New ERA for grants system

Science Applications International Corp. of San Diego has won a five-year contract to update the National Institutes of Health research grants application and processing system to an object-oriented architecture using Java 2 Enterprise Edition.

Cheryl Campbell, SAIC's corporate vice president of program management, said one of the project's goals is to unify the Electronic Research Administration Commons, a research administration portal for NIH's external grant holders, and Information for Management, Planning, Analysis and Coordination II, an application for managing grants within the NIH community.

The J2EE architecture will create a Web front end to NIH's grants programs that's more functional than the largely paper-driven process still in use, Campbell said.