Services We Provide

ORIS supports the following enterprise research applications that facilitate the communication and data exchange between central research administrators and researchers:

• Proposal Development System – S2S Grants
  – s2sgrants.research.ucla.edu
• Extramural Proposal Approval and Submission Summary – EPASS
  – epass.research.ucla.edu
• Proposal and Award Tracking System – PATS
• Post-Award Management System (PAMS)
  – pams.research.ucla.edu
• Effort Reporting System (ERS)
  – ers.it.ucla.edu
• Research Administration Portal (ORC)
  – portal.research.ucla.edu
• Research Faculty Portal (PI Portal)
  – piportal.research.ucla.edu
• Human Research Protocol Management System (webIRB)
  – webirb.research.ucla.edu
• Animal Research Protocol Management System (RATS)
  – rats.research.ucla.edu
• Research Safety Management System (SafetyNet)
  – safetynet.research.ucla.edu 
• Electronic Disclosure Gateway (eDGE)
  – edge.research.ucla.edu

Please visit the systems we support page for an overview of each system, system highlights and obtain more information.

In addition to IT support, ORIS also provides business process redesign services to ORA departments. These services include analyzing and documenting current business processes, identifying potential opportunities for optimization through new tools and technology, and designing future workflows that enable departments to better meet their goals. For each ORA department, ORIS has designated a business liaison/project manager who is familiar with the department’s specific processes and objectives and can assist in facilitating the services described above.

ORIS employs systems development lifecycle (SDLC) methodologies to develop custom applications that support enterprise research administration, such as the ORA Online Resource Center (Portal), PI Portal and Post Award Management System (PAMS). ORIS business liaisons/project managers collaborate with ORA departments and campus representatives to first analyze and gather business requirements, then direct ORIS’ team of developers to design, build, test and implement new applications. ORIS’ development expertise and business knowledge results in high-quality, customized systems that meet customer needs.

ORIS applications are generally integrated with other UC systems, such as Shibboleth, QDB, Financial System and Payroll to ensure updated information is readily available to the UCLA research community.

The ORIS web team currently manages the ORA and departmental websites of OCGA, EFM, OHRPP, RSAWA, ORIS, and RPC. ORIS collaborates with departments to understand their requirements for updates to web content and page layouts. In addition, ORIS provides information architecture and graphic design services for websites. Most recently, ORIS reorganized and redesigned the ORA website and is currently in the process of updating the other ORA department websites.

Additionally, ORIS manages the ORA Intranet, which is a central web portal for ORA personnel to view internal announcements and to access internal resources such as commonly needed links, tools and documents.

ORIS collects and analyzes data from the various applications we support to provide custom reports to ORA departments and the campus at large. This includes the development of web-based reports, many of which are available on the ORA Online Resource Center (Portal), as well as running special ad-hoc reports. These reports support research administrators in various capacities, ranging from trending and forecasting of contracts and grants transactions to compliance-related audits.

With the data available through ORA’s transactional systems, ORIS compiles monthly metrics for ORA departments on their key performance indicators, such as workload volume and processing turnaround times. Based on this information, departments can measure the efficiency of their operations, optimize their business processes and make more informed decisions.

ORIS provides new employee IT setup, which includes setting up a workstation, phone, user account, email account, and access to network printers, scanners, and copiers.

The ORIS Service Desk provides technical support to ORA departments, RPC and TDG. This includes managing and troubleshooting issues relating to the workstations, phones, user accounts, desktop applications, printers, scanners, copiers, and A/V resources. The Service Desk also provides basic desktop computing training as needed. All requests are entered into a ticketing system where they are tracked, monitored and resolved.

Service Desk support hours are from 7 am to 5 pm on University working days and support is available via walk-in, telephone or  email.

ORIS provides IT asset management for ORA. ORIS keeps an inventory of IT equipment, periodically replaces hardware and software, and ensures that licenses for utilized software and contracts are compliant and up-to-date.

ORIS provides server, application, and data backup and recovery, offsite disaster recovery, and business continuity services that meet ORA’s business units’ requirements for critical business functions, systems, and applications.

To ensure that business-critical data for ORA and UCLA is protected in the event of data loss, the ORIS operations team reviews and tests backup and disaster recovery plans on a regular basis.

ORIS safeguards servers, applications, and information from security threats, such as hackers and viruses, by implementing antivirus, firewall and intrusion detection systems to filter network traffic, ports and protocols. In addition, ORIS monitors event logs and implements manufacturer suggested updates, patch cycles and industry best practices.

As custodians of UCLA data, the infrastructure team ensures that all ORIS systems are appropriately secured. ORIS applies and configures the best passive protections and hardens systems through network isolation, traffic filtering, patch compliance and anti-virus scanning. Beyond these measures, ORIS collaborates with campus security and other technology providers to perform regular attack simulations against our own network to find any potential vulnerabilities.

ORIS system administrators perform a variety of roles in support of research administration. Their primary role is to maintain basic services for ORA, including file and print services, system standardization and configuration management, Tier-2 service desk support, back-end infrastructure and networking services. Additionally, they collaborate with the ORIS application development team to design and maintain the complex database architecture upon which the suite of UCLA research administration applications is built.

ORIS plans and budgets ORA’s information technology infrastructure. ORIS also manages the IT vendor agreements and IT software and hardware assets for ORA.