HRIS Data Definitions Committee:

Introduction

The HRIS Data Definitions Committee was formed and first met in January of 2003. The primary impetus for forming our committee was Program Review. More broadly, it was recognized that bringing the HRIS user community together to better understand HRIS data would ultimately lead to improved data quality and thus, more useful data. An important aspect of “value added” with a major management information system is found in using the data for operational, managerial and analytical reporting purposes (decision support). To that end, we are focused on improving the quality of HRIS data in order to ultimately improve decision support at Northwestern.

Organization and Purpose

We are committed to broad representation across the university. The committee currently consists of twenty members representing five of the university’s schools, and a variety of functional areas within human resources, and other key central administration units (see list below). Additional schools are represented on subcommittees, and the goal is ultimately to have a representative from each school on the full committee. This is essential since the needs of the schools diverge somewhat, and we strive to develop standards that are both rigid enough to provide consistency across the schools, but flexible enough to allow the schools to function in unique ways. We believe it is important for the schools and central administrative units to work together on improving the quality of HRIS data so that strategic planning and policy decisions are enhanced by better information.

Structure and Process

The committee meets monthly. Subcommittees are formed as needed, and they are expected to meet at least monthly as well.
We spent our first few months as a committee attempting to reach a common level of understanding of HRIS. This included information sharing and training meetings. As a result of this initial process we began identifying the highest priority data “issues” that we proceeded to study. We categorized the data “issues” as falling into four areas, and the following initial subcommittees were formed: 1) characteristics of employee, 2) characteristics of position, 3) department and dates, and 4) compensation. Ultimately, there were intersections and overlap among these subcommittees, and in some cases, certain subcommittees collaborated on particular issues.

We anticipated that our initial round of study would encounter issues that were resolvable, or that we could at least articulate recommendations to resolve, while other issues would require more time and effort to resolve due to their complexity. Thus, our work is split into two phases. Phase I is a set of findings and recommendations that are to be communicated and addressed immediately. Phase II is a set of issues that require further study. As the Phase I findings are finalized and approved, we anticipate that the original four subcommittees will disband. To begin work on Phase II we have formed two subcommittees, one focused on the difficult issue of “full-time equivalency (FTE).” The other Phase II subcommittee is more broadly focused on an “academic panel” recommendation that attempts to address the need to improve data related specifically to faculty.

Community Communication and Expert Engagement

In addition to formal committee and subcommittee meetings, committee members have been encouraged to communicate our ongoing work within their unit or school, and among colleagues at Northwestern as an initial method of keeping the community informed of our work. We have presented on our work at the bi-monthly business administrators meeting. In the future we plan to present to them again as a primary venue for informing the community. We plan to share a draft of our report with the larger community of HRIS users via the HRIS listserv. In addition, we met with the effort reporting work group, and our committee members overlap with many other committees working on information system and decision support issues. We also met with smaller groups of HRIS stakeholders, such as the Provost’s Office. Ultimately, we will present our report and seek counsel and approval from the Administrative Data Council.

HRIS Data Definitions Committee: Finding and Recommendations ( PDF)