Phase 1 of this project includes

1. Creating a Institute’s Portal Advisory Committee (IPAC) to guide project direction, prioritize phases, provide leadership insight, and support portal objectives.
2. Manage commonly used faculty/staff resource links. This should reduce duplicated across many websites by centralizing them. This will also make management of these links more efficient. 
3. Gather feedback about faculty/staff professional profiles.
4. Allow management of “specialty groups” and “employment responsibilities”. The Institute has many groups that do not follow a typical “responsible account” or departmental hierarchy. Faculty/staff may belong to one or more groups other than their primary department/group. ITS has created “specialty groups” where faculty/staff can be grouped with others in the Institute so that the group can be displayed on the Institute’s web pages. Management roles will be built to allow non-ITS staff to manage group members. “Employment responsibilities” is similar to “specialty groups”. Employees can have reporting responsibilities to more than one department.

Other project phases may include

1. Centralizing links for faculty reporting. The Institute’s faculty have to report in multiple systems which can be duplication of effort. ITS would like to partner with faculty representatives across the Institute to determine if some reporting (or data collection) can be streamlined.
2. Discussion of the use of Elements system by faculty to track professional accomplishments.
3. Allow Management of “Expertise”. Throughout the Institute, “experts” are defined several ways for different purposes. All of these business units house their “expertise” listings in separate systems. ITS would like to standardize terms and centralize this data and its management in the Institute’s portal. This would make locating “expertise” and “specialty” information easier. 
   • AgResearch defines expertise for faculty/staff in National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) categories for the purpose of identifying experts who may be able to apply for specific research grants.
   • Marketing and Communications (M&C) has a need to know which people are experts to be media and press contacts.
   • UT Extension has “specialty” in responsible areas and stores this data in SUPER2.       
4. Incorporation of AgResearch’s INTRANET data components. The unique data components in this portal could be incorporated into the Institute’s portal. This would also be an opportunity to streamline data components as determined by AgResearch, ITS, and others.    
5. Other solutions identified based on feedback from faculty, staff, and the Institute’s Portal Advisory Committee (IPAC). 

If you have any questions about this project that you would like to send in advance of the sessions, please send them to ITS.