Awards

1999 Quality & Productivity Awards

Sponsored by Royal Bank and Ricoh Canada

Royal Bank, Ricoh Canada and Canadian Association of University Business Officers are pleased to announce the following winners of the twelfth annual CAUBO Quality & Productivity Awards Program:

Even though the number of projects entered in the 1999 edition of the competition was significantly lower than in previous years, CAUBO's annual Quality and Productivity Awards Program continues to be an important showcase of innovative ideas for Canadian university administrators. Senior university officials attribute the decline in the number of submissions to increased workload and lack of time to prepare a dossier, rather than to lack of worthy initiatives. In fact, the selection committee that evaluated the 27 projects found the overall standard and the quality of the presentations as high as they have ever been.

We continue to see the shift in emphasis started a few years ago to the quality of services to students and the university community. Dollars saved alone do not seem make the grade anymore, although cost effectiveness remains an important consideration for many projects. It is significant that benefits to the broader community surrounding the university were an important consideration in awarding first place to Queen's University for its project Kingston: Partners for a Safe Community.

Many thanks are due our to sponsors, Royal Bank and Ricoh Canada, who contribute significantly more than financial support by involving senior executives in the selection process.

Queen's University at Kingston (First Prize)

The Kingston: Partners for a Safe Community Project was established in 1997, by Queen's University through the Department of Environmental Health and Safety to provide the Kingston community with the support, tools and networks to develop and maintain successful health and safety programs for the small business employer and young people in the youth transition years. The aim of the Project is to coordinate the efforts of a number of well-established, safety focussed activities in the community in order to remove some of the duplication of efforts.

The prime objective of this Project is to make Queen's University and Kingston leaders amongst the Safe Community Network. Initially the Project was designed to provide member employers, including the greater Queen's Community, with the resources to develop and maintain successful health and safety programs. The Project also sets out to develop a safety conscious and competent workforce for the local economy.

Small Business Strategies:

The Project delivers the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board's Safe Communities Incentive Program (SCIP) to 95 employers who were recruited in the Fall 1997 and 1998. Additional safety-related courses and seminars are also offered on specific topics to those interested employers. A mentoring program has been established between large and small employers. The Project team has, to date, identified a number of knowledgeable professionals in the field of Health and Safety. These individuals have been linked and assigned to work with all members of the participating employers' group. The Project goal is to reduce the costs associated with Workplace Safety and Insurance Board compensable injuries by 20%.

Increasing Overall Knowledge of Health and Safety:

The second component aims at integrating health and safety training into the core curriculum of university and college students. Piloted in the 1997-98 academic year, it is now mandatory for all 650 first year engineers at Queen's to take the Young Worker Awareness Program (YWAP) as well as WHMIS. As well, an additional 400 students participating in second and fourth year commerce courses will receive an overview of the Occupational Health and Safety Act in their course work.

Volunteers with the Safe Workplace Associations also continue to deliver the YWAP to an additional 500 secondary students within the city of Kingston, on a yearly basis.

Université Laval (Second Prize)

Sherlock is an infrastructure that gives access and exploits survey requests by students, professors and researchers. Following a proposal to other Quebec university libraries, the library of Université Laval created a team to develop Sherlock. The major challenges were: structuring a distributed management site, creating a multi-source databank, creating a presentation structure on the Web, establishing links with operating systems such as SPSS and distance access and consultation for the clientele.

Based on a bilingual Web interface, Sherlock offers universal access to all surveys available in the Quebec university network. Sherlock can be accessed from: http://sherlock.crepuq.qc.ca/

Major features are:

• Consultation of the list and description of surveys;
• Immediate availability of documentation (guides, user's manuals or "codebooks", SAS or SPSS statements, description of variables);
• selection of variables, extraction of data question by question for statistical treatment at a local station;
• On line analysis results (frequency distribution, tables, average, median, regression analysis

Survey collection

Sherlock presently gives access to the description and detailed data (answers to each question) of some thirty Statistics Canada surveys. These surveys that could not be reproduced by a well-subsidised researcher, reach 15 to 30,000 participants and more.

Archiving of local surveys

Given its open and distributed architecture, Sherlock can house the data of surveys done by researchers and make this information available to the university community. A pilot project is presently under way in a political science course whereby students draw up a questionnaire, collect and encode data Sherlock will house raw data and students will use it as a tool to have access to their data by variable and for analysis purposes. (tables, average, etc..).

Concluding remarks

The collective approach of Quebec university libraries to the management of survey data not only opens access to all but also opens up the use of available data. As an access infrastructure, Sherlock promotes the analysis of statistical information available in the Quebec university network, improves student training with real data and supports the work of professors and researchers.

University of Ottawa (Third Prize)

Since April 1997, internal and external customers of University of Ottawa have had easy access to a variety of services and generalist staff in a single location. InfoService is a one-stop source of information and services for admissions, enrolments and files, student customer accounts, parking, computerized accounts and general information. Its mandate is 1) to be the first point of contact for anyone doing business with University of Ottawa; 2) to avoid sending customers from one place to another on campus; and 3) to the degree possible, to eliminate line-ups.

InfoService carries out this mandate by making maximum use of technology, physical space and human resources to offer top- quality service in person, by telephone, by fax and by Internet. It is different from other one-stop shop systems in the post-secondary education environment in that a multi-skilled staff has received specialized training in all areas for which InfoService is responsible. As a result, customers can settle all their queries with one agent, at one counter, all at once.

With the same number of customer service agents as when the units were independent of one another, an annual total of three months of additional service has been offered in the first year of operation. Longer opening hours and a flexible work schedule have allowed more services to be offered by the same number of persons.

Customer statistics over a one-year period show that, despite a constant student population of approximately 23,700, there were approximately 74,215 visits to InfoService in 1998 compared to 123,510 visits per year to the former individual sectors. In the past, the same person might go to each counter in the same day to complete a transaction.

The concept took one year to plan and six months to implement.

Bishop's University (Quebec Regional Award)

Faced with major reductions in Government funding and no way to increase fees because of strict Government regulations, Bishop's administration was left with no option but to reduce costs.

After setting the tone by cutting its own costs, the administration believed strongly that everyone had to participate in the restructuring of the University; everyone from janitors to faculty to administration, and participants were encouraged to maintain services while cutting costs. Key to getting full participation in the plan was the quick dissemination of the information. News releases and newsletters provided the University community with information presented in the same format and easy to understand.

A critical eye was turned to all aspects of the University's operations. The Principal and the Vice-Principal Administration and Finance reviewed an activity analysis with each Department and Service. They were asked to price every service and product that they delivered.

Targets for staff reductions were set and Departments were told what they were. No deadlines were set. It was soon realized that this was only going to work if the administration made a promise of no layoffs. A unique program was instituted. Protocols were negotiated with the staff associations that allowed for restructuring without the usual job posting method, in return for a promise of no layoffs. Realizing that, ultimately, their jobs would be targets for reduction, staff took opportunities to move to other departments when a position opened up. By simply announcing where the University wanted to be and, through attrition, early retirement and staff mobility, the university reduced its staff by the required numbers.

The whole operation was carried in-house. Early in the process, the administration ruled out the opportunity of using consultants. While Senior Administration had to devote a very substantial amount of time to carry out the operation, this decision proved to be right. Active participation of Senior Administration fostered good relations with the staff and lent a high degree of credibility to the operation.

Univ. of Guelph, Univ. of Waterloo and Wilfrid Laurier Univ. (Ontario Regional Award)

At the University of Guelph, the Library and Computing and Communications Services have worked together to develop a very successful and innovaive service for its data users (http://tdr.tug-libraries.on.ca)). This service (TDR or Tri-University Group Data Resources), allows users to easily access and process large data files via the World Wide Web. This data might include a large collection of survey results from Statistics Canada, any number of surveys from international sources, or data collected by a local researcher. All of this data has been available in the past, but this rich information source has been inaccessible to all but a small group of people, due to the high costs of acquiring the skills necessary to utilize this type of information. These resources are now used heavily at Guelph by faculty and students through the TDR, and recently a single joint data service has been established for the consortium of the University of Guelph, the University of Waterloo and Wilfrid Laurier University. This service has made access to large data sets feasible for a wide range of users who could not have utilized these resources previously. It has greatly increased the amount of data available to the users from the three institutions, and has improved the service available to all. The net result is increased and improved research along with increased value to students who are now able to utilize real-world data and applications in their work.

Prior to the establishment of the TDR the use of large data sets was limited to a relatively exclusive group of users with the necessary expertise and resources. While these people had the storage space, computer power, and programming skills at their disposal to make use of some of these very large files, rich information sources such as Statistics Canada's Survey of Consumer Finance or the National Population Health Survey were out of reach for most users. While any library user was able to discover that data had been collected and made available on a given topic, only summary tables were universally available in paper. Accessing the raw data and thus being able to manipulate it for specific queries, required a large budget and the ability to write statistical programs to generate useful results.

The TDR changed data use on campus in a number of significant ways. Data is now purchased through consortial agreements, making large amounts of data available to all users from a central location on campus. This single location has all of the necessary resources to acquire and store all of the datasets, and to make this information available to any users on campus at no cost to them. The heart of this service is a web-based front-end that allows the user to access the data from their desktop, select a data set and variables that they wish to view, and run statistical analysis on the data, returning results in a customized form. The user can now access a great deal of data, and perform complicated data processing on their own, without committing the human and financial resources that were necessary in the past, and only available to a select few. The TDR offices are able to field requests, acquire data, and mount the data on the system in a very short time, utilizing one program to deal with any set of data. The service is staffed and centrally located in the library so that any student or faculty member can consult with staff on data use. In addition, the TDR has made data use possible on a large number of publicly available computers in the library, in classrooms, and in labs across campus.

Broadening this service to the wider audience of the Tri-University group was a logical step once the concept had been proven at Guelph. It was clear that sharing the success of the data centre could be beneficial for all of the partners. The three universities, already linked through Tri-University Group partnerships in many areas, already had experience in collaboration and the infrastructure in place to make a shared data service a reality. Along with the obvious advantages of not needing to go through the same development process at all of the institutions, all three could share the costs of upgrading the service and increasing the amount of storage space available. The result is significant savings in time and funds, and a greatly improved data service accesible to a very large audience.

Univ. of Northern British Columbia and Univ. of Victoria (Western Regional Award)

The University of Victoria and University of Northern British Columbia, in conjunction with Millennium Computer Systems, developed a secure web interface into their Accounting, Purchasing, Payroll and Budget Development systems.

The Benefits of the system are:

• Significant cost savings on computer hardware as MacIntosh users were not forced to change to IBM compatible machines in order to access information on the new financial system.
• Lower total cost of ownership, as the system is accessed using freely available web browsers such as Netscape and Internet Explorer (i.e. unlike the client/server model, which would require client software being installed and maintained on much more powerful computers.)
• Secure, worldwide access. At Uvic, for example, this has allowed 1,300 researchers and administrators to access up-to-date financial information 24 hours a day from research sites scattered around the world using any PC, Mac or Unix computer connected to the internet.
• Easy, one click data download ability into Excel and Claris works for graphing and analysis.
• The system is platform independent. Unlike many software packages that are only accessible from IBM compatibles, the web system is accessible from IBM, Mac and Unix machines.
• The need to print and distribute hard copy reports has been greatly reduced, resulting in significant savings in staff time that was previously devoted to printing, collating and distributing reports.
• At mid-size, comprehensive Uvic, the cost savings exceeded $1,675,000.