FOR ADMINISTRATION AND MANAGEMENT

NSF manages its research and education programs through a cycle that involves choosing an appropriate portfolio of programs and activities, project selection, and project and program assessment.

Portfolio Management

As described in the Budget Overview, NSF balances its portfolio of activities in a variety of ways, introducing new programs and shifting resources toward existing ones regularly. The amount of funds obligated for facilities as a percentage of total obligations is one of NSF's measures of balance in its portfolio. Facilities funding can grow out of balance with other activities, given the possibility of large, sudden incremental construction or operations costs. NSF management and the National Science Board guard against this threat to the overall balance in the NSF investment portfolio in their continual review of facility plans. This year, NSF staff recommended and the Board approved the principle that facilities funding should remain in the range of 20 to 25 percent of the total budget. Achieving this goal will require continued management attention during the budget process, as well as on-time, on-budget performance from the facilities themselves.

Facilities Obligations as a Percent of Program Funds

Project Selection

• Merit review is a key investment strategy for NSF, since it maintains standards of excellence and allows flexible response to changing research opportunities. NSF's goal in the merit review process is to invest available resources to yield maximum benefits for the American public. Merit review activity measures indicate the level of program officer and agency effort going into this key investment process.

Merit Review Activity Measures

• Applicants for grants are the major customers of NSF's administrative services. NSF has adopted ambitious customer service standards, and is working to meet them. NSF's customer service standards commit us to an improvement to lead time of three months for program announcements and solicitations. They also commit NSF to be able to tell applicants whether their proposals have been declined or recommended for funding within six months for 95 percent of proposals, unless the program announcement or solicitation states otherwise. As the table indicates, this new standard requires significant improvements from current practice.

Processing Time from Proposal Receipt Through Directorate Recommendation

Performance Assessment

Performance under NSF awards is regularly examined through the merit review process. In the case of research projects, this happens when grantees apply for additional funding. In the case of centers and facilities, regular site visits and recompetitions gather performance information and incorporate it into resource allocation decisions. Committees of visitors, advisory committees, and the National Science Board provide oversight at program and directorate levels.

As described in the introduction to the Key Program Functions section, NSF has been moving toward an even more systematic examination of goal-based performance assessment in response to the Government Performance and Results Act.

NSF proposes to set descriptive performance goals based on its strategic plan, and to ask independent assessment panels to judge whether its investments are leading toward them. The panels would be provided with both quantitative and descriptive information on which to base their assessments.

• The panels will be able to draw on reports of results provided by principal investigators on research projects. This information will be gathered and retrieved through a new results information base scheduled for implementation early in FY 1997.

• The panels will have access to reports of results provided by facility and center directors, external reviews, and the reports of site visit reviews. NSF is currently testing a set of indicators of the efficiency and effectiveness of facility operations.

• In judging NSF's education portfolio, the panels will have access to the Impact Database that gathers information on outcomes of activities funded through the Education and Human Resources account.

• The panels will also be able to draw on the results of special performance studies. For example, an evaluation of the Science and Technology Centers program is underway and two studies of the Engineering Research Centers (ERC) program, on the impact of ERCs on industry and on ERC graduate student outcomes, are nearing completion.

Other Highlights

• In order to provide the best returns on public investments in research, engineering, and education activities, NSF staff work to reduce administrative burdens on grantees as far as possible. Electronic communication presents NSF with unique opportunities to reduce the administrative burden on the research community and on NSF in many parts of the proposal, review, and award process. A key part of this effort is Project FastLane, a three year experimental program utilizing advanced information technology to explore methods to re-engineer and streamline the way NSF does business with the research community. In October 1995, participation in FastLane was expanded beyond the original 16 universities and now includes over 100 institutions. This group represents a broad cross section of NSF funded institutions including large universities, state colleges, community colleges, minority institutions and museums. In FY 1995, the Graduate Research Fellowship module was particularly successful having over 20% of its applications submitted electronically. Another notable success was that 10% of all cash requests from institutions were submitted to NSF via FastLane. All requests were processed within 5 days (and 90% were processed within 3 days). The standard for processing these requests is 90% within 5 days. In FY 1995, 800 reviews were submitted via FastLane. This resulted in a savings of 200 hours of processing time.

• NSF has implemented a site on the World Wide Web that has drawn critical acclaim from our customers and the trade press. The NSF home page (and associated sites developed by NSF research directorates and staff offices) has provided a number of benefits to NSF and to the communities we serve:

1. The NSF website serves as a very effective vehicle for communicating with the external research community. The home page has expanded the overall audience for NSF information and enabled us to reach target audiences more quickly.

2. The "instant" access made possible by dissemination on the World Wide Web has helped us to make important science news and information (e.g., press releases) available quickly and to a broader audience.

3. The NSF home page has given NSF the opportunity to create an unprecedented global science information network that showcases the accomplishments of NSF-sponsored research projects and centers.

4. Feedback from our external customers regarding the NSF home page has provided valuable insights on their information needs.

• The NSF Information Center annually responds to over 50,000 requests for information from external audiences about NSF programmatic and operational activities. In a recent pilot project, the Center worked with the Office of Polar Programs to develop a profile describing facets of the Antarctic and Arctic Research Programs. The profile included frequently requested information that could be disseminated directly to customers through the Center, thereby freeing the program staff from handling numerous routine inquiries. This pilot will be expanded to other program areas of NSF and should result in significant time savings from customers and program staff.

• FinanceNet is the Internet's worldwide home for public financial management. FinanceNet began as a concept at the National Performance Review in early 1994 and is now operated by NSF under memoranda of agreement with agency members of the U.S. Chief Financial Officers Council. FinanceNet seeks to achieve its goals by (1) encouraging dialog for the sharing of ideas, best practices and successes through subscriptions to a series of 30 public Internet mailing lists and corresponding netnews newsgroups, and (2) by providing an instantly available electronic library of financial information on gopher, ftp and World Wide Web Internet servers to empower government financial operations staff and taxpayers to make more effective decisions. FinanceNet is also the worldwide electronic "clearing house" for information on the sale of all manner of public assets from real property and loans to planes, boats, cars, jewelry, and just about anything that any government, Federal, state, local or International, will be offering for sale to the general public electronically--truly a "one-stop-shop" for such information. FinanceNet has become the largest government administrative Internet network on all service platforms in the world. FinanceNet posts an average of 75 new financial management documents every month, processes over 300 e-mail messages daily and is visited at the rate of nearly 9 million "hits" per year.

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