Making a Difference with Data: Collective Support for Research Data at Harvard Business School

The mission of Harvard Business School (HBS) is to educate leaders who make a difference in the world.  In doing so, faculty members investigate evidence-based leadership practice, employing diverse, data-intensive research.  In order to support such research, the School’s landscape of administrative departments work collectively to ensure that such research is efficient, seamless, ambitious, robust, and reproducible.

This poster profiles the relationships among the web of services provided collectively by partners at the School, including the library, archives, IT, research computing, and research administration, among others.  It describes how professionals in diverse fields—e.g., infrastructure development, computing, storage, data collection, contracts and ethics, statistical analysis, data publishing, curation and archiving—collaborate to enable fundamental and practical quantitative and qualitative data research.  Departments and individual staff members provide services both individually and collectively, balancing efficient standardisation (at the School and University levels) with the diverse needs of researchers and service providers.