ARCHIVED: Completed project: Faculty annual reporting (FAR)

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Primary UITS contact: Aaron Neal

Completed: February 10, 2010

Description: Develop an application that will automate the annual faculty summary reporting process. Currently, faculty members fill out a paper form outlining the events and accomplishments of the previous year. These reports are used in the salary setting process and for reappointment, tenure, and promotion decisions. The annual report is then mailed to various department chairs and school deans before a final review by the Dean of the Faculties. After the review is completed, the annual report hard-copy documents are filed for future reference.

For more, see the Faculty Annual Report project page in Confluence.

Outcome: This project replaces the paper process with an electronic system faculty can use to update and record their information throughout the year. At the end of the year a final report can be routed electronically to the various department chairs, school deans, and the Dean of the Faculties for review.

Milestones and status: The Faculty Annual Reporting system was implemented as planned in early November of 2007. A pilot group of approximately 250 users with affiliations to 20 departments began using the system in November and have submitted their 2007 reports. The development team continues to receive good feedback regarding system enhancements that are being considered for phase 2.

Additional departments were added to the system for reporting year 2008. User counts included more than 600 faculty members from more than 50 departments. Phase 2 enhancements are targeted for October 2009. Departments continue to be added to the new system, with the entire Bloomington campus targeted to be online for reporting year 2009.

Phase 2 enhancements were implemented in November 2009. The system is now being used by the entire Bloomington and Kokomo campuses as well as selected departments elsewhere. Users continue to provide feedback on suggested improvements that will be incorporated into the application in future releases.

Comment process: Send comments to bl-uits-hrms-java-team@exchange.indiana.edu.

Benefits: This project will provide many advantages over the current paper system:

  • The new system will provide improved faculty-related data collection in a secured electronic environment.
  • The new system will incorporate electronic routing capability for reports according to structured/pre-defined routing rules.
  • The new system will provide activity reporting and summarization capabilities for deans and department heads.
  • All data collected will be stored in a database for future inquiry and processing.
  • Annual reports will be pre-populated with data retrieved from various databases to alleviate tedious and redundant data entry. For example, faculty information will be retrieved from the HRMS database, teaching and course data will be retrieved from the SIS database, and external grant information will be retrieved from the Contracts and Grants (ERA) database.
  • Electronic reports will be available for data entry throughout the year. Data from annual reports will be made available in the IUIE Data Warehouse for reporting and analysis at various levels of administration. In the future we hope to build an interface between the FAR application and ePortfolio.

Risks: Several departments at IUB and IUPUI have started to implement their own electronic applications to support the Annual Faculty Summary process. The office of the Dean of Faculties hopes to solicit enough support to move these schools and departments toward adopting the system-wide application in order to avoid serious fragmentation of this valuable data.

Primary client: Initially, the primary client for this application will be faculty in specific pilot departments at IUB and IUPUI. Over the long term, the client base will be all faculty in adopting departments on all campuses.

Client impact: This will be a new process for most departments and will require some retraining for departments adopting the new application in place of an existing electronic application.

Project team: The development team consists of developers from the HRMS Java team and functional analysts from the Office of Academic Affairs. In addition to this core project team, we have established a Technical Advisory Team consisting of the project team plus analysts from the School of Education (IUB), School of Engineering (IUPUI), and School of Medicine (IUPUI). The technical advisory team will assist with technical design and implementation issues that will facilitate rolling the application out to a wider set of schools in the future.

Governance: The Dean of Faculties in the Bloomington Office of Academic Affairs is the primary sponsor of this project.

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Last modified on 2018-01-18 15:30:28.