SAMS ICT & Information Services

The SAMS ICT & Information Services department provides a range of infrastructure and research\education specific services to the SAMS group, covering all areas: Research, Enterprise, Education and Enabling. As well as providing the usual range of infrastructure ICT services such as networks, security, email, file & archive storage, telephony, printing, user support, Audio\Visual provision, etc., we also deliver specialised services such as high performance computing, development (database, programming, MIS), data management, machine learning, data driven websites ( for internal and project\contract use),  conference support, bioinformatics and telemetry systems. The department also includes the SAMS library service (see https://www.sams.ac.uk/facilities/library/)

We are tightly integrated within the organisation and do not provide such services in isolation: our philosophy is that ICT is here to support the organisation, not dictate how it operates. We try to have a pragmatic approach to balance the importance of good security and procedures against the requirements of the research environment. We utilise a service desk (via the UHI) which we encourage staff and students to use to report issues (as it helps us better manage & monitor our workload) but we also have an open door policy and encourage all staff and students to discuss all their technology and data needs with us.

Many team members are actively engaged in research projects and commercial contracts and we provide advice and services from the proposals stage right through the lifetime of projects; including data archiving. In addition, we are also involved in delivering student and CPD teaching, as well as providing and managing local education ICT systems. This direct involvement gives the team a clear understanding of the ICT requirements of the various functions of the organisation.