Chancellor Linda Katehi today (June 11) announced an “ambitious” plan to have a shared service center pilot project in place by winter quarter, as part of the university’s Organizational Excellence initiative.

“I have launched this initiative to create an administration that is lean, effective, transparent, service-oriented and innovative,” Katehi wrote in a welcome message on the new Organizational Excellence website.

The initiative comprises three primary areas:

• Administrative unit reviews — Starting with the Office of Research, Information and Educational Technology, and the combined Offices of the Chancellor and Provost.

• Shared service centers — Focusing on economy of scale and efficiency in process.

• Risk management — Exploring whether the UC Davis culture is too risk averse, that perhaps the university needs to accept higher levels of risk in order to reach new levels of academic stature, funding, enrollment, productivity and internationalization.

With unit reviews and shared service centers, the university aims to reduce administrative costs while maintaining service quality, and redirect resources to the university’s teaching and research missions — especially important during this time of budgetary crisis.

“Through this effort, we are creating a better future for UC Davis,” said Katehi, who launched the Organizational Excellence initiative in February, in her State of the Campus address to the Academic Senate.

Vice Chancellor John Meyer, in charge of Administrative and Resource Management, said, “Certainly we will continue to have budget challenges in administrative areas, but we need to approach these in a manner that is thoughtful and examines new ways of doing business.”

‘A UC Davis-driven response’

To help with that careful examination, the university has brought in ScottMadden Management Consultants to assist in the design and implementation of shared service centers. As part of that process, the firm has begun a comprehensive analysis of existing administrative systems.

Beyond that outside expertise, Katehi is relying on the campus’s own cost-saving proposals.

“Utilizing our Budget Advisory Committee recommendations, comments received from the campus community, and other internal assessments, we have identified the highest impact opportunities for strategic change and service improvement,” Katehi wrote in her welcome note on the website.

This is what makes the UC Davis initiative stand out from similar efforts at several renowned research universities, Katehi said. Our initiative, she said, “is truly a UC Davis-driven response to long recognized issues and opportunities.”

For example, a multiyear plan is in motion to cut back on leases for off-campus space. Some academic units are clustering their administrative services, and other units are looking at doing the same.

And the campus is moving closer to the shared service center pilot project, consolidating such broad functions as human resources, payroll, accounting and information technology.

According to Katehi, the pilot project will support Administrative and Resource Management, Student Affairs, University Relations, the Offices of the Chancellor and Provost, and Information and Educational Technology. The Office of Research will be added within six months of the project’s launch, the chancellor said.

In examining the work of these units — and the work that could be shared — the ScottMadden team is specifically looking at these processes: HR, select accounting activities, IT, research administration, fundraising, communications and gift processing.

The ScottMadden contract runs for three months, at a cost of $420,000. Meyer said the university’s overall budget situation mandates caution before the hiring of outside consultants, but, in this case, “we felt we needed objective, outside assistance in order to achieve a meaningful analysis of UC Davis business practices.”

Through surveys and interviews, Meyer said, ScottMadden is asking: “What processes do we use now and how can we simplify them? Perhaps we are doing something in 10 steps, when we need only four steps.”

Prompt implementation

The Organizational Excellence initiative builds on the two earlier efforts:

• The Administrative Process Redesign Initiative, which has morphed into the shared service center project.

• The Budget Advisory Committee and five subcommittees, which took up their duties in early 2009.

With the Budget Advisory Committee’s recommendations already in hand, along with comments from the campus community, UC Davis has a head start on achieving organizational excellence, Katehi said.

"Rather than expend significant resources to assess those administrative areas requiring enhancement," UC Davis can “more quickly dedicate resources to the implementation of service improvements,” she said in her charge letter to the Organizational Excellence steering committee.

“While study is important,” she said, “my bias is to promptly implement changes which improve administrative systems and provide greater support to our academic mission.”

Katehi announced that she will co-chair the steering committee with Vice Chancellor Meyer, whose own unit, Administrative and Resource Management, is a product of the Administrative Process Redesign Initiative.

ARM came into being last September through a merger of the Office of Administration and the Office of Resource Management and Planning. The merger coincided with Vice Chancellor Stan Nosek’s retirement from the Office of Administration.

Meyer, who had been vice chancellor of ORMP, became the ARM vice chancellor.

“Given that Vice Chancellor Meyer is newly assigned to many of our administrative units,” Katehi said, “I have challenged him to approach these services in a manner which places the needs of customers (in our case, faculty, staff and students) above the needs of the bureaucracy.

“We must recognize that administrative units and systems exist only to support our core functions of teaching and research.”

Feedback

The chancellor said she welcomes questions, suggestions and ideas — and said all feedback will be reviewed, and the responses shared via the Organizational Excellence website.

On the Net

Organizational Excellence

OE News & Updates (including details of the arrangement between UC Davis and ScottMadden Management Consultants)

OE leadership and charge letter