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UNC HOMEPAGE
On June 30, Teresa Mayse, Barbara Page and Patsy Oliver did not close their W.
Franklin Street offices until close to midnight. Hours after everyone else had
gone home, they sat together on the floor munching candy bars and crunching
computer data.
Their late-night work sessions served as the forerunner for a revolution of
sorts for the hundreds of researchers on this campus who cannot do their work
without first applying for grants to pay for it.
It's a revolution that will add efficiency to that process by eliminating the
need to type the same information again and again from one office to the next
as a grant proposal winds its way through campus offices to a funding agency
for its consideration.
It's a revolution called Coeus, a new computer software program developed and
licensed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
And it's a big deal for what on this campus is big business.
There are between 1,200 and 1,300 faculty members who perform research work
here. Between July 1, 1999, and now, they submitted more than 3,100 proposals
that, if funded, would bring to this campus nearly $600 million, Oliver said.
Coeus, in case you are wondering, was the Titan god of intelligence. The Coeus
software, for researchers on this campus, could be seen more as a godsend. The
software is already available on campus to some users, but it will be several
years before all researchers on campus begin using Coeus to write and submit
grants. This year, the main focus will be on training.
If this is the Computer Age, think of Coeus as MIT's souped-up version, geared
to record and share information through "electronic transfer" rather than
paper.
Coeus is designed to add both speed and simplicity to the grant-writing process
while allowing immediate access to up-to-date information about research
proposals, no matter what stage of the approval process they are in.
People wanting to find out about the status of a project application have had
to rely on somebody else walking or mailing a paper document to them from
somewhere else on campus.
Coeus eliminates the need to take any of those steps.
With a few clicks of a keyboard and mouse, Coeus users with the necessary
security clearance will be able to retrieve information instantly sitting
behind their own desks.
Over the years, few people on this campus have seen more changes in the
grant-writing process than Mayse. For most of those years, she said, changes
were slow.
She started work in the Office of Contracts and Grants (OCG) 28 years ago using
a typewriter to clack out checks and filing grant proposals in their thick
manila envelopes.
She used thick printout sheets to look up accounts and check off the invoices
charged against a particular grant to keep track of the remaining balance.
After about a year, she exchanged her typewriter for a "dumb terminal" that
allowed her to track grant money as it was spent. It even did the math for
her.
The next quantum change happened with the introduction of specialized
software.
Nearly a decade ago, the Office of Research Services (ORS) developed a program
called "Sparci" that was used to create a database of all research proposals
that had been submitted for funding.
OCG began using software called FRS (Financial Record System). It was designed
to keep the official record of grant expenditures.
Meanwhile, various departments created their own databases to track their
proposals and awards.
The magic of the Coeus software, Mayse said, will be its ability to give
immediate access to the same information at any time to anyone on campus with a
need to know it.
Since mid-February, Mayse, Page, Oliver and others have spent countless hours
copying all the proposals from Sparci into Coeus.
Their late Friday night June 30 was spent making sure nothing had been missed
in anticipation of the Coeus system "going live" the following Monday.
"Going live," Mayse said, meant people on campus on the Coeus network could
access information for applications within their departments. More important,
Mayse said, was the need to log all information about a grant in the fiscal
year to which it belonged. And June 30 marked the last day of the 1999-2000
fiscal year.
University administrators decided months ago to be among the first campuses in
the country to implement Coeus.
Mayse, Page and Oliver are part of the seven-member team charged with making
that happen as smoothly and quickly as possible.
Sandra Shirley, a system accountant, serves as leader of the team. David
Langham will oversee the application of Coeus throughout the campus. Roger
Jarrell is the programmer who will be doing much of the work. Jarrell will
address security issues as well as modify the MIT-based software to tailor it
to the needs of the University.
People within the research department from which an application originated will
have "read only" access to follow its progress as soon as it leaves the hands
of a "PI," short for principal investigator. People will be able to do that as
soon as they complete training, Jarrell said.
Rodney Bishop is the computer consultant who has made sure the Coeus software
is not only available to appropriate users across campus, but that it works
with all the other different software their computers might already have.
Shirley said the team decided to implement Coeus in two phases, with the first
phase to be completed over the current academic year.
The two offices most involved in this first phase are OCG and ORS.
The jobs of the two offices are equally important but distinctly different.
All grant applications, of course, originate with the PI for a proposed
project.
Once it leaves the PI's hands, a grant application goes to OCG. Here, an
application is checked for errors ranging from adding mistakes to
miscalculations of budget needs.
Once this is done, an application is forwarded to ORS where staff fine tune the
application to get it ready it for submittal to the sponsoring agency.
Page was hired in September 1999 by ORS to serve as the faculty training
coordinator for Coeus. This September, 37 faculty and staff participated in the
first training session. Another one is planned for Oct. 18.
"We would like Coeus to be recognized and embraced as a powerful tool in the
research community across campus," Page said. "For this to happen, people have
to feel comfortable navigating the system and understanding what they see."
Shirley said it would take several years to get all researchers on campus using
Coeus to its full capacity. Pilot projects will begin next summer in an
unspecified number of research departments.
It could take another year or two or more to get all the research departments
using Coeus for grant-writing, Shirley said.
The University followed MIT in familiarizing staff workers with the software
before researchers. Doing so, Shirley said, will allow staff members to become
familiar and comfortable with Coeus now so they won't have to adjust to it
later when PIs are using it to send their applications directly to them.
When that happens, a PI will simply type a grant proposal onto the appropriate
form pre-loaded in Coeus. As soon as the PI completes the application, it will
be available on the Coeus network for contract specialists in OCG to review.
When everything is in place and everybody has had access to training, each
research department will have the option to develop their proposals online,
then monitor them as they are electronically routed from OCG to ORS to the
internal review boards and finally to the funding agencies themselves.
The database will eventually be loaded with all information about grant awards,
too.
Oliver, a systems accountant, said Coeus provides the databases that can be
used later for both management purposes and for quick analysis.
For instance, Coeus would have the information to chart the total number of
grant awards a department has received year by year, the percentage of
applications approved, the total amount of grant money awarded and so on.
The farthest-reaching goal is to be able to send electronically the completed
University applications to the source of funding, be it a state or federal
agency, a private company or a private foundation.
That can't happen until the federal government decides to join the revolution,
too.
Coeus training offered
The next Coeus training session for faculty and staff will be Oct. 18.
Also planned are Thursday morning sessions at 440 W. Franklin Street for people
who have requested access to Coeus.
Dubbed "Coeus 101" by organizers, training teaches such basics as how to log in
and out of the program, how to reach the help desk, how to search and sort, and
how to track proposals through the approval process.
To get more details on training opportunities, e-mail Barbara Page at Barbara_Page@unc.edu
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