One of Regalix’s clients is an Ivy League University renowned world over for its research and academic excellence. The University’s history includes many productive relationships with outside companies that translate research into useful products and technology. To ensure academic freedom and transfer of knowledge for the public good, the university works diligently to protect research from bias and has developed processes and policies for identifying and controlling conflict of interest.

One of the critical pieces of university’s compliance and research management system is the transactional conflict of interest (T-CoI) process that requires researchers to disclose potential conflicts for each research proposal.

Before
Prior to the solution deployment, compliance management was a manual process which typically happened over emails, telephone, campus mail and face-to-face meetings between researchers and Conflict of Interest (CoI) Managers, Department Chairs, Review Committees, Research Management and compliance staff. As with any manual process the data was difficult to collect, collate and track.

The Solution
Based on the design personas and task analysis it was determined that an ideal solution for T-CoI process was a Business Process Management solution. Lombardi’s (now acquired by IBM) . Lombardi BPM solution, Teamworks, was selected for implementation after much due diligence.

Lombardi is a specialized platform that requires very specific skill set. Regalix took that challenge and developed a custom J2EE solution on top of the Lombardi Teamworks based on the subtasks and activities identified for different personas in the University system. The solution covered complex workflows, SLA’s and routing rules based on researcher disclosures or actions by other users in the system. Since the disclosures were of sensitive nature (mostly financial), the solution was required to enforce a comprehensive authority model that ensured that only the right people with relevant authority had access to data.

The solution required complex but seamless integrations into the existing Research and Administration Infrastructure.

The designed solution allowed the university to track conflicts across all research activities and Schools under the university. Finally, Regalix technical team was able to discover & resolve more than 300 issues in the system which had not been found before in just a period of 40 days