This kind of requirement is essentially a re-statement of “installing Perl [packages ...] as a non-root user.” You can, indeed, configure a local directory, arrange for PERL5LIB to include it, then arrange for cpan[m] to install things there, all without elevated privileges. Many Un*xers will use part of /usr/local for this purpose.
It is very advisable not to tamper with whatever Perl installation might be present at the system-wide level, because many system maintenance utilities provided by [distro ...] software vendors are written in Perl, and they implicitly rely upon their database of installed packages to know what the state of the system is. If you hose up out-of-band modify that, you’re screwed recovery can be a little delicate . . .
On the other hand, the research teams can readily configure their own, even project-specific, CPAN library configuration, superimposed upon top of the standard system installation which should remain the same, and either share that among all computers in a cluster or use version control and/or rsync to spread it across the local hard-drives of each cluster node. The IT Team does not need to be directly involved in this, although they do need to know to inform you if and when the underlying system-wide Perl configuration might change. (It is possible, although more rare, to create a completely isolated Perl, right down to recompiling the executable itself from source.)
