Tag: customer-focused solutions

NIH SharePoint Modernization

Posted on by Alix Ganga

Congratulations to LCG’s team at NIH’s Office of Strategic Coordination (OSC), who diligently worked over three years to modernize and upgrade 35 SharePoint sites from the legacy on-premises SharePoint 2019 platform to SharePoint Online. Our team developed custom interactive and responsive components using SharePoint Framework (SPFx), React, and TypeScript, allowing seamless integration with SharePoint data and services for a personalized and modern user experience.

When modernizing legacy tech, the act of translating old functionality to new frameworks remains essential to delivering on customer needs. The team attempted to make the custom SharePoint Online site more functional, while easing the end-user transition by retaining familiar SharePoint 2019 elements.

The team integrated features such as breadcrumb navigation, created reusable component libraries to modularize and design site architecture, developed User Acceptance Testing (UAT) cases, and addressed challenges such as custom actions not being able to translate 1:1 from SharePoint 2019 to SharePoint Online.

The following team members worked directly on this migration project and received high satisfaction marks from NIH’s OSC:

  • Sreepallavi Thota
  • Raja Ganapathi
  • Rupinder Kaur
  • Sumitra Sampath
  • Fern Wildesen

Back It Up – The Importance of Redundancy

Posted on by Alix Ganga

World Backup Day is March 31st, 2023. It’s a great day to remind ourselves of the importance of backing up personal and professional data. From family photos to important presentations, you’ve likely felt the pain of forgetting to do backups.

“Failure is Always an Option” – Adam Savage

Whether you are a MythBuster or a software developer, there is no shortage of issues that can result in data loss. Software bugs, malware, environmental factors, accidental deletion. Without a robust backup solution, your data is constantly at risk. There are several types of backup options that can mitigate this risk. Let’s take a look at a few of these that can help maintain access to your important files no matter what gets thrown your way. 

3-2-1… Countdown for Successful Data Protection

Having one backup copy of your critical work data is sometimes not enough. Let’s assume you back up your files or your application data to an external drive, and keep this drive in your home office or work desk. If your laptop fails, you have a backup copy for immediate recovery. If a water pipe bursts in your home, or there’s an issue at your desk onsite, then your computer and the external drive backup will likely be destroyed. This is a good reason to keep at least two copies of your critical data with one copy residing in an offsite location. Examples of offsite locations include simply saving to the cloud or even using an infrastructure datacenter whose specialty is housing backup data. 

OneDrive – One terrific offsite solution is Microsoft’s OneDrive. If you have a Microsoft 365 subscription, you may have access to 1 TB or terabyte of OneDrive cloud storage. OneDrive can be used to backup specific data but can also be set up to backup all your local folders such as documents, downloads, and desktop automatically. This “set it and forget it” configuration means your data is stored in the cloud in the event something happens to your PC. This approach has the added benefit of giving you access to your files anytime and anywhere. For more information, simply access Microsoft’s OneDrive backup instructions online.

Even with the redundancy offered by a large company such as Microsoft, it’s a good idea to backup your cloud data and email to a third-party provider for even more offsite availability. Whether you are a web developer at a federal agency or a systems administrator at a business like LCG, our data easily climbs into multiple terabytes of cloud data. Having a robust strategy is critical to personal and business success. 

Remember – your backup strategy is only successful when implemented, so save your work today. 

Hold on let me go save this…

Daniel Trencher is the Systems Administrator in IT and Network Support at LCG

Engineering at All Stages of the Health IT Lifecycle 

Posted on by Alix Ganga

This Engineering Week, LCG recognizes the contributions engineering has made to Health IT and biomedical research support.

LCG helps accelerate digital government strategy and programs so that agencies and their critical systems can stay ahead of the curve in a rapidly shifting digital landscape. From initial project conception to finished product, the process of development would be nothing without the expertise that many engineers employ. Innovation is crafted by decisions that shape the pathway from idea to reality. Through the work of LCG’s many engineers, we enable more efficient, productive, and speedier customer transformations. 

For instance, in the design and development of Health IT solutions, engineers at LCG are there at every phase from design and development, to creating interfaces, developing algorithms, and designing databases. Adding on top the existing complexity, the engineering team then integrates systems to be sure that all components are working together seamlessly. 

With many Health IT products outputting large amounts of data, there is also a need for analysis and insight. Through the phases of development, engineers working alongside healthcare professionals can ensure that designs of databases, algorithms, and management of key records allow for robust data analysis. This enables healthcare professionals to make informed decisions about diagnosis, treatment, and care management.

As with any sensitive data, cybersecurity is of utmost importance. All products must be secured to protect patient data from theft in any form. Cybersecurity engineers are responsible for safeguarding vulnerable data and to increase the security profile of the organization. 

Finally, to ensure regulatory compliance and that the solution created in development is viable, engineers must perform rigorous testing, including designing and executing test plans, system verification and validation, and conducting risk assessments.  

At every step, engineers work closely with healthcare professionals following the Federal government’s standards.  By working together to design, develop, and test, engineers are involved at each stage so solutions are guaranteed safe, effective, and fulfill the ever-changing needs of Health IT and biomedical research. With the advent of advanced machine learning and generative artificial intelligence models LCG is testing and incorporating emerging technologies to modernize, integrate, and create whatever our clients need to embrace innovation’s future.

Srinivas Kothuri is Vice President, Innovation and Digital Engineering Services at LCG.

Modernizing Legacy Data: AudBase

Posted on by Alix Ganga

Building customer-focused solutions aren’t just buzz words at successful companies – it’s part of the corporate DNA. It starts at the top with strong leadership vision and it multiplies across departments with employees breaking down silos to serve the company and customer missions.

A recent example comes from our client, the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) – one of 27 Institutes and Centers at NIH – where Ravi Kosuri of LCG recently received the Director’s Award for his work on NIDCD’s Audiology project.

NIDCD’s Audiology project was a small part of a very large project the LCG team was working on in 2022.

The larger project had an extensive project management plan with timelines, tasks, and deliverables identified upfront with the customer. An immediate need was identified to provide NIDCD Audiology staff with a way to read and process data from the AudBase system.

The team’s approach was quickly shifted to progressive elaboration by LCG’s project manager, Ashley Stanton. Progressive elaboration is an iterative Agile project management technique that allows for a project plan to evolve as information is gathered. This approach, as well as its short turnaround time, made the AudBase project very unusual from the start.

Even when the pressure was on to rapidly turn the new project, time had to be spent in the early days determining the foundational nature of the challenge. Since the service delivery team was deeply embedded in the project, they worked with customer stakeholders to understand their needs. Multiple technical options and their impact were researched with cost and risk analyses so the team could recommend the path forward. Ravi worked collaboratively with the developer, third-party vendors, and government employees to implement a cloud-based database solution that met NIDCD’s needs on time and under budget.

By conceptualizing the best solution and accomplishing the client’s goals and objectives on the tight timeline, Ravi’s team successfully delivered a:

  • Web service interface (Azure-hosted API interface with AudBase)
  • Data transformation engine (JSON parser)
  • Cloud-based relational database
  • Accessible interface for third-party applications (such as RedCap, QlikSense, or Power BI)

Not only did Ravi receive the NIH Director’s award but the entire LCG team was recognized by the Center for Information Technology (CIT) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) as one of the pioneers in using the NIH Azure Science and Technology Research Infrastructure for Discovery, Experimentation, and Sustainability (STRIDES) Initiative.

The end result is a new concept and technique for conducting and supporting biomedical and behavioral research and research training in the normal and disordered processes of hearing, balance, smell, taste, voice, speech, and language.

Ravi Kosuri is LCG’s principal architect supporting the life science advancements in biomedical research at NIDCD.

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