September 26, 1996

Dear Colleagues:

I would like to invite each of you to serve on a Universitywide task force to guide our future directions with regard to human resources and benefits information systems. M. Stuart Lynn, Associate Vice President for Information Resources and Communications has kindly agreed to chair this task force.

Our payroll/personnel, benefits, and retirement systems have served us well over the years. They are complex, Universitywide systems that perform reliably and correctly in meeting a broad range of requirements. In some aspects, however, they are becoming outdated and do not support changing University organizational and customer service objectives.

In my view, it is time for us to reassess these systems, and how we organize the work practices and services these systems are intended to support. Some of the factors that persuade me of the timeliness of such a reconceptualization are:

• The need to reassess, both from a work practices and systems perspective, the inter-relationships among human resources, benefits, retirement, and payroll. While recognizing the distinct needs of each, we must ensure that we are meeting our goals of service, efficiency, effectiveness, and accountability, along with appropriate financial controls. This gains in importance as we encourage new organizational approaches, such as the decentralization of benefits counseling from the Office of the President to the campuses.

• The need to increase the focus on people-centered systems that eliminate unnecessary processes and steps, remove reliance on cumbersome forms processing, and exploit new technologies to reduce costs and provide easy and timely access to our employees.

• The need to eliminate redundant or ad hoc systems, born out of necessity but which need to be integrated into a total concept.

• The need to consider how to integrate the interests of several campuses in new HR systems initiatives into our overall planning for HR and Payroll processing, while maintaining the integrity of the centrally-supported payroll system.

The charge of the task force to develop a plan for my consideration with respect to these systems and work practices in the context of both campus and OP requirements and the above considerations. This plan should assess those requirements, provide clear recommendations for alternative courses of action, develop schedules for implementation, analyze the effect on current operations and the benefits to be obtained, and assess the resources that will be required. I am requesting that the task force complete its work by March 1, 1997.

I would ask, however, that any plan presented be flexible and agile, in the sense that it allow for implementation via a series of steps that can provide relatively rapid deliverables with near-term payoffs, rather than one requiring years of analysis, design and implementation before benefits can be realized. In this context, I would ask you to assess carefully when and how we can obtain those benefits through appropriate augmentations and enhancements to our current systems, and when major systems re-engineering will be required.

Please ensure that your final plan involves focus groups composed of employees from across the University who can provide a variety of different perspectives. It is important to remember that our systems must serve not only administrative departments and support functions, but our end users as well.

No response is necessary unless you are unable to serve.

Sincerely,

V. Wayne Kennedy

Senior Vice President