Supernova Award Category
The Problem
As surprising as it may seem, JHU does not have a comprehensive database of our faculty to reflect their expertise, contributions and impact. As a result, there is no easy way for our faculty (or our students and staff, for that matter) to connect and collaborate with others with similar interests or expertise within their own school or across the university’s nine schools. Further, we offer no means for the media and the public to find experts at JHU.
Finding colleagues for collaboration is only part of the problem. Once found, we do not have an easy mechanism for them to collaborate virtually with one another. These challenges are particularly troublesome in an environment where interdisciplinary research is no longer the exception and where competition for scarce research funding is intense.
Simply put, the absence of a platform to facilitate connections is likely impairing the opportunity for organic collaboration that will lie at the heart of the discoveries of tomorrow!
The Solution
Higher education is a late bloomer in adopting CRM technology. We have focused our efforts on managing relationships with donors, alumni, students, and prospective students. While the lifeblood of a major research institution like JHU is its faculty, we have not yet leveraged this technology to manage relationships with, and between, faculty and other constituencies. Recognizing the power of CRM in other industries, we are using it to develop an entirely new platform to drive collaboration around research within a single institution and ultimately across multiple institutions. What we have set out to do is novel for our industry.
Our solution, called facultyforce, aggregates meaningful data about our faculty and their activities and presents a profile with a uniform look and feel. With this data, we are building algorithms to identify existing relationships among faculty who have collaborated and make recommendations to form new connections with others who have related interests.
The results
We are establishing a comprehensive database of faculty information for the university that has never before existed and enable automation of business processes that have never before been automated. We are doing so in a manner that allows other universities to adopt and extend our solution, with an eye towards developing a network of participating universities.
There are unlimited opportunities for how we can engage faculty with facultyforce, by integrating other systems to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of cumbersome processes that detract our faculty from their mission of discovery. Accordingly, we also anticipate that we will be saving precious hours of faculty and administrator time in manual activity reporting and other intensive data collection, including CV creation and maintenance (necessary for every grant submission, annual reviews, etc.).
We expect to expand interdisciplinary activity--pursuit of “one university”-- a strategic goal for JHU to overcome traditional barriers across schools. Our solution matches faculty members by their interests to fuel the research enterprise in completely new ways.
Most audaciously, we expect that our solution will enable identification of potential research partners, faculty mentors, and research opportunities for students, all of which has the potential to lead to new scientific discovery that otherwise might never have happened.
Metrics
Quite frankly, all we need is one significant research output, or one big grant award, via newfound collaborators to make the entire project worthwhile.
We will be closely monitoring for connections made using the platform and looking for future collaborations with successful grant submissions, publications, and connections established based on our technology. We will also build follow-up capabilities for faculty to report the impact of our recommendations as to whether they provided meaningful or fruitful connections.
We will also be scrutinizing usage based on faculty demographics, as we expect our solution to be of more interest to early-career faculty, who can use every advantage to help expand their research careers. When this solution achieves the vision that we have set forth, we will have developed a resource that provides additional competitive advantage to the university in the increasingly competitive world of grant-funded research.
The Technology
Our solution leverages the Salesforce platform-- Sales Cloud, Community Cloud, and the Salesforce1 platform for mobile access. It has been important to us to use as much "out-of-the-box" functionality to develop a solution that will be cost-effective for JHU and for other universities.
We have augmented the solution with homegrown tools to load data from internal systems to the Salesforce cloud and then synchronize it for analytical purposes in our local environment.
Disruptive Factor
Since we are still in development, we can’t speak to adoption just yet.
Internal interest in our solution has been overwhelmingly positive. A number of our stakeholders have identified opportunities to eliminate systems that they are not enamored with in favor of our solution, saving money and reducing technical complexity in the process. During any given presentation, our customers provide new ideas, features and ways that we can extend the platform to solve other related, but not envisioned, business problems.
In response to concerns about faculty adoption and uptake, we developed what has been considered “killer” functionality in our solution—a CV builder. The most robust summary of a faculty member’s accomplishments is their CV, used for internal review purposes and part of every grant submission. By integrating the ability to produce CV documents and provide an interactive means to add additional information, the faculty get what they want (a complete CV) and we get what we need to make the solution work (robust data about the faculty member).
To increase the value proposition, we will be integrating relevant information from our various information systems into a social activity feed, providing the first consolidated view of important and relevant information that is personalized to the faculty member. This view will eventually include providing suggestions about funding opportunities relevant to the faculty member.
Shining Moment
The Salesforce.com Foundation’s Force for Change grant program is open to over 23,000 non-profit and higher ed organizations to accelerate innovation that creates a positive impact around the world. JHU was awarded the maximum grant of $250K to develop facultyforce. Since its inception, there has been tremendous interest in our solution from major research universities across the country, validating that our solution is valuable to this peer group.