Project Overview
As a result of Congressional passage of the Federal Financial Assistance Management Improvement Act in 1999 (P.L. 106-107), all proposals to the 26 federal granting agencies must be submitted electronically via Grants.gov by the end of 2007.
This impacts SDSU PIs submitting proposals to the federal granting agencies. Of the 1,100 proposals submitted by SDSU faculty in 2006, 610 (approximately 55%) were submitted to federal agencies. SDSURF received 248 federal awards totaling $64,810,536.
SDSU Research Foundation formed the Electronic Research Administration (eRA) Team in November 2005 to research the solutions available for SDSURF to comply with the federal government's mandate to submit proposals to federal sponsors electronically. The form–based solution PureEdge and commercially available system–to–system applications identified as service providers on the NIH website were evaluated against a minimum set of system requirements and preferred strategic features.
Based on the product demonstrations and evaluations, the decision was made to implement InfoEd's system–to–system solution. InfoEd is one of the most mature products on the market. It meets the minimum system requirements and provides key features that other vendors do not. It has a user–friendly interface, integrates with the SPIN module already used by faculty to search for funding opportunities, is web–based supporting both Windows and Mac users and has the most powerful routing features of all the solutions evaluated. InfoEd also has built in flexibility that will allow us to configure the system based on SDSU/SDSURF business processes. It is also the only solution with form–level locking allowing multiple users to be working on a proposal simultaneously and a powerful integrated form–building tool that can be used to develop internal and non-federal sponsor forms that can be associated to and routed with application packages. InfoEd will also scale as SDSU's research volume grows.