My Web Sites

eRA Website

Sun, 17 Jun 2007 12:30:16 -0400

This is a redesign of a badly out-of-date site. The challenge was more along the lines of decided what NOT to remove and to find a focus. The original site was clearly “developed” by the technical group who did the programming for the NIH’s electronic grants management and administration software. Little thought went into what the users of the site actually needed.

We formed a number of small focus groups and decided to focus this site on the community of scientists and administrators that seek funding from the NIH. We would include short fact sheets on all of the services offered by the eRA program and provide links to additional content that is scattered across NIH web space.

We recently presented the new design to a working group which enthusiastically supported our goals. The site is slated to go live in July of 2007.

ORISphere - A Blog

Thu, 14 Jun 2007 12:24:08 -0400

I started an NIH blog to much resistance, at least from some quarters. My immediate management saw it as something “fun” but that I shouldn’t spend much time on it as it wasn’t a priority.

The actual reason for the blog is to move the NIH in a new direction. Research indicates that people don’t trust traditional sources of information. They tend to trust more informal presentations where the writer seems more a person “more like themselves.” So I created an ORIS blog, or the “ORISphere” to prototype a new way to reach our audience. The manner is informal and the editing is minimal. Since this particular blog is inward facing, I didn’t meet as much resistance and found cooperation among a group of senior managers. The intent is to show another side of management to staff, one that each person can relate to on a more informal level while still receiving “the message” intended by management.

Portals

Wed, 9 May 2007 12:42:47 -0400

I suspect that portals as we’ve known them over the last 5 years are on their way out, to be replaced with newer, more user-friendly Web 2.0 applications. But they’re here now and they have their uses.

We use them when we want to present information to one audience while excluding another. This means “access control”. You could do this with an intranet, but you would have to work with your technical developers to create security groups that would manage who had access to what. With a portal, the portal software takes care of that. You can essentially create an intranet for your staff that includes news, a document repository and collaboration tools... all mostly out-of-the-box.

This is what we’ve done with the NIH portal. We’ve created an ORIS Workplace as a staff intranet and collaboration environment.

I suspect this effort will be short-lived as technology moves on, but it is easy to do and it meets our current needs at a low cost.

ORIS Update

Tue, 27 Mar 2007 12:11:44 -0400

Part of my “mission” at the National Institutes of Health and in my new role as Associate Director of Communications is to improve internal communications. That is much more easily said than done by NIH management. NIH is extremely compartmentalized with many little pfifdoms. The only lasting solution I could see was to bring about cultural change within the organization. The ORIS Update, a web-based newsletter attempts to do this by introducing key personnel in a way that mixes humor, informality, the importance of their work and a bit about their lives. The idea is to make it easier to work together in teams in the future.

The notable thing about the ORIS Update, in terms of technology is that we devise a very successful pure CSS two column layout. This allows us to easily meet Federal Section 508 requirements.

ORIS Podcasts

Wed, 28 Feb 2007 12:35:18 -0500

This is another example of pushing the envelop in a conservative organization. As Associate Director of Communications within the Office of Extramural Research at the NIH, my goal is to use newer technologies to help improve the image of the programs managed by the office. The primary users of eRA (the Electronic Research Administration) feel that the eRA program is not run particularly well and there isn’t much visibility into how decisions are made. The goal of my office is to improve the perception and improving that perception is vital or the program may find that its funding has been cut.

The idea eventually is to have a series where users of the system can directly interact with key eRA management in a “Talk Back Radio” format. eRA staff will give a short presentation and callers (or participants) will be able to ask questions that are answered live. The results will be formatted as a podcast and provided to interested parties via RSS.

At this point, we’re experimenting with the technology and gaining expertise by recording the audio of one of our staff brown bag lunch seminar series and synching up the presentation slides with the audio.

Although the primary purpose is to get familiar with the technology, I can not over emphasize how important it is to capture all your content. Raw material is what is needed for the next stage!