase” programme that delivered the investment. I’ll look at the initial value drivers that got us started, the emerging benefits that compelled us to deliver on the investment, and the opportunities that drive us from here.

The true outcomes of NeSI’s Rebase investment are yet to be seen, and will only reveal themselves over the years ahead. The early experiences and potentials are starting to emerge - I’ll touch on our focus on the quality of user experiences and our guiding principles.

This focus on the researcher is core to NeSI’s culture and is exemplified in our work on Rebase. The focus on continuity of experience is the short-term result of our researcher-obsessed culture. As we lift our gaze to the future potentials yet to be discovered, I’ll cover the longer-term horizons and aspirations we’ve had in mind as we designed and built a platform that is flexible, scalable, and that can adapt to the changing shape of our sector.

Ultimately this is a story about people involved in our NZ eResearch ecosystem, and specifically those shaping and rebasing our NeSI infrastructure into what we need.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Nick Jones is a leader of the national eScience and research High Performance Computing platform investment in New Zealand, NeSI - National eScience Infrastructure. He has been in leadership roles in the academic research sector for 20 years across eLearning and eResearch. Nick led the development of the eResearch Ecosystem Framework and sponsored a subsequent International Benchmarking Study. Nick has been an advocate for the evolution of research practice in advanced digital technologies across research data and software, computational thinking, and a user-centred and relational approach to delivering innovative experiences to researchers.

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