NSF PR 96-77 - December 3, 1996
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NSF Fastlane Features Simultaneous Innovation and
Experimentation
Ten winners stepped to the podium to accept National
Information Infrastructure (NII) Awards for excellence
and innovation in information technology Dec. 3 at
New York City's Hilton Hotel. But in the National
Science Foundation's (NSF) winning entry, the FastLane
project, there is a uniqueness to the story.
FastLane developers at NSF, working on a three-year
experiment to streamline the way the agency does business
with its many constituencies in scientific research
and education, took an aggressive approach. They sought
to implement new techniques using the World Wide Web
that would cut across the entire range of NSF business
processes while simultaneously improving existing
ones.
"Most Web initiatives are implemented singly, attacking
only one part of a business process. If successful,
there may be another tried or piloted, then another,"
Gerry Stuck, NSF deputy director of information systems,
said.
"When we started FastLane, we said we would automate
all interactions with NSF customers."
These processes range from solicitation announcements,
submission of proposals, peer review, the final awarding
of grants or graduate educational fellowships, and
even financial transactions such as cash requests.
According to Stuck, FastLane planners broke these
pieces of the process into self-contained modules.
More were added as the first year modules went into
production. Continuous communications with participating
institutions and aggressive use of emerging technologies
allowed for FastLane's consistently rapid development
and increasing customers' satisfaction as they felt
ownership in the new system.
Working initially with 16 coordinating universities,
NSF information managers maintained continuous communications
with these institutions to make changes in all of
the processes of proposal submission and review, rather
than a single phase. These across-the-board experiments
allowed breakthroughs that could be refined quickly
as an individual proposal process went on.
Further innovations are in the works, according to
NSF experts. The FastLane project will eventually
provide global access to scientific information, such
as complete texts of funded proposals and full reports
of projects. Multimedia presentations of funded projects
are also on the horizon. NSF is also working with
other federal agencies on common interfaces in order
to share information with an even wider audience and
provide funding seekers with "one-stop shopping" for
a variety of federal programs.
Editors: For more information about FastLane,
see: http://www.fastlane.nsf.gov
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