For Wisconsin and the World: Focusing a Great University on its Core Mission, Public Purpose, and Global Reach

Fifth-Year Progress Report

Be responsible stewards of our resources

• The campus demonstrated a commitment to sustainability through a wide variety of activities. Among them:
• Aldo Leopold Residence Hall became home to 172 students in late August. The building includes a greenhouse, solar panels to assist with hot-water heating, and monitors for electricity and water consumption.
• Nancy Nicholas Hall, the new home of the School of Human Ecology, received a LEED Gold designation.
• The We Conserve program and the Office of Sustainability partnered with community groups to collect reusable items during student moving days in mid-August. And WE Badger Volunteers added a green aspect, with teams of students committing to volunteer with a community partner for a semester.
• Faculty and staff across campus have been actively making improvements that result in better services and efficiencies. More than 80 improvements from 12 schools/colleges and 21 other units were shared with 675 attendees at the 2014 Improvement Showcase. More than 725 improvements have been shared and leveraged since the first Showcase in 2000.
• The Wisconsin Energy Institute (WEI) dedicated the past year to moving “Forward in Energy.” The institute hosted the Wisconsin Energy and Sustainability Challenge for students and announced its first-ever seed grants for cross-disciplinary research in clean energy, and its building received LEED Gold certification. In pursuit of turning inedible organic materials into fuels and chemicals, the Great Lake Bioenergy Research Center, part of WEI, published four papers and filed four patents with the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation.
• The Office of Sustainability launched Climate Quest, a grant competition to encourage the campus community to create solutions to climate change that can have local to global impact. A new sustainability certificate will be available for undergraduates beginning in fall 2014. And the office completed a first-ever study to evaluate how we can use classroom space more efficiently.
• The campus received an award from the Environmental Protection Agency for using green energy for 15.4 percent of its total electrical usage.

Educational Innovation Inspiring to engage

• Engaged 125 faculty and staff in blended and online instruction, reaching 4,900 students in 54 courses.
• Explored mobile learning, learning analytics, and self-paced, modular learning applications through EI Design Teams with 60 faculty, staff, and students.
• Reached 100,000 learners throughout the world via four pilot massive open online courses.
• Innovating through incentives and resources
• Launched 44 EI-funded projects and sabbaticals in 53 departments, spanning mobile and online learning, curricular redesign, master’s courses, and interprofessional projects.
• Honored five outstanding educators with UW–Madison’s inaugural Teaching and Learning Innovation Awards.
• Building capacities and exploring technologies
• Built capacity for instructional design and technology support for innovations.
• Served new students through 18 post-baccalaureate programs, master’s degrees, and capstone certificates.
• Collaborated to advance course design and development, learning spaces, enrollment management, recruitment of new learning audiences, assessments, advising, learning management systems, and the student experience.

New Human Resources System

UW–Madison has been granted unprecedented authority by the State Legislature to develop a new personnel/human resources system specifically tailored to meet the university’s talent needs. Based on a framework articulated in the UW–Madison HR Design Strategic Plan, the university is moving forward with the detailed design of this new system, which will be put in place over the next several years. Several critical components will go into effect on July 1, 2015.

The new system will help ensure that UW–Madison has a workforce that is highly talented, engaged, diverse, and adaptable by providing greater HR flexibility and efficiency in key areas of talent acquisition and management, such as compensation and hiring. At the same time, fundamental employee rights will be preserved. The new personnel system is being designed in close cooperation with campus governance and other stakeholder groups.

Administrative Process Redesign (APR)

In addition to managing the Administrative Excellence initiative (see below), APR’s process-improvement portfolio includes enterprise projects such as a financial portal for students and parents, internal campus communications, and enhancements to a key tool for managing research finances. Partnering with the Wisconsin School of Business, APR also offers a new professional development course on metrics-based decision-making, bringing performance measurement and analysis to the fore of administrative operations.

Administrative Excellence

This initiative had a goal of transforming processes, systems, and structures to bring about cost savings, efficiencies, and improved service. All projects have been transitioned to the respective business owners, marking the close of Administrative Excellence in 2014. The projects will be monitored for ongoing measurement by the APR office.

• Strategic sourcing: Leveraging the scale of purchasing and limiting choices or vendors without sacrificing quality or service levels. A wide range of office supplies, including remanufactured toner, were identified as preferred UW products, resulting in initial savings of $293,000. In the eleven months following rollout of the desktop and laptop computer selections, the campus realized more than $393,000 in savings.
• Email and calendaring: By consolidating existing email and calendaring systems across campus into one, the university can appreciate significant savings by improved productivity and avoiding duplicative costs. Implementation is under way, with early adoption targeted for fall 2014.
• Data center aggregation: A new operational model was approved to reduce costs by eliminating duplicative infrastructures and substandard facilities. A service unit reporting to the CIO was established to match optimized, high-efficiency hosting with service needs. This unit will align with the advanced computing infrastructure and the research community to enhance service and risk management.
• IT decision-making: A structural model for the campus to decide which IT projects are approved and funded was developed and approved for implementation. The CIO will operationalize the new model.
• Instructional space utilization: Two studies of instructional space and a College of Engineering feasibility study demonstrated that following campus policy could free more than 30 percent of classrooms for repurpose. A centralized inventory of instructional space data, including more than 60 attributes describing each room, was compiled and made available to the campus in April.