In January, the Board of Regents selected the university implementation plans for delivery of services (covering Human Resources, Finance, and IT). The plans showed a strong commitment to becoming more efficient and effective. Additionally, the Board of Regents has engaged Chazey Partners to lend its expertise and experience to assist in the further development of the delivery of service planning and implementation at the public universities. The Board of Regents has also engaged Huron Consulting Group to do a strategic analysis of sourcing and procurement. These reviews began this week and are scheduled to run for a period of 12 weeks.

Huron Consulting Group will help identify opportunities to enhance our sourcing and procurement processes and policies.

As you will no doubt recall from previous communications, we embarked upon the TIER initiative to create accessible and affordable education destinations as the landscape of higher education changes. We will achieve this through a transformation program delivering both effectiveness and efficiency changes to ensure that we have a model for future generations and position Iowa’s public universities to be stronger and more successful as higher education changes.

The goal within the engagement with Chazey Partners is to identify internal changes to improve service and quality. Chazey Partners has a focused practice in shared service organizations and a strong track record within the higher education sector having worked with UC Davis, UC San Francisco, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories, as well as international higher education institutions.

The Chazey Partners engagement process will include gathering both staff and client inputs. This will include a large number of staff completing a piece of "Activity Based Analysis" and others attending workshops. Staff who will be participating in the Activity Based Analysis will receive additional details from campus leaders in the next few weeks.