The Simons Scientific Information Management System: Supporting scientific decision-making in autism research using a lightweight web-development methodology

Making decisions about scientific direction, such as funding of research programs, requires a variety of information sources. Science officers require knowledge of multiple internal sources about grants, as well as multiple external sources about grants and publications. Access to a wide range of systems can increase costs and reduce the speed of decisions. Different kinds of tasks (use cases) often result in very different software solutions, such as customized “dashboards”. These attempts usually fail due to long delivery times, measured in months or years. By the time the dashboard is delivered, decisions and data have changed. Our approach is to produce a platform for rapidly configuring decision support dashboards that can be delivered in a matter of days or hours.