The Faculty Senate Committee on Research and Creative
Activity has drafted a proposal calling for the SUNY Research Foundation
to either fix OASIS, the Oracle data management software program that
manages grants and contracts for researchers at UB and across the SUNY
system, or abandon it entirely.
OASIS is a fiasco, John Ho, SUNY Distinguished Service
Professor in the Department of Physics and chair of the Committee on
Research and Creative Activity, told senate's executive committee at
its March 22 meeting.
Ho said that many faculty and professional staff members
have been suffering in silence while monthly grant and contract reports
issued by the Research Foundation have erroneous balances, leaving principal
investigators and grant administrators confused about where their grant
balances stand.
The resolution as drafted by the committee calls the
January 2001 conversion by the SUNY Research Foundation to OASISat
a cost of more than $20 million"a disaster."
"Not only are the original promises of online transactions
and monitoring not fulfilled, but the unreliability of the system and
its inability to provide even such basic information as accurate account
balances are severely hampering the management and conduct of sponsored
research at UB," the resolution states. "The inadequacies and inefficiencies
of OASIS and its failure to carry out proper fiscal accounting of grants
and contracts are costly in time and effort, and are also jeopardizing
our chances in future grant applications."
The resolution cites "the heroic efforts by our campus
administrative colleagues in trying to cope with an almost impossible
situation."
Bernice Noble, professor of microbiology, noted that
other major universities have documented similar problems with OASIS,
and that intensive investigations were under way at Cambridge University
to look into the how OASIS was sold to the university, as well as to
analyze problems inherent in the software.
Noble said it was almost eerie how the problems at
Cambridge mirrored the problems with OASIS at UB. "It's actually an
international crisis over these data-management systems," Noble said,
"with no end in sight."
Lilliam Malave, associate professor of learning and
instruction and acting director of the Urban Education Institute, pointed
out that the Research Foundation has tried very hard to fix the problems
with OASIS, but has been unsuccessful.
President William R. Greiner said the Research Foundation
is well aware of the problems with OASIS, but that there was no possibility
of "moving off" the software because there is not another system available.
He added that the problems with OASIS might not be fully solved for
another year. "There is no higher priority," Greiner said, than solving
the problem of inaccurate account balances.
William Baumer, professor of philosophy, asked that
the FSEC place the resolution on the agenda of Tuesday's Faculty Senate
meeting for immediate action, dispensing with a first reading.
In other business, Jack Meacham, SUNY Distinguished
Teaching Professor in the Department of Psychology and a member of the
SUNY task force to determine outcomes of student learning, updated the
committee on the SUNY General Education Assessment Review (GEAR) process.
Meacham noted that the GEAR group was formed to review the proposed
assessment plans of all SUNY campuses.