Administrative Technology provides the infrastructures and tools for CHASS staff to act effectively and efficiently. The proven E-Business technology addressed below provides the services that are crucial to enable administrators to lead, faculty to excel at teaching, and students to maximize their educational opportunities. There are several information management systems previously or currently used, or in development for supporting campus operations and student services as described in below.
Technologies Deployed
Technologies Currently in Development
Previous Developed, Initiated, or Used Technologies
The following technologies were pilot developments or
initiatives. They were adopted by campus for campus-wide
operations.
Department/center/program
web pages. The CHASS approach to enhancing
and supporting the maintenance of department/center/program
web "presence" has been awarded a Larry
Sautter Award of Achievement in University Computing
by the University of California system in 2003.
All the many faculty, chairs, departmental administrators,
staff and CHASS College Computing people who took part
in designing and implementing this program should be
proud that their collective accomplishment has been
recognized.
Our approach is one that maximizes technical efficiency by using a common web server, standardized file structures, web-page templates, and a staff of carefully selected and trained student interns to do web page development and maintenance work. At the same time, the actual content and appearance of the the web pages of all of our units are unique to their program, and under their control. All departments in our college have voluntarily adopted this approach.
During 2003-04, our emphasis will be on providing more content -- particularly in the areas of graduate programs and research. C3 is also working to provide a suite of tools that departments and programs may add to their web-sites.
C3 is also very interested in learning,
from you, what enhancements to our College's web sites
might make them better serve our faculty, students,
administrators, potential students and faculty, donors,
and casual visitors. Ideas like discussion boards,
pages for alumni relations and relations with donors
are ones that we would like to make available, if departments
are interested.
Graduate Program Recruiting Support. Increasing the numbers and qualifications of graduate students in programs in CHASS is critical to our success in both research and teaching. It is central to building the reputation of UCR as a major division I research university. These days, the first "point of contact" that most potential students have with us is through our presence on the World Wide Web. We are working, as one of our highest priorities, to increase the use of proven ideas of Customer Relations Management (CRM) to bring top students to UCR.
The
system is more than a pretty web-page. By connecting
it to a database, departments and the College share
real-time data about prospects who have contacted us,
review the status of their applications, and use this
information to support faculty recruiting efforts and
the processes of making admission and financial aid
decisions. The system will enable (and, in some
cases, challenge) departments to become more assertive
in recruiting, and to be as timely as many of our competitors
in wooing top prospects. During 2003-04, all graduate
programs in the college have implemented the system.
In 2004, the College entered into discussions with
the Dean of the Graduate Division, and with C&C
about how we could link our College system to the systems
currently used by the Division for graduate admissions,
and ultimately to the student records system and financial
system. The success of the graduation student
recruitment support system and the financial aid support
system triggered the Graduate Division to reevaluate
and redesign the business procedures campus-wide. C&C
has been undertaking the development since 2004.
Scheduling Support
(e.g. Foreign Languages Placement). C3
was asked by Department of Comparative 
Literature
and Foreign Languages to create a system where students
who needed to take language exams could register for
the limited seating at the various sessions on-line.
The program is been successful in greatly reducing the
amount of paperwork and phone calls that department
staff have to do.
Conference
Registration Support. The programming
staff of C3 have developed a web-page 
based
program that allows visitors to register for conference
events. The entries that visitors make on a web-page
are stored in a database where they can be used to create
emailing and mailing lists, lists of event attendees,
etc. This program has been developed to support several
conference registration with successful result. The
model has been also applied to CHASS Connect enrollment
and Pre-Business orientation registration. It has help
to reduce significant administrative burden of staff
who are organizing events.
File Servers and Business Information Organization. Making sure that the data we use for administrative work are backed-up on a regular basis, and are secure from hacking and intrusion are obviously important concerns for every department. As we all work to comply with new legislation that requires strong safeguards on information that includes student names and IDs, file security becomes even more important.
During 2002-04, we re-located the administrative files
of the college and a majority of departments to fast
central file servers located in the secure machine room
maintained by Computing and Communications. Authorized
users access their files the same way they always did
-- the remote file server is just another "disk
drive" that appears along with the local drives.
The system has proven to be highly reliable, fast, and
secure. In the process of relocating files from
insecure desk-top machines to the file servers, we've
also helped departments to rationalize the organization
of their folders -- so that different users in the same
department are better able to locate digital documents
that they need, and so that personnel who move from
one unit to another do not face such a sharp "learning
curve" due to different filing systems in different
units.
Mandatory Student Email/Webmail. The College's Student Academic Affairs office have spent a huge amount of time-and-effort (not to mention a lot of cash) on sending out letters to students to inform them of critical matters. While we also used email, we couldn't rely on email for "official" notifications, because students were not required to use email services (though, of course, most do use either campus or private email providers). Starting from Fall 2004, VC Student Affairs issued a policy to make students responsible for providing the university with an email address, and responsible for using email for official communications.
What this means for departments is that they will be able to use electronic communication for official business, instead of hard-copy. It also means that departments will also be able to be in more regular contact with their students -- or selected mailing lists of them -- with other announcements (e.g. announcing events of interest, other news, or reminders about things that students need to do). This should dramatically increase the speed and reduce the cost of mandatory communications with students, and enable considerably more "non-mandatory" communication that may help provide better connections between departments and their students.
Facilities Management System (FMS). With budget cut-backs and rapid growth, managing space has become ever more challenging. To help the space management, the Office of Vice Chancellor for Academic Planning and Budget has created a web-based FMS. The annual report of space utilization is made available on-line as a web-form for departments to review and modify. In addition, drawings of all the campus spaces will be provided on line. FMS helps a good deal in quickly preparing and submitting required reports, and in developing plans and proposals for space needs.
e-Calendaring. In
2002 , the campus introduced the "CorpTime"
on-line calendaring system. This tools allows
people or entities (who have accounts) to schedule events,
view other's calendars (but you can control what, if
anything, other people can see in your calendar), request
meetings, and schedule access to spaces and equipment.
Many campus administrative offices -- including most
of the college offices -- use the system, now called
UCR e-Calendar. The system is free to all faculty and
staff members of UCR.
Contract and Proposal Tracking. The Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research has implemented an on-line contract and proposal tracking, and document management system. This system enables units and the VC Research to share information about the status of these transactions, and to make available on line the documents relevant to each (contracts, guidelines, tracking and transaction information).
CHASS Intranet. CHASS intranet is logically "internal" to CHASS and is for administrative operation purpose. The intranet provides a single entry to access all web base applications developed by C3, and C&C. Physically they can span the globe and is limited to CHASS administrative members.
Event Calendaring. CHASS integrates the campus' event calendar system to publish various events and academic activities. More than 20 departments, centers, and programs have been utilizing the system to increase publicity of their academic activities, conferences and events.
Knowledge Base e-Services. Several e-Services models that embedded with business logics have been developed by C3 to provide students with knowledge base online information services. Examples are Major Requirements Self-Guided Tour and Foreign Language Placement Test Enrollment, these models are not only reducing the burden on staff, but also improving the service quality to students. An online CHASS Faculty Handbook: Practices and Procedures that has been developed to serve our faculty is another example. The College has been studying other potential e-Services to enhance the quality of services to our faculty and staff.
Online Application for Graduation. The re-engineering effort streamlines the current manual paper and labor intensive processes by applying e-Business technology. The CHASS students and the CHASS staff (Student Academic Affairs Office and departments) interacts with the online system through a common web browser. Certain manual processes are converted into automatic information passing. The system was in full operation since Winter of 2005.
Student Advising Appointment System. The system provides a mechanism for College’s students to make appointments with academic advisors online. It is a supplement system for the campus’ Student Information System providing an intelligent and convenient method, and friendly user interfaces for both students and advisors to manage their appointments. Since CHASS has over 9000 students, full deployment of the system was very difficult and could create confusion among students and advisors. To eliminate the obstacles, two-phase deployment strategy has been developed. The current deployment requires students to make appointment through phone or office visit. The front desk assistant will record the appointment request on the web base advisor interface of the system for academic advisors to view and administer. The next phase of the deployment will provide full web base student interface for students to make appointment online.
Facility Online Reservation and Management System. The Facility Online Reservation and Management System is an online tool that was designed to simplify the task for institutional facility administrator to manage facility reservation requests. The system is capable of managing multiple buildings and rooms. With an intuitive, easy to use interface both administrators and requestors will benefit from the time that this system will save. Administrators can manage their facilities and related supports such as what equipment is available for each room, the cost and any other details. From the requestors’ perspective, requesting a room is as easy as picking the room you want, finding an available time slot and filling out the online reservation form. While the ultimate decision on who gets the room is the administrator’s responsibility, this system eliminates all the paper work and cumbersome book keeping that normally goes with trying to manage room reservations. All communications between facility administrators and requestors are kept as records for tracing purpose. This system was designed to run in an Apache Tomcat Servlet container using Java technology in combination with the Spring framework and Hibernate for application control and database transaction management. By utilizing these web technologies and databases, all the information is stored on the server and easily accessed through a web interface, rather than a file cabinet and log book. This system saves staff time and cost to manage their responsible facility.
Graduate Program Financial Aid Planning Support. During 2002-03, the new "cohort model" for managing graduate student financial aid commitments was put in place. As a part of this, a system of file sharing between the departments and the College office (Assoc. Dean John Ashe) enabled both parties to share access to the same spreadsheet data (We called it "checkbook").
This
system has been a huge success in improving the management
and planning of graduate student financial aid.
It hasn't caused more resources to appear; but, we're
doing a much better job now of planning and tracking
in this important area, so that we may be getting a
better "return on investment." Certainly,
we now have a much better picture of the the status
of support in our programs, and are in a better position
to argue our case for increased support of our graduate
programs. The success of the graduation student recruitment
support system and the financial aid support system
triggered the Graduate Division to reevaluate and redesign
the business procedures campus-wide. C&C has been
undertaking the development since 2004.
Work on Academic Personnel Systems. Of all the administrative tasks that departments do, one of the most important - and one of the most time consuming and difficult -- is academic personnel reviews. As the number of faculty in the college has grown rapidly (and as the number of staff in the departments and in the college has remained about the same), the burden of academic personnel file management has become greater and greater. This is a major challenging area for almost everyone in the college, and for the college office.
From 2004, all the departments of the College have taken some very important first steps by sharing access to common documents used in the academic personnel process through carefully controlled file sharing. This makes communication between the College and departments for review and revision of documents much faster, and reduces confusion about multiple versions etc. It also enables us to provide the highest possible level of security for these sometimes sensitive, and always confidential documents. It has been estimated that the file sharing method have eliminated over 10,000 pages of paper a year in the College office alone.In the long-run, it is easy to envision a system where all academic personnel documents are kept in digital form, and shared on-line with carefully guarded security and transaction control.
In 2003, Bourns College of Engineering has prototyped an Academic Review System (ARS) as an electronic repository for faculty’s merit profiles. CHASS jointly worked with C&C in the research and development efforts by investigating the business processes and requirements to completely streamline the processes. In late 2005, Vice Provost for Academic Personnel made the system as campus-wide initiative. C&C has been undertaking the project since them..
On-line Distribution of Registration
PINs. In the Spring quarter of 2002-03,
students were 
urged
to get their registration PIN numbers from our student
affairs web site, rather than by getting printed materials
by visiting departmental and college student affairs
officers. In Fall 2003, registration PIN information
was made available online only. This online distribution
has proved a significant improvement in student services
by eliminating student waiting time and saving staff
time to do the advising work. Conversative estimation
shows the system can save the College's staff time more
than 60 working days a year. This technology deployment
triggered the Office of Vice Chancellor for Student
Affairs to reevaluate and redesign the business practices
campus-wide. A feature was implemented on the campus’
Student Information System to replace the need of the
registration pins in earlier 2005.
Credit Card Server. The CHASS initiated the needs of Credit Card Server in the former EVC’s RMAC Brainstorming sessions. It was adopted by campus as one of the technology initiative and has been undertaken by C&C. The system is near completed. A credit card server is a secure service (like those used by Amazon, etc.) so that people can safely and securely make credit-card payments to campus accounts that are authorized to receive them.
This service would allow visitors to campus web-sites to make purchases, pay fees, and make donations with credit cards. It has the potential of relieving staff all over campus of thousands and thousands of transactions that we are currently doing by hand.
While most of the applications are for things like purchasing tickets, paying fees and fines, and the like, departments/centers/programs could also apply this technology to automatically receive payments of conference fees, fees for xeroxing services from students, etc.
The College has been working with campus authorities
to try to make credit-card services available as soon
as possible.