New Tool Now Available to Help Institutions Assess Their Research Computing and Data Programs

Internet2’s collaborators at the Campus Research Computing Consortium (CaRCC) are pleased to announce that a new version of the Research Computing and Data (RCD) Capabilities Model assessment tool is now available and ready to use. This new web-based version of the assessment tool offers a much better user experience and is backed by a database that provides a more robust platform for data analysis. A new online data exploration and benchmarking portal will also be launched in early 2024. 

Why Participate in the RCD Capabilities Model? 

The RCD Capabilities Model allows participating institutions to: 

• Assess their support for computationally- and data-intensive research.
• Identify potential areas for improvement. 
• Understand how the broader community views RCD support.  

Contributing institutions help build the Community Dataset and enrich the resulting picture we have of our community. You will get access to the benchmarking functionality on the new portal that compares your assessment to the community-at-large, as well as segments of the community (R1s, R2s, Public or Private institutions, etc.; on the new portal you can define your benchmarking peer groups!). As a contributor, you will also get access to more detailed reporting functionality on the new portal to dig into the data and create custom visualizations. Although summary data will be publicly available, only contributors will have access to the detailed data and custom visualization feature.

How to Get Started

Whether you are from one of the 56 institutions that have submitted past assessments or if you are an organization interested in submitting for the first time, use our Quick Start Guide to walk you through the process of using the new tool.

Have Questions or Need Help?

We have developed an integrated collection of help documents for the new tool.

You can also get help, including advice on how to approach your assessment, understand the questions, and interpret the results by emailing capsmodel-help@carcc.org, or joining our RCD Capabilities Model Office Hours on the second Tuesday of each month at 1 p.m. ET. 

Subscribe to the capsmodel-discuss@carcc.org discussion list (click here to join) to hear how other institutions are completing their assessment and using it as part of their strategic planning.

Want More Information? 

To find more information and background on the RCD Capabilities Model visit the RCD Nexus website. 

This work is supported by RCD Nexus, an NSF CI Center of Excellence Pilot under grant OAC-2100003, and the Campus Research Computing Consortium (CaRCC).

This story was originally posted on the CaRCC website: https://carcc.org/2023/11/02/new-rcd-capabilities-model-assessment-tool-now-available/