Business Intelligence (BI) Dashboards & Data Analytics
CLIENT:
National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID)
CHALLENGE
The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), Office of Administrative Services (OAS) embarked on an initiative to implement a “self-service” BI model for enhancing current data analytic capabilities in support of the organization’s daily and strategic functions. This effort required expertise in NIH’s budget processes and systems to validate financial management records and development of budget reporting tools to ensure alignment between OAS, the NIAID Budget and Financial Management Branch and the NIH Office of Financial Management. The scope included various appropriations (direct, reimbursable, gift fund, royalty), operating budgets (RMS, R&D), funding mechanisms (IAAs), and supporting complex data calls. NIAID also required an NIH acquisitions expert to co-chair the Data Analytics and Technology Workgroups as part of the greater Optimize NIH initiative to assess current acquisition-related analytic capabilities.
SOLUTION
For the past year, Malbaie has supported the Optimize NIH Acquisitions Workgroup to improve acquisitions-related operations across the Institutes and Centers (ICs). The institutional knowledge within our team of NIH acquisitions experts, and former National Business System (NBS) acquisition lead, was a key factor to delivering the specialty requirements of the Optimize Project. Utilizing this rich knowledge, we performed four distinct data studies to assess NIH’s current reporting capabilities, identify current gaps and developed a high-level roadmap for achieving cross-functional integrated reporting. Concurrently, our BI analysts have designed, tested, and deployed a suite of dashboards across administrative, financial, budget, travel and other lines of services using Tableau to monitor budget execution and manage financial operations across NIAID’s administrative community.
OUTCOME
Our support for the Optimize NIH initiative resulted in the following key deliverables:
- Data products and studies including dynamic dashboard visualizations and tabular reports that assessed the current landscape of available acquisitions-related data.
- Inventory of data sources by acquisition phases across NIH Consolidated Operations Acquisitions Centers (COACs) gathered from issuing data calls, surveys and hosting demonstrations.
- Inventory of “wish list” reporting requirements to be evolved into future enterprise metrics.
Moreover, our efforts spearheading NIAID’s self-service BI processes resulted in actionable dashboards and reporting tools that automated manually prepared spreadsheets to support daily operations across the Institute.
