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UCDE: On-Line HR Document Routing System

Sponsor

Tom Wiley - Director, Info Systems, UC Davis Extension (UCDE)

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UCDE: On-Line Human Resources Document Routing (Draft)

Feedback Received to Date (10-04-2007)

Workgroup Observations and Comments

• The UC Davis Extension's proposed On-line Document Routing System would integrate with the larger UCDE system in terms of authentication, authorization, and availability. The infrastructure and development tools appear to be solid given their foundation's origin of Oracle 10g architecture and Oracle Developer Suite development tools. A significant attribute to the UCDE routing system is its potential for integration with the existing UC Davis PPS/Data Warehouse.

Considerations and Areas Needing Clarification and/or Future Action

• Regarding the architecture, the security aspect, as well as the physical and logical architecture - more documentation is needed to further describe/discuss these areas. Given future possible integration with major campus systems, what assurances can be provided ensuring the application servers and software will be secure and well-maintained?

• The project's scope appears to be very large but is somewhat difficult to assess from the summary provided. In an attempt to narrow and perhaps make the project more manageable, can the application be written in modules? Can focus be limited to one aspect per module? Can these modules be drafted modularly such that they can be applied to future applications with little or no modification?

• The time estimated to configure the application has been projected to consume 2 programmers for 6 months, but the review group was uncertain if this relatively modest investment was inclusive of all processes, user interfaces, and additional application integration. If so, the projected investment may be underestimated.

• More budget information would have been useful to the review and, we assume, to UCE leadership as it considers this type of investment. The costs that are identified appear limited to one-time costs, so it was not possible for the review group to get a sense for true long-term cost of ownership. Additional questions are: Relative to maintaining and improving the system over time, what is the proposed annual financial investment? Is the proposed annual financial investment anticipated to remain constant or increase relative to application growth and development?

• The cost of user training ($10k) requires further development, exploration, and definition. Several reviewers wondered about what training expenditures were needed if the proposed application mimics existing functionality. Reviewers also wondered if there were similar departmentally-developed application at UC Davis, and how the proposed system is expected to integrate with central campus HR systems.

• Investing in this application by UCDE will likely require a future transitional effort to either a new HR system, developed at either the campus- or UCOP level. Consideration should be given to how the proposed online routing system might anticipate interfaces with HR systems hosted by other UC Davis/UCOP entities.

• Some reviewers indicated that they HR subsystems they have developed or considered developing were based on anticipated connections to campus HR systems that were either not possible or not allowed by campus HR. In such cases, this necessitated reverting to traditional paper copies or processes to maintain work flow. In some cases, significant advantages were realized by moving even part of the target HR process on-line, even if the result was a paper document that had to be used to get the information into the central campus system.

• Reflecting upon the IET experience with the White Pages information routing procedure, it is recommended that UCDE ensure their proposed workflow is robust enough to accommodate the following:
  • Allowing for reversal of routing if an action is not approved at any stage
  • Detecting email delivery failures and queuing for a later re-delivery
  • Periodic email reminders to limit routing bottlenecks
  • Easy addition and removal of routing stops
• Finally, the review team was unsure if this application was to be a true stand-alone entity or whether it might it use my.ucdavis as a portal website?

Notes

The project description was also provided to Campus HR, which advised that the core functionality of the proposed system is a subset of what would be available if the campus PeopleAdmin application is implemented. A decision about this implementation is pending and expected soon. UCDE may be well-served to consider carefully investing in the proposed system until this decision is made.

Additional Note

Technical Leads Minh Nguyen (College of Letters and Sciences), Greg Loge (Biological Sciences), and Adam Getchell (College of Agriculture and Environmental Sciences) were among the participants in this review and have offered their assistance to UCDE in addressing the issues raised above and in working to ensure campus-wide acceptance and success of this application.