COEUS
Training and
Proposal Development
OSP
will continue to offer training sessions for various ways to use Coeus to the
MIT community at the MIT Learning Center.
These sessions are designed to enhance your understanding of the
capabilities of Coeus and will gradually expand to include the creation of
proposals.
Over
the past couple of months, OSP has been training the department of Earth,
Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences and the department of Aeronautics and
Astronautics Engineering to use the Proposal Development module of Coeus. We have learned much from these two
departments and wish to thank both of them for their continued support and
patience while we determine how to best train future users to use the new
module of Coeus.
With
the Proposal Development module of Coeus, you will be able to create your
proposal on-line, prepare the budget, attach the scientific portion of the
proposal, and route the proposal all in electronic form. The budget preparation tool accurately
calculates your budget by applying all EB, vacation, F&A, lab allocation
and inflation rates. Under recovery and
cost sharing are automatically calculated.
Once complete, you can print your proposal on the required agency forms
and/or select from a variety of pre-defined forms for those sponsors that have
no forms. For NSF, your proposal can be
transmitted electronically into the Fastlane system without the necessity of
re-keying the data! Even if your
department is not ready to use the complete routing and approval component of
Coeus, you can still take advantage of the robust budgeting tool to prepare you
proposal’s budget.
Some
of the questions that are answered by attending the general training session on
Coeus include: How many proposals did
your department submit last month? Last
year? How does that compare to fiscal
year 2000? How many awards from NSF are
active in your department? What is the
obligated amount of those awards? What
is the anticipated total for those awards?
What is the current and pending support for any PI in your
department? You can find answers to
these and other questions by understanding and utilizing the search
capabilities of Coeus without having to write any special programs to access
the data warehouse.
Many
of you have experienced the variety of electronic research administration (eRA)
systems being deployed by various agencies.
To date, we have seen systems from DOE, ONR, NSF, NIH, NASA, Education,
Space Telescope Systems and from some private foundations and non-profits. Coming down the pipe are systems from DARPA
and to support the ATP program. What is
the most troubling about these systems is that they are all proprietary. Learning one of these systems won’t help you
in learning to use one of the other systems.
All have different user interfaces and use different technologies and
approaches to solving the particular agency’s eRA activities.
Probably the most important reason to use Coeus is that Coeus will provide for a one-face approach to proposal development and award administration. MIT has been engaged in many projects, initiatives and actively participates in several government-wide efforts to streamline the proposal-to-award life cycle. Since other universities have licensed Coeus, the government looks towards MIT for eRA capabilities and readiness and is using MIT data models in some of its standardizations. Over the next year, MIT will continue to work with the government to ensure that Coeus is compatible with the Federal Commons.
The
IAEGC encourages and assists Federal agencies in developing electronic grants
systems and standardizing electronic commerce methodologies throughout the
Federal government. The IAEGC is
working closely with the Grants Management Committee to achieve the mandates of
Public Law 106-107, the "Federal Financial Assistance Management
Improvement Act of 1999", which was enacted on November 20, 1999 and to
comply with federal guidance for Electronic Government. In doing so, its mission
includes:
·
the electronic exchange of federal grants information,
·
developing, promoting, coordinating, and maintaining the use
of standard data through a coordinated effort with other federal agencies,
federal inter-agency organizations, and federal grant recipients, and
·
conducting outreach to the trading partner community to
encourage its participation in electronic grants.
The
IAEGC works in a proactive and coordinated manner among the participating
agencies, with various inter-agency groups
(such as the FDP, the CFO council, and the CIO council,) and with the
entire grant recipient community.
The
IAEGC has been approved as a new federal working group by the Federal EDI
Standards Management Coordinating Committee (FESMCC). The purpose of the group will be to establish the standards for
the 194 Transaction Set and other related grants standard transactions. This will mean that desired changes to the
194 would no longer have to be staffed with other work groups to get approval
for change.
In
order to bring this to fruition, several steps must be taken. The IAEGC must establish a work group that
will be the decision authority on proposed changes and must write a charter and
have it approved by FESMCC. The IAEGC
must also design the business processes that will be used to make suggested
changes, evaluate their business impacts and then approve and institute the
change. The new subcommittee will
tentatively be known as “Federal Grants Functional Work Group” (FGFWG). Each agency would have one vote in the FGFWG. It is the intent of this group to consider
standards, not just in EDI, but in other emerging technologies such as XML.
An IAEGC initiative that will enable the exchange of
grant business transactions (applications, award, etc.) through:
·
Establishing a One-Stop Web Site
·
Supporting multiple transmission
technologies
·
Focusing EC development &
maintenance
In
an effort to provide a common face of the Government to the grantee community,
participating federal agencies have developed the Federal Commons. The Federal
Commons is being coordinated through the IAEGC. The Federal Commons will include interfaces designed to support
the secure transmission of administrative information pursuant to pre-award and
post-award grants administration business processes. For each business process,
users will be provided with technological options as to how such information
can be formatted, transmitted and/or received.
Additionally,
the Federal Commons will offer functionality to support the registration of
grantee organizations and users, enabling a single Government user logon
whereby secure access to all participating agencies will be provided. The
Federal Commons site will support the establishment and maintenance of profiles
for each grantee organization (Organizational Profile) as well as professional
staff at that grantee organization (Professional Profiles). Using information
contained in these profile repositories will greatly facilitate submission of
such information as part of various business processes to any of the agencies
participating in the Federal Commons.
Proposed Federal Commons business processes
include: Grant Announcements,
Application Submission, Application Status Checking, Award Notification,
Payment, Organization Profile, Professional Profile, Reporting: (Progress,
Financial, Invention), Security Technologies.