Huron selected as new electronic research administration system

As part of a broad strategic initiative, Northwestern is launching a program to replace InfoEd — its pre-award research administration management system — with Huron Grants and Agreements. The effort, called the Sponsored Research Administration Transformation Program, includes the development of an analytics environment to support business functions. These moves aim to implement a synergistic enterprise sponsored research administration management system based on industry best practices to strengthen processes, maximize efficiency, and support continued growth of University research. The program is a partnership between Sponsored Research in the Office for Research and Northwestern IT and includes representatives from key administrative units and research-intensive schools and departments.

The University’s research administration management system is vital for Northwestern researchers and administrators, who rely on the online tool to create, review, submit, and track research grant and contract proposals, negotiations, and awards that fund their investigations.

“Northwestern’s research impact is phenomenal and far reaching — a key reason we once again remained ranked among the nation’s top 10 universities,” said Milan Mrksich, vice president for research. “What’s not always as apparent are the administrative and IT resources that support those remarkable investigations. With Huron Grants and Agreements, we are providing our research community with an updated system to help reduce their administrative burden and allow them more time to focus on their transformative work. I want to thank the team involved in this important transition for their time, expertise, and dedication.”

Huron Grants and Agreements offers outstanding features in a robust and user-friendly interface, including:

• Online proposal budget development and transparent, streamlined award setup workflow
• Centralized project email correspondence stored in a searchable format
• End-to-end support for agreement negotiation, including clause library, change tracking, and two-way integration with DocuSign for automating signature collection
• Dashboards tailored by role (PI, department, central office, executive leadership) with at-a-glance features, including workflow queue balancing, deadline calendars, and the ability to embed and display current reporting from Tableau
• Vendor-hosted application with no customizations enabling faster implementation of new features and reduced upgrade time.

“As Northwestern’s research enterprise approaches $1 billion in annual sponsored funding, it’s crucial we maximize our technology use to keep up with this growth while offering our investigators and administrators an outstanding system to manage their sponsored research projects across the lifecycle,” said Shandra White, executive director for Sponsored Research.

Implementing innovation

The implementation timeline for the program spans approximately 18 months, with a spring 2023 go-live date.

The overall Transformation Program includes two related projects: one is focused on system implementation, including configuration, integrations, and data conversion; the other is focused on designing and developing the corresponding analytics environment. The latter project includes implementing a new datamart to enable reporting and self-service data access to  sponsored activity at Northwestern. The redesigned datamart also will provide a single combined source for legacy and current research data.

“Research analytics as a field has evolved tremendously in recent years,” said Nicholas Angeloni, director of Research Analytics. “Updating the current datamart will allow stakeholders to benefit from many additional types of reports and analyses.” Angeloni said the revamped analytics environment also will offer new and improved insights into sponsored research at Northwestern, enable the availability of research data in visualization tools, and empower end users to better leverage data for decision-making.

“This project gives us the chance to re-envision the system to ensure that current analytics needs are met, while also planning for future needs,” said Northwestern Information Technology’s Alan Garbarino, director of data management and analytics, noting that community feedback and engagement will be a key part of this development.

Project information is available online, where Northwestern’s research community will see regularly updated details and FAQs. In addition, the implementation team will communicate directly with stakeholders periodically to provide updates about the Sponsored Research Administration Transformation Program.

Those with questions, ideas, or suggestions about the transition to Huron Grants and Agreements are encouraged to visit the project website where they will find a comprehensive list of project participants.

By Matt Golosinski