printable versionNew software system for research administration considered
BY RAY DELGADO
The words "new software system" may give some people pause so soon after the problem-plagued Oracle financial systems rollout, but university officials say they are carefully proceeding on the development of a new and greatly needed software system for research administration.
Paperless electronic systems are quickly becoming the norm in the world of research grant proposals, and Stanford must develop its own system that will be compatible with the newly implemented Grants.gov system and reduce the risk of noncompliance with the current and inefficient manual research processes, Anne Hannigan, associate vice president for research administration, told the Faculty Senate last week.
With the lessons of the 2003 Oracle rollout still on the minds of administrators, a steering committee made up of research administration leaders from across campus began meeting more than a year-and-a-half ago to carefully deliberate over a variety of research administration systems available to them and what elements of a system would be required. The committee selected the system InfoEd, which has been deployed by a number of other research universities with great success and was enthusiastically recommended by some 100 Stanford faculty and staff who attended a product demonstration.
A proposal to use InfoEd, which is expected to cost around $13 million to implement, is currently being considered by the University Budget Group. If approved, the new system modules could be tested on campus during the summer to see how they work with various departments, Hannigan said. University officials will be careful to mitigate risks and create back-up plans in case the system doesn't perform as expected, she said.
"I don't think that many of the things that we're doing with this implementation, including having users review the product, happened with Oracle," Hannigan said. "The experience with Oracle created a desire to mitigate any issues related to the product's implementation."
Research administration is a huge undertaking for the university. In the last fiscal year, the university spent just under $1 billion on research. Additionally, Stanford submitted approximately 3,000 new proposals and managed over 4,000 active awards and 5,000 active human and animal protocols. Research is managed through multiple organizations, including the Office of the Vice Provost and Dean of Research and Graduate Policy, Office of Research Administration, SOM Research Management Group, Engineering Research Administration, individual departments and faculty principal investigators.
The university's largely manual systems for handling research administration are inefficient, risk noncompliance on a daily basis and cannot be sustained, the committee report said. An electronic system would help facilitate and interface the major functions of research administration, including proposal preparation and submission, award negotiation, acceptance and initiation, compliance oversight, property management, post-award administration, reporting and closeout.
More than 80 percent of faculty and staff who reviewed the product recommended it, Hannigan said, and there were no "negative" responses. Product users liked the ability to obtain information directly from other co-investigators; that the product was web-based and compatible with all computers from any location; that it was intuitive of common needs; that it could be used by multiple people at the same time on the same proposal with security concerns met; and that there was a lack of redundancy in having to fill out the same forms more than once.
Stephen Fortmann, the C. F. Rehnborg Professor in Disease Prevention, was one of the faculty members who tested the product and recommended it. "It's principally a benefit for the administration," he said. "So it will be a benefit indirectly, because if the administration is more efficient, we're happy. And it looks to me like it is something relatively easy to interact with and it would make the process of putting the front pages of the grant together much simpler and quicker."