Ideate

Full Economic Costing is complex, but it doesn't have to be difficult. While we leveraged the latest web technologies to deliver a compelling FEC application, we also used some traditional techniques – first we listened to some pretty smart folks, then we thoughtfully deconstructed the problem before trying to solve it.

In Ideate, every page view is tailored to help busy researchers and administrators navigate the dizzying array of rules that govern their projects. By dynamically delivering the right mix of procedures at the right time the Ideate software intelligently guides end-user compliance with government regulations, sponsor terms and conditions, and institutional policies. Ideate’s system-mediated processes not only significantly reduce the effort and guess work involved in managing project requirements; they enable a fundamental shift from reactive compliance to proactive oversight. 

Ideate takes a holistic approach to service orientation. Instead of modelling a research process as a single monolithic flowchart, Ideate has thoughtfully deconstructed complex research lifecycles into loosely-coupled Services. A Service Oriented Process, or process fragment, represents a single step or series of related steps that collectively fulfil an abstracted business need (e.g. form completion; error checking; internal review; account establishment; project startup; etc.). Ideate’s approach gives it unprecedented support for long-running human-centric processes that involve frequent ‘wait’ periods, extensive conditional branching, complicated decision trees, and interrelated processes. Importantly, the architecture manages all these variables in a consistent and structured way that provides for governance and change management.

Importantly, with change being a constant in the research arena, Ideate was built from the ground up with thoughtful consideration of the Information Architecture challenges. As a result, the Service Oriented Framework provides for unprecedented governance and change management, and includes an elegant data repository. Ideate maintains copies of all versions of a process to ensure a complete audit history and supports process-level roll-back. Administrative modifications to a research process can be submitted through an internal review before any changes are implemented. Data captured in older versions of a process remains available for reporting and can be optionally viewed in their original page layouts.

Ideate makes implementation easy with helpful wizards that step central administrators through configuration options without the need for any specialized technical knowledge or extensive product training. Ideate’s Configuration Accelerator greatly reduces the time, cost and risk of a software deployment and expedites the time to productive value. An initial deployment with basic configuration can take as little as one week.

Since all Ideate applications are entirely built up from loosely-coupled services, there are no hardcoded rules, forms, or processes. This means that all of the application logic is open to customization and integration with other internal systems to ensure a best-fit solution - without losing Ideate support for the underlying Framework. With Ideate, organizations can finally say goodbye to vanilla software implementations that force conformity with a generic research model. With Ideate, institutions can even develop their own applications, leveraging Ideate’s Framework and resource library, to automate orphaned paper processes, to migrate legacy functionality to the platform, or to address new procedural requirements. Member organizations are free to share and/or co-develop applications with other participating institutions. Ideate’s support for open exchange within the user community enables customer-driven change and ensures continuous process improvement.