Project Overview

Currently, Northwestern University’s Central Administration and individual schools maintain faculty records in a variety of ways. 

Core employee information, such as personal demographics, appointments and tenure are captured using FASIS.

• The Office of the Provost and many schools track similar data using Microsoft Access databases and Excel spreadsheets. Faculty members enter additional information directly into these databases
• Some schools with technical staff have built their own independent faculty information systems. They import data from central enterprise systems (FASIS (HRIS), SES, InfoEd, and CTEC) and expand it to address the reporting needs of the dean and other administrators 

Capturing faculty data in multiple ways results in data inconsistencies and raises questions about how best to enhance data quality, accuracy, security, ease and timeliness of reporting while increasing cost effectiveness. 

In FY 2005 and 2006, a group of central and school administrators convened the Faculty Information System Initiative (FISI) to document a core set of faculty data fields and definitions as a step to future faculty system development.  However, funding was not available at that time for this project.

In FY 2007, funding was identified to create a faculty reporting database for the Office of the Provost to consolidate several locally-maintained sources of data.  In developing the reporting database, staff from several offices (including the Office of the Provost, Institutional Research, and FASIS (HRIS)) met with WCAS, McCormick and Feinberg to learn more about their faculty information systems.  The School of Communications has a robust content management system for their faculty which has not yet been reviewed.  Although those Schools upload data from central enterprise systems (FASIS (HRIS), SES, InfoEd, and CTEC) and capture additional information from faculty, they expressed the need for an enterprise solution for faculty information.

Scope & Objectives

The scope of this project is to compile faculty information into a university-wide data management system, providing an accessible, secure environment that achieves the following objectives:

• Leverages collective knowledge of existing faculty systems to accommodate faculty information for all schools in FASIS (HRIS)
• Establishes policies and processes for hiring faculty
• Provides for seamless data sharing between schools and central administration
• Standardizes the processes of data integration and dissemination
• Establishes a centralized “system of record” that ensures legal compliance both for internal use and external reporting 
• Creates a central repository of data, where schools can extract information from one source, the data mart
• Streamlines faculty data collection into a data mart in the enterprise system integrating transactional and reporting systems to take best advantage of the university’s business intelligence tools and provide comprehensive reporting and analytics
• Uses the University Portal to create one place for faculty members to update information on their research, teaching, service and other activities. The Portal also allows faculty to view data (both centrally- and locally-generated) and reports for which they have role based security connected to FASIS (HRIS)
• Links to other enterprise systems, including SES, InfoEd, Maximus, and Blackboard, to provide a comprehensive view of faculty research, funding sources and teaching activities (Phase 2).

Project Documents

Letter from Provost Linzer

Project Charter
Project Timeline
Project Organizational Chart
Task Force List
Communication Plan

Project Sponsors

Pam Beemer - Assoc VP Human Resources
Jake Julia - Assoc VP/Assoc Provost for Academic Initiatives
Dan Linzer - Provost
Jean Shedd – Assoc Provost
James Young – Assoc Provost