Scottish Biomedical Data Science

A toolkit for galvanising communities, bridging institutional silos, and building shared research data science infrastructure and skills

Lessons Learned

This page captures my honest reflections on the experience of building this initiative. They are observations from having gone through the process, including the parts that were difficult, slow, or unclear.

Three overarching themes emerge as critical for success.

1. Resilience

The core lesson Progress required sustained effort over approximately 18 months, despite uncertainty, institutional transitions, competing responsibilities, and no dedicated funding for the coordination work itself.

What resilience looked like in practice

This was not resolved in a single workshop. The workshop was the culmination of a year of work: evidence gathering, stakeholder engagement, relationship building, and repeated course corrections. Anyone who expects a single event to solve a systemic problem will be disappointed.

The timeline was longer than planned. Initial estimates proved optimistic. Institutional transitions, stakeholder scheduling conflicts, and scope expansion all contributed to delays. These were not failures — they were symptoms of the complexity involved. The initiative survived because the underlying problem remained real and urgent.

Competing responsibilities were constant. This coordination work was done alongside — not instead of — active research, teaching, and other professional responsibilities. There was no protected time for it. This is a systemic issue: the research system asks individuals to catalyse change without recognising or resourcing the effort.

What I wish I had known

2. Agility

The core lesson The process evolved significantly from initial concept to final workshop delivery. The ability to adapt — to change plans, reframe the problem, and respond to new information — was as important as any initial plan.

How the initiative adapted

The scope expanded. What began as a question about compute access broadened into a five-pillar framework encompassing governance, careers, IP, authentication, and — critically — training and people. The initiative was never just about infrastructure: the evidence consistently showed that fragmented training, workforce precarity, and the absence of coordination across people and skills were as significant as any hardware gap. This was not scope creep — it was the problem revealing its true shape. The discipline was in structuring the response (five defined pillars) rather than trying to squeeze a complex problem into a simple box.

The audience shifted. Early engagement was primarily with peer researchers. Over time, it became clear that institutional leaders, funders, and policymakers were essential. This required a different pitch, different evidence, and different language.

The workshop design evolved. Early concepts were closer to a traditional academic workshop — presentations followed by discussion. The final design was radically different: evidence-first, decision-oriented, with structured templates and explicit output requirements. This evolution came from testing ideas, getting feedback, and being willing to discard approaches that were not working.

The end goal changed. The original aspiration was a white paper produced directly from the workshop. In practice, a white paper will require additional data gathering and validation beyond what one workshop can provide. Recognising this and adjusting the plan — rather than forcing premature outputs — was the right call.

What I wish I had known

3. Influencing upwards

The core lesson Systemic change required engagement with funders, institutional leadership, and infrastructure providers — not just peer-level collaboration. This is the hardest skill to learn, and the one most likely to determine whether an initiative succeeds or remains aspirational.

Why this is different from peer engagement

When you engage with peers, you share a problem. When you engage with senior leaders, you need to offer a solution — or at least a credible path to one. The conversation is fundamentally different:

Peer engagement Senior engagement
“Do you experience this problem too?” “Here is the evidence that this is a national problem — spanning infrastructure, training, and people — and here is the economic case for coordination”
“We should do something about this” “Here is a specific proposal with defined costs and outcomes”
Shared frustration builds solidarity Strategic framing builds buy-in
Informal, conversational Structured, evidence-led
Time horizon: flexible Time horizon: “What can you deliver in 12 months?”

What worked for influencing upwards

What I wish I had known

Additional lessons

Beyond the three core themes, several specific lessons emerged:

On community building

On sustainability

On the research system

The most important lesson

Systemic challenges require systemic responses. Infrastructure, training, and people cannot be addressed in isolation — and none of them can be coordinated through one-off events. The workshop was essential, but it was the culmination of months of work, and the beginning of a longer journey toward shared ownership of resources, skills, and expertise.

Next: Resources — templates, frameworks, and references you can adapt