The ‘go to person’ is probably the best bet, most researchers are willing to learn new things so hopefully this would lead to improvements. I saw this formalised in a group in KTH where a person’s job was to help researchers and students get the most out of their computational resources.
A bigger problem is the stop start nature of software development in academic research. Students and postdocs come and go and tools are frequently abandoned to the new inexperienced student or are kept frozen in time on that one old machine that still works. Many researchers are simply afraid of coding.
We recently had a student from my former lab interview with us and he presented all his Ph.D results captured and processed in a tool I wrote several years earlier. It had seen zero development even though the commments through listed possible improvements. I doubt anyone even looked at the source code because it just worked and he had no idea I had wrote it even though my name was in the header comment.
A bigger problem is the stop start nature of software development in academic research. Students and postdocs come and go and tools are frequently abandoned to the new inexperienced student or are kept frozen in time on that one old machine that still works. Many researchers are simply afraid of coding.
We recently had a student from my former lab interview with us and he presented all his Ph.D results captured and processed in a tool I wrote several years earlier. It had seen zero development even though the commments through listed possible improvements. I doubt anyone even looked at the source code because it just worked and he had no idea I had wrote it even though my name was in the header comment.