IT Department Vision and Objectives

Vision

The IT Department's vision is to reinforce its position as a trusted and efficient IT service-provider and technology partner for the CERN community, and to be recognised as a reference catalyst driving collaboration and innovation in the scientific computing environment in the member states and beyond.

Objectives

To implement this vision, the IT Department will pursue the following strategic objectives:

  1. IT as Provider: Meet the Information Technology needs of the Organisation
    • The IT Department plays a part in both serving the scientific programmes of CERN and in serving its user community, through its services and research.The IT Department will continue to provide a set of services designed for the ongoing needs of the Organisation and its partners, striving to achieve a cost-effective balance between standardised, common services and specialised tools.
       
  2. IT as Optimizer: Support CERN’s existing scientific programmes by deploying production quality services
    • The IT Department will continue to support CERN’s core scientific mission, by delivering state-of-the-art services, providing dedicated technical support to the Organisation’s ongoing mission-critical activities and programmes.
       
  3. IT as Pioneer: Prepare for the challenges of the scientific programmes’ evolution and the lab’s future
    • The IT Department will support the evolution of the organisation’s diverse scientific programmes, such as HL-LHC, the Physics Beyond Colliders, and the FCC programme. The department will develop future computing models,software and services in close collaboration with internal and external communities, through fundamental research, to meet both scaling challenges,and novel requirements, such as those in the areas of storage and data management, heterogeneous resources and parallel computing. IT will also assess the impact of potentially transformative technologies, such as Artificial Intelligence and Quantum Computing.
       
  4. IT as Connector: Increase CERN’s scientific, societal and economic impact
    • There is an opportunity to consolidate and further develop a portfolio of IT solutions in the spirit of Open Science, like it happens with the WLCG initiative. The CERN IT department will collaborate with its member states,the HEP partners, other research communities, academia and industry,through mechanisms such as CERN openlab, to nurture an ecosystem of tools and services, participating as an honest broker and trusted partner. It will reinforce the long-term sustainability of the software, services and communities, and create a positive impact on society consistent with the European vision for Open Science.

See the complete IT Department Strategy document in CDS.