Joseph DeVore's Blog: UW

I'll be presenting on April 18th, 2010 in New York with my coworker Rachel. Our topic of discussion is the tool that we built that allows the University of Washington to report to Recovery.gov on time, receive millions in ARRA funding and continue to receive this stimulus money, in part due to the fact that we're reporting on time and successfully. The application that we wrote reduced the manual labor by at least 99%, but my boss says 98% so I'll agree with him.

I wrote all of non-data related code using ColdFusion 9, SQL, XML, 32 different XSDs, HTTP and SFTP. The other team members were Rachel Gatlin, she built the data mart, Greg Maass, he built the SharePoint sites and David Uhlar, he built some front-end data collection forms. Then there's about 200 more people involved it seems: http://www.washington.edu/research/gca/recovery/

This is my biggest accomplishment thus far for the University of Washington. It has the biggest impact as well as the most visibility. It was and is a complete success.

For these first two quarters so far, we were one of three agencies in the entire United States to report using the Federal Reporting API (automated method) vs. manual MS Excel spreadsheets and the federalreporting.gov website.

Here's a bit more about the work and our up coming presentation: The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) introduced stringent new reporting standards for research and projects funded by stimulus funds. The pressures of ARRA's timelines and requirements threw out normal planning practices and required a rapid response. In under four months the UW developed an incredibly successful data mart based system for reporting that reduced the required human effort by over 98% compared to a proposed manual solution by combining data from our central DW with transactional data from areas not yet incorporated into the central DW and then building application and reporting interfaces. Presentation will include design, challenges and decisions made in the creation of the ARRA Mart, the outcomes (foreseen and unforeseen), the nature of the collaborative effort across business and technical units that had not previously worked together, and the new opportunities to improve our transaction systems, our business processes and the build out of our central DW including improvements to an area currently in the process of building out in our central DW. Our "Rapid Response Data Mart" for ARRA demonstrates the value of using all available information to enable agility and efficiency in a time of increasing regulation and decreasing funding.