Thanks Bob and all others who responded with so many thoughful ideas! A related issue in the news is a plan to spend something like $19 billion--$2 billion in grants to create a national system of computerized health records, and $17 billion in higher Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements for doctors and hospitals to adopt the new technology. Perhaps the Government Accounting Office's report on what went wrong with grants.gov will be completed in time, so that some of the grants.gov lessons will benefit this new federal, nationwide technology project...? Just sign me, Addicted to Hope ======================= Glenn Krell MPA, CRA Director, Research Compliance and Proposal Development Illinois Institute of Technology http://www.iit.edu/research/services/orcpd/ 3300 South Federal Street Main Building, Suite 301 Chicago, Illinois 60616 312-567-7141 (telephone) 312-567-7517 (fax) IIT Research: Transforming Lives, Inventing the Future http://gradweb.iit.edu/gradresearch/searchengine.htm -----Original Message----- From: Research Administration List [mailto:xxxxxx@hrinet.org] On Behalf Of Bob Beattie Sent: Wednesday, February 11, 2009 12:26 PM To: xxxxxx@hrinet.org Subject: Re: [RESADM-L] Lessons Learned from Grants.gov Implementation Glenn, good ideas. As I mentioned a while back, the GAO is doing a study of Grants.gov. It is a government study, but the Legislature studying the Executive. This report is due in May. Plenty of time for us to have input. We need to keep in mind that Grants.gov has had a number of problems over its tenure. First, it was supposed to be part of a cooperative effort between granting agencies and grantee organization, brought together through PL106-107 to improve the grants submission process, and to streamline and improve the process. Some agencies abandoned their own internal systems, such as NIH, to give full effort to implement Grants.gov. Other agencies keep their own systems, encourage use of that system and thus are not participating fully in the effort to provide a single portal for submissions. Grants.gov has a half dozen overseers, including the HHS hierarchy that knows little about the grantee needs, the Grants Executive Board made up of reps from each granting agency , and OMB that gives directives, yet still exists in the world of "forms" not data streams. Moreover, there has been high turnover at the leadership positions in Grants.gov. Since Charlie Havekost was the first director, I think I can count 6 directors. Only the current director Eban Trevino has thought of himself as more than just a caretaker. No previous director has taken much effort to seek information from the Grantee Community. Indeed, others have tried to avoid such input. Grants.gov was set up with no grantee user input until it was ready to be released (and it was discovered that it did not work with Macs). No user input was sought on whether PureEdge was actually any good for the purpose intended. No user input was sought as to whether problems would be solved by Adobe, when General Dynamics took over as the integrator. Almost no user suggestions were implemented, until recently. A clear example of Grants Colonialism -- the government knows what's best for us in the Grantee community, and we need to take it or else. So the current Grants.gov leadership is stuck seeking funding by going hat in hand to the various granting agencies (some of whom would rather spend the money on their own systems, instead of helping to improve G.g). The current leadership is stuck with the software accepted by leadership 3 years ago, stuck with a multi-headed management environment, stuck managing hardware when it should be dealing with data. The 8 or so members of the staff have good intentions, want to help the grantee community, but must answer to the grantor community that wants more and different forms, more data items, and wants to pay less money. Does anyone recall any grantor agency reducing the burden on us by eliminating forms or data requirements. NIH has made many improvements and reduced burdens in response to user input. They are the only agency I know of that has an actual users advisory group -- and listens to it. What happened to the heady principles of 8 years ago of Grantor and Grantee working together to make like easier for all of us, reducing administrative burden by having fewer forms, fewer data, fewer problems? We are now at the end point of a struggle by Grants.gov staff in the last year or so to correct the many problems that were initiated when the system was set up. I think all of us in the grantee community want a simple way to submit grant applications -- one form, one system, one portal. We want some input on how those should work. Perhaps we might put energy into creating the process that we want. We have learned may lessons from the way Grants.gov was imposed on us; can we now use those lessons to propose a better system? Bob ------------------------------ On Feb 11, 2009, at 12:39 PM, Glenn Krell wrote: Hi Resadmr's, Into the textbooks on Public Administration go some of the great screw-ups from which students try to learn: the Challenger disaster, the ValuJet tragedy, the Centralia Mine Disaster. Academic scholars try to describe what went wrong, where the ball got dropped, what functionary or government quality control inspector did only his/her job and not a whit more. After so many lugubrious tales of woe on the Grants.gov saga, I am curious as to whether any academic or layperson has put together a comprehensive article on what went so terribly wrong despite so many good intentions, millions of dollars, and years (decades?) of planning. I would imagine that there are at least several papers and/or poster presentations on this topic by now. The grants.gov saga could have numerous lessons for many activities and plans we launch at our home institutions. How wonderful to think that the research administration community, including the agency planners, might learn from this. All best regards, Glenn ====================================================================== Instructions on how to use the RESADM-L Mailing List, including subscription information and a web-searchable archive, are available via our web site at http://www.hrinet.org (click on "Listserv Lists") ======================================================================
