Research Support and the TU Delft Digital Strategy
TU Delft is currently writing a digital strategy for 2024-30. It’s due to be approved in spring 2023, but work is already beginning on its implementation.
The strategy has eight sections
- Students and Education
- Research and Innovation
- People and Community
- Campus and Service Provision
- Digital Skills
- Data
- Security & Privacy
- Digital Infrastructure in the workplace
Along with Robert van Bremeen from ICT, I am responsible for the research and innovation section. We have identified four key areas where the university’s approach to digital can have a positive impact on the practice of research. These followed discussions with those writing the Digital Strategy and workshops involving researchers and others from the university.
The workshops identified some broad themes. For example, the crucial importance of a trusted infrastructure for sharing data; the amount of unstructured data that was created by researchers but never reused; the importance of good training, and staff support; and the growing importance of software.
The themes were summarised as the four areas shown in the image below.
We then took this a step further, and identified both existing initiatives and new ones that are needed in order to turn the four areas into specific, actionable projects.
This draft diagram still needs some work, but it gives an indication of these initiatives.
This discussion is of course just the first step. The work now begins of turning these fine ideas into practice.
For this step, ICT and the Library will appoint a kwartiermaker to explore how this list of initiatives can be turned into a programme with specific projects under it. The programme currently has the name of the Research Hub.
The kwartiermaker will be discussing these initiatives with researchers, support staff, managers and others across the university – in conversations, meetings, workshops and other forums. The goal is to have a defined programme for the Research Hub, including a list of projects by mid 2023.
Open Working 