An Organizational Framework of Institutional Stakeholder Engagement for Capacity to Support Big Data Science Teams Towards Cyberinfrastructure Diffusion

This paper presents an organizational framework for measuring institutional stakeholder engagement for big data science teams toward cyberinfrastructure (CI) diffusion. CI projects are an academic example of big data science projects in data-intensive research efforts. CI projects provide a unique case for understanding big data science teams from an important context, which is scientific and academic in nature. We argue that the capacity of a big data science team needs to take into consideration several institutional stakeholder engagement factors, such as having a pro-CI administration, institutional CI investments, campus CI tech support, and a non-traditional research culture. We proposed composite scale items designed to quantitatively measure these four dimensions, using a self-reported questionnaire. The overall mean score and the four individual composite scores of the main dimensions can be used as reflexive feedback and assessment for teams about the macro institutional environment in which they are embedded. Future research should statistically validate the framework via (exploratory and confirmatory) factor analyses.