Wednesday, July 15, 2015
Written by: Office of Strategic Communication

As the University of Iowa moves forward with the Board of Regents’ TIER (Transparent Inclusive Efficiency Review) project, the UI TIER leadership team is committed to keeping the campus informed on the latest developments in connection with the initiative.

The team will be sharing updates in Iowa Now on the 1st and 15th of each month. Information on the initiative can also be found on the UI TIER website.

Here are the latest developments on the UI’s academic and business cases:

Academic:

  • Administrators with the Office of the Provost will continue discussions of the utilization data with representatives from Ad Astra during a webinar that will be held later this month. 
  • As a follow-up to the enrollment management visits conducted at the end of June, the UI is collecting some additional material that will be provided to the Pappas team by the end of the week. Pappas Consulting still plans to have a draft proposal available to campus for review by the beginning of September. 

Finance:

Finance 01 - University Shared Services

  • The Office of the Vice President for Research and Economic Development is currently working with the University Shared Services and the HR-01 project teams in planning for the first full-scale pilot.
  • The project team has been expanded to include Sue Sager, Hans Hoerschelman, Renee Fun, and Rodney Anderson.

Next Steps:

  • A subcommittee to begin discussions on the methodology for staffing the Shared Services Organization will host their first meeting on Friday, July 17th. 
  • Data analysis is being finalized and formatted in departmental dashboard to help with decision making. 
  • The subcommittee for the Shared Services funding model will meet again to work toward drafting recommendations.
  • The project team is finalizing the draft “Menu of Services” to be offered by University Shared Services
  • Developing communication plan for the broad campus community, department heads, deans, directors, supervisors and potential affected staff.

Human Resources:  

HR Redesign

The HR redesign process is underway with two current projects, each following the prescribed redesign process:

  • An initial discussion is held with the leadership of the college/division to outline parameters of the HR redesign project and the steps involved.
  • The HR redesign team meets with the employees who currently do the majority of HR work to verify the previous survey data on HR activities and to gain their input into the future state for their college/division.
  • The information collected via these employee interviews is analyzed by the HR redesign team.
  • Recommendations which achieve the HR redesign goals are formulated.
  • These recommendations are shared with the college/division and the best alignment of HR services is discussed.

The College of Pharmacy project is nearly complete; work on the Division of Continuing Education project continues.

Information Technology:

Draft Project Plans Available

Drafts of project plans are being posted to the OneIT website. Currently the plans for Office 365 (a sub-project of the Communication & Collaboration project) and Instructional Spaces are available, and others will be added as soon as they are ready to share.

If you have comments on the draft project plans, please use the feedback forms on the project pages to let the project leaders/managers and Program Office know. Once several of the draft plans are ready for discussion, another series of listening posts will be scheduled.

Project Updates

  • Storage: Announced increase from 3TB to 5TB for the “free” level of the Research Data Storage Service for researchers.
  • Identity & Access Management (IAM): Working on IAM infrastructure refresh.
  • Project Management Office: Completing interviews with key stakeholders.
  • Data Centers & Servers: Server room owners are responding to surveys with helpful information for space inventories and needs assessments. Powered down two chemistry clusters; planning decommissioning/moving of remaining Chemistry clusters to ITF.
  • Business Intelligence: Demonstrated UI Business Intelligence solutions for Iowa State and UNI. 

Finalized Project Charters

All 14 of the finalized project charters are now available on the OneIT website (the two remaining projects are delayed due to dependencies on other projects). The finalized charters that are new since the last update are Human Resources Processes and IT Procurement.