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7. Management / Business Practices / Institutional Models |
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High-End Climate Science
7. Management / Business Practices / Institutional Models |
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Updated
12 October, 2003
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High-End
Climate Science: Development of
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Subcommittee on Global Change Research, Participating Agencies and Executive Offices Ad hoc Working Group on Climate Modeling Executive Summary Main Report
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7.1) An "Institute" for Product-driven Climate Science In order to provide the required capabilities and products there needs to be an organization that has as its primary mission the delivery of these products. The current approach of expecting the existing organizations to deliver these products as an ancillary activity to their primary missions is not working. Simply sprinkling these organizations with additional funding to give them incrementally greater capability is not an effective remedy to the current situation. The attributes of the institute to deliver these needed products will be discussed next. This is done without consideration of which Agency should host this institute or, indeed, if a completely new institute external to all of the agencies should be initiated. We, ultimately, envision the evolution of a Climate Service that integrates all aspects of Modeling, Data, and Computational Systems. However, the planning and development of this service is difficult and necessary and subject to reconciliation with current Agency missions. Therefore, we propose an evolutionary process that starts, soon, to align the major components of a climate service while a more structured service is planned and developed. Success of a product-driven climate service requires fundamental changes in Agency behavior and the discovery-driven science culture. Fortune 100 companies today have realized that it is fruitless to try to graft cutting-edge business theories and new agendas onto the framework of old and unproductive organizational practices. Moreover, the success of organizations is usually traced to the strength and commitment of an individual or a handful of individuals in key positions. Therefore, those in top positions must exhibit strong and stable leadership as they incorporate the positive qualities from the existing programs while not losing sight of the need to initiate and implement the overarching vision for the new institution. 7.2) Institutional Attributes First and foremost the institute charged with the delivery of needed climate-science products must have a clearly defined mission focused on the actual delivery of the product, including fundamental assurance of the quality of the products. Solid scientific process must lie at the basis of the products, but it must be realized that delivery of the product will require bringing closure to incomplete scientific arguments to allow builds of software suites. These builds need to be tested and validated prior to their application in product generation and will serve as baselines for future builds with more comprehensive scientific development. The defined mission of the institute will provide overarching structure to facilitate prioritization and decision making. Just as essential as the mission, there needs to be an executive decision-making function vested in, at most, a small group of science and software managers, whose performance is measured by the successful delivery of the products and the subsequent customer response. At the lead of this group will be an individual with the ultimate authority and responsibility for delivery of the product. For the executive function to be effective, the institute has to have a unifying incentive structure that connects the organization from top to bottom, with the delivery of a successful product at the top. The current situation does not support an effective incentive structure at any level. At the lowest level, scientists are generally rewarded for individual accomplishments of innovative research: i.e., discovery-driven research. At the next level, even in the most project-focused organizations, funds flow into organizations from a variety of program managers. These funds fuel subsets of the organizations and draw human resources towards these subsets, away from the systematic delivery of the needed products. The program managers naturally command the allegiance of these subsets of the organization and are generally not rewarded for the delivery of successful products by the organizations they fund. This programmatic fracturing extends to computational resources, and in most U.S. laboratories there is a disconnect between computational resources and the delivery of simulation and assimilation products. Finally, the organizations that are expected to deliver the needed climate-science products are often embedded in large Agency laboratories whose basic metrics of success do not include delivery of successful climate-science simulation and assimilation products.[22] All told, the current structure of climate-science activities in the U.S. is fracturing rather than unifying. 7.3) Business Practices A functioning Climate Service that contains the attributes described above would stand in stark contrast to the pervasive scientific culture of the U.S. Such an organization would vest the decision making function in an executive process that acts in the best interest of the delivery of the institutional products[23]. Such a Climate Service will require supporting business practices that are significantly different from those currently used in the scientific community. These business practices must be unifying. They must provide a mechanism for stable and effective external review as well as integration with the discovery-driven research community. As with the scientific and computational aspects of this enterprise, the business practices need to be considered in a systematic and integrated way. They need to support the goals and function of the charged institute. While the complete specification of these business practices are beyond the scope of this document the following can be derived from experience within the current organizations.
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