System considerations for a Faculty Information System

Challenges

Faculty are central to driving institutional success, and faculty engagement is at an all-time low. A lack of change could cause real challenges.

• Losing top talent to competitors

• Risk of litigation on errors, inequities, and inconsistencies in the hiring and promotion processes

• Financial risk of hiring the wrong tenure-track faculty

• Missing out on high-impact research funding opportunities

To avoid these pitfalls and set your institution up for sustained growth and success, academic leaders must have efficient and effective processes in place across the entire faculty lifecycle and be equipped with data and insights to guide academic decision-making. Here, you will also find advice on choosing a solution that efficiently and equitably handles all stages of a faculty member’s career, such as hiring, review, promotion and tenure, and faculty activity reporting. 

The more than 400 academic institutions that have successfully made this transition now enjoy streamlined and standardized processes, minimized administrative burden, more equitable and better-documented reviews and data to make informed decisions around their strategic goals. 

Those that have chosen disparate or homegrown systems have risked significant financial and time investments. This guide helps academic leaders find a solution for managing the faculty lifecycle that truly serves the success of all your faculty and, ultimately, the success of your institution. 

Three key considerations

1) What faculty experience is your institution trying to create or scale?

Institutions looking to empower and engage faculty should prioritize investments in platforms that are easy to learn, manage, scale and integrate with other core campus systems. Adopting a platform that facilitates essential processes across the complete faculty lifecycle—including academic recruitment, evaluations, career advancement and showcasing work and achievements—makes faculty feel supported while easing their administrative burden, which helps drive faculty buy-in and free up time for high-value activities.  

2) Can your institution access data on demand? How accurate and timely is the data?

Ensuring your institution’s faculty information system is a centralized source of validated data is critical. Reports must be easy to generate within the system (i.e., not requiring vendor support). Data must be up to date for aspects of the faculty member’s work and validated by faculty themselves or authorized proxy users. 

3) What level of training and support will your users need?

Prioritize partners that can deliver support, training, and best practice consultation— not just through implementation but across the lifetime of partnership to all constituents. It's essential that support is available to administrators, as well as faculty members who cannot afford a gap in service with a job application, promotion, or review in process.

Aligning technology with your institutional goals

Institutions face the critical task of aligning their administrative systems with their mission, vision and strategic objectives. Choosing a faculty information system is a strategic decision that can enable institutions to cultivate an academic environment that supports the success and advancement of faculty members, enhances institutional reputation, and fosters innovation and excellence. 

A faculty information system helps you accomplish your institution’s long-term goals, including: 

• Institutional Insights and Showcasing: Highlight faculty achievements and elevate rank and prestige, easily access reporting related to accreditation and make informed decisions toward strategic initiatives with access to faculty data and work. 

• Efficiency and Effectiveness: Streamline the complete faculty lifecycle process, enabling faculty to save time so they can focus on important academic work. By optimizing their processes and utilizing resources efficiently, faculty can effectively impact the overall success of your institution. 

• Transparency and Inclusion: Create equitable workloads, facilitate fair hiring and evaluation practices and support unbiased decision-making processes—all backed by trusted data. 

With a faculty information system, you accelerate your institution’s journey to impact. 

Considerations for a Faculty Information System

Use this guide to assess the key capabilities you need in your technology for faculty. What can you accomplish today with your current system and what do you need when considering a technology partner? This checklist serves as a workbook as you assess your institution’s—and its stakeholders’—needs.

• Enable academic leaders to instantly access data about their faculty: Trust this data since it is drawn from authoritative sources and validated by faculty or their proxies. With this holistic view, leaders can understand their most important asset—faculty—and drive strategic alignment and demonstrate an institution’s impact. Furthermore, institutions can generate accurate reports and analyze faculty data supporting faculty development, accreditation, budget and workforce planning, and more. 

• Encourage collaboration between faculty and administrators: Foster collaboration and trust among faculty members, administrators, and academic leaders through centralized communication, document sharing, and task management, resulting in enhanced productivity within the institution. 

• Drive efficiency with integrations: Eliminate redundant, duplicative, and manual data entry and enhance efficiency while maximizing data quality. 

• Establish workflows that fit your governance processes: Hardwire your institution’s unique needs and processes to meet governance requirements. 

• Enhance the experience for faculty and administrative staff: Increase user satisfaction and adoption through a well-designed interface and intuitive navigation, thoughtful implementation resources, and a best-in-class services team that supports all users, including faculty, academic leaders, and administrators.  

• Ensure institutional business process continuity: Digitize processes that can be accessed anywhere and anytime. Furthermore, codify existing workflows to retain institutional knowledge and maintain standards at the institutional level. 

Faculty Information System Capabilities

Implementing a faculty information system that ensures efficiency and effectiveness, transparency and inclusion, and institutional insights and showcasing is critical to the short- and long-term success of an institution. The functions that need these qualities start with faculty hiring, managing their career lifecycle, capturing faculty activity, and streamlining review, promotion and tenure processes. Additionally, all these functions must be complemented by a full suite of wraparound services that provide comprehensive support for all administrators and end users. 

Faculty Search

A faculty information system should offer institutions the ability to manage their academic recruitment processes under one platform. A purpose-built system for faculty hiring needs to centralize the applicant pool and related data; natively integrate and manage letters of recommendation requests; establish evaluation criteria; empower faculty search committee decisions; and more. 

• Streamline processes: Access tools that increase accountability, compliance, and consistency in postings.  

• Reduce time to hire: Attract and secure highly qualified candidates, ensuring they are not lost to competitors.  

• Deliver on inclusion goals: Empower administrators to take action on inclusion initiatives in real time, ensuring diverse applicant pools.  

• Increase transparency and accountability: Ensure all academic units use consistent language, criteria, forms, and approval procedures.  

• Optimize faculty investments: Minimize the financial risk of hiring wrong-fit tenure-track faculty members. 

Review, Promotion & Tenure

A faculty information system should enable faculty to easily tell their best story and evidence their accomplishments during major career milestones (annual reviews, promotion, tenure, etc.). Additionally, institutions need a faculty information system to conduct academic evaluations online, efficiently, and securely in a shared governance context.

• Drive efficiency: Save time compiling and accessing faculty evaluations and empower faculty to tell their full academic story. 

• Foster fairness: Increase transparency and consistency to help mitigate legal risk for the institution.  

• Maximize security: Prevent sharing an overly broad level of access to evaluators, which risks violating confidentiality or compromising the integrity of reviews.  

• Create transparency for leadership: Easily see where cases are in the process and next steps.  

• Support equity goals: Track case outcomes to identify trends and analyze data for potential disparities. 

Lifecycle Management

An institution’s most valuable asset is its faculty. A faculty information system gives academic leaders new visibility into their faculty workforce. With Lifecycle Management, institutions can transform how they visualize scholar career paths, understand upcoming faculty career milestones and track academic appointments across the institution. 

• Access data and insights for strategic and budget planning: Plan your budget more accurately, anticipate future hiring needs, and identify any gaps in discipline or departments with a clear picture of your faculty roster and who's up for what rank and when.

• Support faculty inclusion: Track trends in the faculty body over time to ensure fair advancement. Quickly identify interventions if particular faculty groups are falling behind anticipated career timelines.

• Increase trust and collaboration with faculty: Keep track of the many individualized advancement pathways and conditions agreed upon for all faculty members.

Faculty Activity Reporting

The heart of a faculty information system is a centralized hub of faculty data that powers insights for institution leaders, reports for accreditation, and more. The faculty information system becomes an institution’s single source of truth for faculty activities and impact. It allows faculty to tell their academic story across research, service and teaching, and then reuse this data on CVs and review cases. 

• Lead more effectively: Access data and reports to help you confidently make strategic decisions.  

• Avoid the data “black hole”: Empower faculty to share their story and administrators to showcase institutional prowess with easy access to critical data.  

• Increase faculty impact: Free up faculty time for activities that positively impact the institution.   

• Decrease admin burden: Provide up-to-date, properly formatted faculty data to accrediting bodies.  

• Enhance networking: Increase collaboration with searchable faculty expertise, a frequent requirement for grants, publications, and committees. 

Services for Success

To be successful, a faculty information system must be complemented by comprehensive support. Pre-implementation discovery projects ensure your solution maps to the current and planned future state, while support during implementation minimizes time requirements on already strained IT resources. In addition, post-implementation support ensures users can access their dossier and reports when needed. Your FIS must evolve alongside your institutional needs; thus, ongoing optimization and consultation are crucial.  

Digitizing your faculty affairs processes is one step. Pairing a faculty information system with best-in-class services ensures you use best practices that benefit everyone involved. 

• Get a return on investment: Ensure your institutional investment in an FIS is maximized with consistent user support and briefings on platform insights and impact. 

• Achieve successful change management: Gain buy-in from key stakeholders at every stage of the process—even before you implement. Our experts will partner with your team on communication and strategy, following best practices learned at hundreds of peer institutions. 

• Maximize faculty adoption: Receive data on faculty usage of the faculty information system so that you can refine communications and end-user training as needed. 

Why does it matter which Faculty Information System you use?

Faculty are central to an institution’s success. Thus, choosing a platform to centralize faculty information is an important decision that can have significant implications for your university or college. 

You need the most innovative tools to support your vision and workforce, not only for today but also for the next generation. A faculty information system is the most direct path to achieving sustained strategic impact.