What is Integrated Services Renewal?
Guided by the University Plan 2025, and specifically Commitment #2: Boundless Collaboration, The Integrated Services Renewal (ISR) Initiative works to leverage our people, processes, data, and technology, supporting a campus transition to a modern cloud-based enterprise system and supporting technology. This will lead us to have more consistency and standardization in our roles, policies, and processes.
Currently, USask is operating on dated administrative technologies and business practices that limit collaboration and cohesiveness and do not meet the needs of our faculty, staff and students. The university also lacks the overall cross-unit processes and integration required to support strategic business decisions that will maximize the use of data, staff and resources.
ISR is a multi-year journey to simplify and modernize our administrative environment. This will help us:
- integrate workflows and enhance collaboration
- create a positive experience for students, faculty and students
- leverage technology that stays current
- access data to inform decision making
- create a foundation that can adapt as we change and grow
- retire more than a dozen outdated systems currently being used
In the future state, our administrative environment will be user-focused and future-proofed, fully capable of supporting USask to be the university the world needs.
Benefits
The ISR Initiative will enrich the daily experience of everyone at USask:
- Students will be supported through their academic journey through seamlessly integrated administrative services. They will have easy access to information and resources that help them succeed.
- Faculty and researchers will benefit from processes that reduce the administrative burden. They will have more time to focus on their core mission of teaching and research.
- Employees will have streamlined access to information. Processes will be more effective and efficient.
- Administrative leaders will have enhanced access to information to support strategic decision-making. They will have more agility to respond to change and opportunities.
Assessment Phase
The assessment phase examined our current state and revealed that modernizing our administrative services and aligning our structures is a central part of delivering on our core mission and necessary to achieve our commitment of Boundless Collaboration.
Goals
Consulted with over 270 stakeholders from across campus to determine how to most efficiently support the university’s interconnected needs for student, finance, human resources, procurement, and other services. This included
- current state assessment
- needs prioritization
- future state snapshot
- roadmap and business case
Foundational Phase
As a result of the Assessment Phase, five projects were identified to focus on in the Foundational Phase of the project.
Job Architecture
A campus-wide project to design a job architecture and create consistent job profile standards. More.
Procurement
Improve user experience through procurement policy, process, and service enhancements. More.
Budgeting and Forecasting
Assessed and implemeneted an interim budget and forecasting platform to address near-term challenges. More.
Enterprise Service Management (ESM)
Implemention of a new ESM system for request, knowledge and incident/problem management, project planning/work tracking and more. More.
Technology and Partner Selection
Selecting supporting technology and implementation partner for human resources, finance, and procurement. More.