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Strategic Technology Planning >> Critical Thinking

8/29/2006

By Matt Villano

“We are the Human Resources department, not a help desk,” says Tambling. “It was clear something had to change.”

TECH INITIATIVE TIP

The very best approaches to tying IT to mission-critical applications incorporate innovation with a respect for the status quo, never pushing users too far too fast.

Realizing that her HR team needed assistance in providing the level of expertise and customer service that retirees deserved, Tambling set out to find a vendor partner to help transform the system. Ultimately, that partner turned out to be PacifiCare, the company that was handling the university system’s EAP benefits in the first place. Together, the entities created a comprehensive plan to provide retirees with top-notch service and assistance, including phone and web access to information and resources, in-person consultations, referrals to financial planners, eldercare services, and workshops on timely topics related to retirement services. All of these offerings are pulled together in a web portal.

Taking Faculty to TACC

IN THE ACADEMIC ENVIRONMENT, education clearly is the most mission-critical objective of them all.With this in mind, officials at the University of Utah launched the Technology Assisted Curriculum Center (TACC) five years ago, to help faculty members gain a better understanding of technology and incorporate it into their lesson plans. The center—and its measures to help faculty meet their education objectives—is still evolving.

The center is part of the university’s library, and employs more than 40 librarians to help educators get comfortable with technology. In some cases, this is as simple as showing professors what kinds of databases they can make available for a particular class. In other cases, the librarians help educators build syllabi around one-of-a-kind software.

In addition, TACC Director Alison Regan says the center provides workshops for faculty members three times a year. These workshops teach educators how to use everything from Adobe’s Photoshop and Dreamweaver, to software that combats plagiarism.

“We really provide them with whatever kind of technology support they need,” Regan says. “They have questions; we have answers.”

Most recently, Regan says the office added a streaming media division, designed to help teach faculty members how to digitize video and stream it over the internet. She notes that once TACC librarians have digitized the video, they put it behind a password-protected website to comply with copyright laws.

So far, the new approach has worked wonders. Tambling says that in addition to reducing her benefits staff by a quarter of an employee, the university system has saved $25,000 annually on the cost of its EAP. More importantly, for the first time Tambling and her colleagues feel like they’re delivering exactly what their retirees want. Of course, there were a few bumps in the road: Some retirees, for instance, were hesitant at first to pass along personal information to a thirdparty provider. But Tambling says that former system employees got over these fears in no time, and many of them have said they couldn’t imagine having their benefits handled any other way.

“What we have now is one little step from where we were,” she points out, “but for us, because we improved such a critical application for our department and the system as a whole, it feels like something huge, and that’s all that counts.”