The Office of Sponsored Programs (OSP) at Midwest State University handles various aspects of programs and research projects funded through grants. OSP manages various types of grants such as grants supporting student research and activities, grants supporting faculty activities and those targeted to academic departments to meet special needs. The OSP receives grant applications, conducts an internal review process and coordinates with the Finance department to handle the procurement for approved grants. Investing in the latest technology to support the grant management process has always been a priority for the OSP and the University. The University IT department has played an important role in the development or acquisition of the systems that support various processes. However, in a recent meeting of the OSP representatives with the IT department, the OSP director raised a concern about the paper-based system the office uses to handle technology grants. These types of grants are new to University. They are intended to assist academic departments to meet the equipment, training, and miscellaneous technology needs not covered by or funded through the student technology fee, department or college funds. Since their introduction a few years ago, the number of applications has increased significantly which has necessitated a new system that would support handling of these types of grants. Following discussions on this issue, it was decided that the IT department should consider developing of a web-based system to automate the procedure to handle the technology grants. Below is a description of the current procedures related to these grants. Each year OSP creates a request for applications and announces it to all academic departments across campus. Department chairs consult with their faculty and, making use of the standard application form, submit their grant applications. OSP creates a committee composed of faculty members representing all departments at the University. This committee is responsible for evaluating the applications, ranking them and approving or denying the applications based on various factors such as the total number of applications received, total amount of funding available, nature of technology or need to be supported by the grant, relevance of the technology to student learning, clarity of project objective etc. After the evaluation process is complete, OSP staff that oversees these grants, notifies the department of the grants awarded to them and send the corresponding paperwork to the Finance department. In addition to generating a significant amount of paperwork, one issue with the current process is difficulty of generating reports about grants approved for various departments over the years or checking the status of a specific application. In a preliminary meeting of representatives from the OSP, the grant committee, department chairs and IT department, it was decided that the new system should include the following functionalities: Departments should be able to fill and submit applications online. Once an application is submitted, the department should be able to view the status of their application. The system should also be used by the committee members to view the applications. In addition, the committee chair should be able to modify the status of an application (deny or approve) based on the committee decisions. The OSP staff should be able to view the applications and their status. Finally, Finance department should be able to view the approved applications only. The web-based system should also allow authorized users (such as OSP staff) to: - Generate reports for grants applications received by a specific department - Generate reports for grants applications approved for a specific department - Generate reports about applications by status.

Q- A brief description of how you collected information about this system. Depending on the type of the system (real or hypothetical) requirement collection methods could include interviews, document analysis, research of similar existing systems or personal experiences as users of similar systems.