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Facilities to Join Operations

Operations Director Alexander Merola.

I would like to welcome members of the SLAC Facilities department into the Operations directorate, and provide some background and motivation about this organizational change.

Earlier this year senior management, with input from the whole SLAC community, developed our 10-year scientific vision and shared this with the Department of Energy SLAC Site Office and Office of Science. Using the feedback that we have received, the senior management has developed our SLAC agenda with action items to make that 10-year vision real.

As an important step in achieving the 10-year vision, the mission support organizations of SLAC are devising supporting business plans. These plans will ensure that our current and future infrastructure and services support the scientific priorities expressed in the SLAC agenda. There is much to do—and it is exciting that we at SLAC have so challenged ourselves.

The scientific priorities will benefit if we in the mission support groups share a common, cross-organizational approach to determine and meet priorities for infrastructure and services. That process has started. The Operations organization, jointly with Facilities, has begun to develop business plans to support the lab's scientific priorities. The operational priorities and funding levels will be determined by SLAC's scientific needs, as determined by the SLAC director and our associate lab directors.

Facilities and Operations will continue this work together. Both groups are already taking advantage of shared opportunities between the current organizations, and we intend to create increased synergy by enjoining Facilities into the Operations Directorate. This change is effective October 1. Our first shared all-hands meeting will take place on October 7.

Given that I have been privileged, earlier in my career, to work on airborne electronics and mechanics and to serve as an acting facilities division director, I have a personal affinity to Facilities. Given the importance of the DOE Strategic Line Initiative projects and the criticality of current and future SLAC infrastructure and services, I recognize the special responsibility to succeed here. And we will.

To my fellow Facilities members of the Operations directorate—Welcome!

—Alexander Merola
  SLAC Today, September 24, 2008