Doing UW Business: Information When and Where You Need It

Weldon E. Ihrig

When you want to find flight information or make airline reservations, you have multiple ways to access the information needed to make your decision: you can go to the World Wide Web, visit an airline office, call a travel agent, or take care of it at the airport.

That's our vision for the University of Washington—to build an information-based environment where faculty, staff, and students have the data when and where they need it to make intelligent decisions and take action. This thinking drives the project we call USER—University Services Renewal. (See next article "Some Online UW Employee-related Services.")

The Web Is Key

Using the Web, faculty, staff, and students are beginning to be able to access the legacy systems that support the UW's purchasing, facilities, travel, and human resources databases. The changes USER has already made in how we use the Web interface to do university business will not be impacted when we eventually replace the legacy systems with new technologies.

User Teams Challenge the Status Quo

To invest their time and energy exploring doing business in a different way, the teams needed to not be bound by how things "have always been done." We agreed that they can change anything in coming up with their solutions, and we will alter university policies as well as go after any state problems they come up against. Team members are free to challenge all legal, technical, and institutional constraints, including folklore that exists—sometimes in abundance—at the UW. These guiding principles can be found on the USER Web site (www.washington.edu/user/).

Hired and Wired: Early Email for New Employees Staff applaud new hires having email before they get to campus: "Early email is a great idea. It should solve a lot of problems we have had communicating with new hires. This way they will have their email address to put on their syllabus and Web page and can be in touch with their teaching assistants." —David Miles, Slavic Languages and Literatures, and Linguistics "What a great service! Applause to all involved. Early access to email has really helped in the transition with new faculty members." —Donna DuVal, Business Administration

David Miles

Designing for Change

Any redesigned services should be flexible enough to allow for future changes and different departmental requirements. The College of Ocean and Fishery Sciences, for example, need not operate like the College of Engineering. One college may centralize decision-making while the other may distribute it. The deans within those colleges make those management choices, but the information necessary for decision-making must be accessible to all potential decision-makers.

The advantage of Web technology is that nothing's locked in. Because it can be changed quickly and globally, the Web can support our ever-changing environment.

No Such Thing as Failure

USER teams experiment knowing they won't get hammered if something doesn't work as planned. If someone says, "This is going down the tubes," I can say, "Oh, an unexpected outcome" and we can focus on dealing with it. It's as if we're sailing; the winds change, and we adjust. This is the simple but powerful model we've used successfully.

Involving people within the university to change how we do business has many benefits. It has opened people's eyes as to the possibilities for making changes in their own areas without feeling stifled. In addition, people have the opportunity to be on a team or just accept what their colleagues decide. When you have advice coming from an outside consultant, you don't get that type of buy-in.

Gail Ellingson (left), manager of program operations for the Washington Regional Primate Research Center, and Anne Lawson, fiscal specialist for the Comprehensive Center for Oral Health Research, applaud the speed and accuracy of the online payroll distribution change program. Ellingson credits the "fresh perspective" USER team members brought to the process. Lawson says making Personnel Action Form (PAF) changes online cuts her processing time "at least in half" and adds that excellent support and training is provided.

Distributing Information Through Data Warehousing

To paraphrase the approach expounded by social ecologist and management professor Peter Drucker: Build the organization around information and communication instead of around hierarchy. Answer the questions: What information do I need to do my job—from whom, when, and how? And what information do I owe others—in what form and when—so they can do their jobs?

This is a perfect model of how the UW can operate in the information age. It's not a highly technical approach but rather a philosophical one, based on information and our most important resource—people.

The key is to unleash the vast talent we have at this university to solve problems together, and to break down the separate "silos" of information. Having multiple data warehouses, all widely available and interacting together with clearly defined—and shared—definitions of data, is possible.

The old way of doing business is that information is power. I firmly believe, as does the senior UW administration, that distributing information unleashes power—the power of everyone within the university to make this place go. This vision will be realized through ongoing collaboration as we continue to put all the pieces together and invest in making it happen.