On day 2 of Senior TechLeaders: Leading across culture, keynote speaker Francine Berman, Director of the San Diego SuperComputer Center and Professor of Computer Science at UCSD, continued the discussion of cultural differentiators – Berman talked about the dimensions of uncertainty avoidance, power distance, masculinity and feminity, and individualism versus collectivism.
Berman talked about leadership within an academic culture, where research goals are high level, new ideas are key, and credit is the main mechanism for advancement, making teamwork a more salient challenge even while the challenges they tackle necessitate large scale collaboration. This leads to simultaneous collaboration and competition being the norm – where collaboration is crucial yet individual recognition through peer review is the main reward.
In academia, the cultural boundaries are more defined around domains and fields of expertise rather than geography, as science is a global endeavor. In her specific leadership context, Berman views cyberinfrastructure as the grand cultural challenge. Cyberinfrastructure is the organized aggregate of technologies that enable to access and integrate today’s IT resources to facilitate science and societal goals. This means bridging the different institutional cultures and research cultures, and meeting the needs of technologists, scientists, users, and funding organizations.
Berman points a case in point is TeraGrid, a large scale cyberinfrastructure. For example, TeraGrid could help answer a societal question such as what the impact of a 7.8 earthquake in Southern California – using the grid, at multiple sites, scientists run a predictive model for earthquake behavior and produce a visualization which can be used to raise societal awareness. In order to launch, TeraGrid had to develop cross university partnerships and government agencies. Achieving this level of scale in infrastructure needed the overcoming of technical, socio and political challenges.