Change and Efficiency

Our university is going through a few changes. Of course, that is nothing new – for our university or any university these days – but the changes I want to discuss here all involve software. Our infrastructure has been grossly out-of-date for quite a while and there were many systems that needed a reboot.

Overall I believe our administration has taken a thoughtful approach to installing, replacing, and updating software that run major systems within the university. However, there is a significant tension between the needs of the end-user (think faculty or chair) and the needs of high-level administration in both the university and the larger school system. Even when the input of the end-user has been gathered, the resulting software interface is more likely to benefit administration (at least I hope so). Many of these changes are being done in the name of efficiency. We are told there are financial benefits as well as time efficiencies in how the data is collected and the different ways the data can be used.

In the past year, we have had a major overhaul of our institution’s student registration system (affecting registration, advising, and graduation), our financial system (affecting departmental accounts and faculty grant funds), and our graduate school application system. Coming up this year will be a new centralized system for faculty annual reviews, promotion, and tenure as well as a new system for data storage. They have decided to wait another year before they introduce a software system for tracking curricula changes across the university. All of these new software systems require training. All of the systems have “kinks” that can’t be fully anticipated and show up at inconvenient times (like clearing students for graduation). All of the software is managed by a vendor and all of the vendors periodically update their software, which often changes how the end-user actually interfaces with the system. This can mean additional training but almost certainly means confusion.

Chairs are part faculty and part administrators. This means we are required to use these systems a bit more frequently then faculty but far less frequently then administrators. Any software system can become burdensome when you use it infrequently. Systems designed for a different user (think a student or full-time administrator) can be particularly confusing for a faculty member or chair. So training, when it does occur, is usually forgotten by the time you are actually called upon to use the system. This means that any efficiencies if they exist, are not occurring at the chair or faculty level.