Dear UW community,
Since stepping into the position of Senior Vice President and CFO in January after the merger of UW Finance and the Office of Planning & Budgeting, our new team continues to learn, respond to emergent issues, and build capacity to achieve the benefits of Workday Finance. At this stage, I want to convey several important messages to our community, especially faculty and staff:
- We are not where we want to be with Workday Finance stabilization. The challenges experienced by staff and faculty since go-live have been significant, and we are acutely aware of the setbacks endured. I am sorry that you continue to experience challenges and it pains me greatly to hear about the impacts on your work. I want to assure you that you are heard and that I am committed to resolving these issues with our partners and with you and your teams.
- Along with the Office of Research and UW-IT, we are working a multi-prong strategy to ameliorate the post-award set-up, modification and close-out backlogs; procurement backlogs; and data quality and reporting issues facing all our lines of mission-driven activity and business. It is our shared goal to resolve these backlogs urgently.
- There are resources available to our community to assist with these business processes, and to track our work in support of you all:
- The roadmap to easing reporting needs and addressing backlogs is short and intense. Please stay tuned as we continue to improve this environment as swiftly as possible.
The work of faculty is essential to improving the lives of the public across our many disciplines and domains; likewise, staff in our departments and in our central units are crucial partners in day-to-day transactions, troubleshooting, and evolution to stability. We are relying on each other in this system in ways we have not previously; mutual understanding, compassion and curiosity are the characteristics that have made a difference in stabilizing some of our business processes thus far.
There are many reasons to be hopeful. We are seeing lower and reasonable backlogs and much faster ticket turnaround times in some areas. Further down the road, this software product and continued efforts to stabilize our business processes will enable us to better monitor for deficits, to ensure consistent internal financial controls, to audit our activities and resources, to plan and manage funding consistently and strategically, and to provide budget to actuals and decision support for all levels of university leadership. It is an essential evolution, even as it is a challenging one.
Thank you for your work, your collegiality, and your good ideas to move us forward.