Principal’s Overview | 51
SMART CAMPUS INITIATIVE In the 2021/2022 academic year, efforts of the Smart Campus Initiative focused on continued work on systems designed to enhance critical campus processes. The Human Resources Performance Information System was successfully piloted by the Faculty of Social Sciences as they used the system to manage the assessment and promotion process for academic, senior administrative and professional staff. Based on feedback coming out of that exercise, refinements have been made to the system, which now stands ready for general use by faculties. As a parallel effort, a module of the system has been developed for the management of the corresponding process for administra- tive, technical and service staff. Plans are in place to fully test and pilot this module in the months ahead. After two full years of use by the School for Graduate Studies and Research, the enhanced postgraduate admis- sion process has benefited from refinements based on user feedback, coming from both administrative staff within the School and faculty involved in the process. The two-year period also allowed for analysis of the impact the system has made on the admission process. The results have shown a 37% reduction in the time taken to process application documents and a 30% reduction in the time taken for faculty to review applications and make the required deci- sions. The enhanced system has therefore started to yield the expected process improvements. The Office of Institutional Planning and Infrastructural Services (INPLAIS) Management Information System continues to be a work in progress. The vendor assess- ment module has been successfully piloted over the past year and will be used as the standard means by which the performance of vendors with whom INPLAIS conducts business are assessed. An absence management module has also been developed and deployed for the system, greatly improving the ways in which absences are reported to the Human Resources Section. Finally, work has begun on developing a procurement management module for the system, designed to streamline the procurement process used by INPLAIS. The module is expected to be piloted and implemented in the months ahead.
Mr Keith Inniss, Campus Chief Information Officer
Improvements to the Timetable Process Scheduling during the pandemic presented a challenge, as varying social distancing protocols impacted classroom capacities. A reliable timetable is essential for the Campus to operate efficiently, and CITS which has responsibility for timetabling, has been making continuous efforts to improve the timetabling process. To ensure an early and accurate timetable, CITS has been concentrating its efforts on every element of the process, striving to make it more efficient. The process of reporting has been revised to deliver prompt information to faculty for review, enabling the Campus to take a more proactive approach in resolving issues as they arise. CITS was able to diagnose and solve the problem of duplicate records and eliminate course repetition. Faculty was given the ability to interact and manipulate the scheduling through software, rather than manually as was done in the past, thereby reducing the turnaround time and transcription errors CITS has also streamlined the way that timetabling requests are routed by instituting a ticket system through the IT Service Desk.
THE UNIVERSITY OF THE WEST INDIES CAVE HILL CAMPUS ANNUAL REPORT TO COUNCIL 2021/2022
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