[Cas-allemps] Shared Administrative Services Taskforce

[CAS Dean]

Dear CAS faculty, staff, and GEs,

I am creating a taskforce to explore the creation of shared administrative services in the College of Arts and Sciences and soliciting nominations for individuals to serve on this taskforce.  Our College is already thinly staffed by any measure, so this is not an exercise to downsize.  To the contrary, I believe that we can employ our existing staff in ways and rebalance their work portfolios in ways that would provide more consistent services across our departments while leaving our staff feeling less harried and, we hope, more satisfied with their job duties.

Let me give an example.  Grant administration (both pre- and post-award) support is infrequently needed by many of our humanities and social science departments.  When a faculty member needs such support in these units, the staff often have to reacquaint themselves with the necessary steps to provide such support.  This takes considerable time and effort, especially with a service where regulations and processes are often evolving and different from the last time the staff member provided such support.  It is very difficult for anyone to provide timely and accurate work in these situations, leading to frustration by the department staff, faculty, and the staff in our central research office who support grant administration across the university.  In the past few years, we have created a centralized grant administration service in our dean's office and effectively handled a significant amount of grant administration for many departments in the humanities and social sciences. This, in turn, protected staff members in leanly staffed offices from spending their scarce time on grants administration.

I believe there are likely many more areas like this that may significantly benefit from a similar shared administrative model.  This includes such varied things as travel, human resources, purchasing, international visa support, payables, reporting and reconciliation, event and programming services, and web page maintenance.

There are several reasons why I believe this is a good time to explore this.  First, we have successfully piloted a number of small shared administrative services in the College.  In addition to the grant administration example above, we also successfully combined administrative staff for Economics and Sociology and for English and the Oregon Consortium of International Area Studies (OCIAS).  CASIT was an incredibly successful model of shared administrative services for over a decade in our College, and its model is being used as a primary anchor in the newly centralized IT service developing from the Transform IT process.  Second, nearly all the other schools and colleges, as well as the administrative units under the Vice President for Finance and Administration, have successfully developed shared administrative services in recent years.  Third, we are currently down about 8-10 staff across our College and are facing a hiring freeze for what I expect will be a significant amount of time.  As a result, we are already cobbling together ad-hoc shared administrative services to help units who are down in staff, units that deserve more than a cobbled approach.

Whatever path we choose, it is important that our faculty and students do not feel there is any degradation of service - indeed, we want the opposite!  I especially think it is important that the faculty members and students in a department continue to have key staff who are their conduit to any of their administrative needs.  And there are also administrative services that are specific and unique to departments that will obviously need to be administered by staff who understand those local needs.

While I don't want to create a large taskforce, it will have representation from OAs, classified staff, GEs, and faculty in the College.  Their charge will be to listen to various constituent groups in the College and provide principles and recommended organizational structures for shared administrative services in the College based on what they have heard and what experts consider best practices.  I would like a final report of recommendations and implementation plans no later than the end of fall term 2020.

I am very pleased to report that Connie Brady, Associate Dean for Finance and Administration in the Lundquist College of Business, and Sherri Nelson, Assistant Dean for Budget in Finance in our College, will co-chair this taskforce.  The LCB has long-standing shared administrative services, and Connie led a number of successful efforts to create shared administrative services at her prior institution, Eastern Washington University.  Sherri has served the College in her role for many years at the highest level and helped create the successful pilots of shared administrative services in the College noted above.

I want to reiterate that this is not about downsizing staff in our College.  With that said, it certainly may lead to rebalancing of tasks and duties for some of our staff members.  My hope and intention are this will allow new opportunities for our staff and a chance to better match tasks with their skills and preferences.

Please send any nominations (including self-nominations) of OAs, classified staff, GEs, and faculty for the taskforce to casdean at uoregon.edu<mailto:casdean at uoregon.edu> by Wednesday, May 20.  Thanks for your help, and I look forward to your ideas as the task force gets to work.

Bruce

Bruce Blonigen
Tykeson Dean
Philip H. Knight Professor of Social Science
College of Arts and Sciences
University of Oregon
Eugene, OR 97403
Ph: 541-346-4680



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