Requirements gathering meetings

March-June 2023

Next was a series of requirements gathering meetings with the NOAA Fisheries OCIO contractor that would be involved in managing some of the environments and helping with some of the cloud tools. We were directed to the contractor point of contact (POC). The SEFSC FATES Division routed funds to OCIO for this support.

The initial conversation (March 2023) covered much of the same information that had been previously summarized in the security forms and documents and followed several months of inactivity due to staffing changes at the SEFSC. A second meeting (April) was more technical and outlined the infrastructure needs such as storage, compute engines, and processors. We were able to point to the Southwest Fisheries Science Center’s (SWFSC) documentation from their implementation.

An action item from this early April meeting was for the SEFSC to provide an infrastruture diagram1 to the contractor who would pass it along to the OCIO team for approval to implement. The challenge here was that scientists were being asked to provide an IT infrastructure diagram without the expertise to know what this entailed. After several iterations and follow up calls with the contractor concluding in May, our diagram was sufficient to advance the process along but apparently still only marginally helpful.2 The contractor passed along the information to OCIO for approval and advised that they would reach out to us on next steps once approved.

Footnotes

  1. SWFSC’s diagram had not yet been added to their documentation page.↩︎

  2. We do not include our diagram here because it was not ultimately used.↩︎