All UCLA academic personnel offices are required to use Opus to track their academic appointees’ eligibility and to open cases.
After fall of 2017 academic appointees themselves, as well as reviewing bodies, will be required to use the system for Merit, Promotion, and 4th Year Appraisal actions. During this initial transition, dossiers will be uploaded in PDF format, and sent through an automated workflow. In the future, these PDFs will be replaced through integrations with campus and other data sources to provide data directly in fielded format.
Background
Data at UCLA is distributed in both digital and analog formats across campus units, creating challenges for access as well as the potential for errors related to academic review. To address these challenges, the Opus project was funded in 2013, and designated to become the information system of record for academic appointees at UCLA. The project represents an evolution in efficiency, transparency, and accuracy for the academic review process, replacing current paper files with a secure electronic profile, a convenient and automated review process, and robust messaging and reporting features.
Benefits of Opus
Academic Review Process
Assembling the required data to build a dossier is a major task. Opus assists in this process by creating a secure online profile for each faculty member, which will eventually be pre-populated with data from campus sources, such as courses taught, grants, honors, graduate advisees, etc.
Transparency
An academic appointee will be able to see exactly where their case is in the review process, view any applicable policy, and set notifications to alert them when they need to take action.
Management and Reuse of Profile Data
Academic appointees will be able to view and edit their own personnel data profile. They will be able to add to/augment this profile with a list of accomplishments; to curate their public profile view; to syndicate portions of their profile to UCLA faculty websites, biosketches, or VIVO; and to locate potential collaborators on campus, showcase their expertise, and increase their visibility to potential funders. Individual appointees can do this directly, or they can grant authority to others to help manage their profile information.
Data Fidelity
A parallel initiative called the Book of Record Initiative (see below) will ensure cleaner, more accurate data for the entire campus. For example, while the Central Resource Unit is the data steward for salary data, the Academic Affairs and Personnel Office is the data steward for faculty rank and step data, and faculty serve as stewards for their own data about publications, presentations, honors, awards and certain other categories. Opus is formalizing memoranda of understanding with each data steward office. The Opus system will provide an error resolution process to allow academic appointees to contact the appropriate data steward and resolve errors at the source.
Book of Record Data
A book of record is an authoritative source for a data element or a set of data elements. The Book of Record Initiative is an effort to coordinate and document the policies and practices surrounding the campus systems and data that serve as sources for Opus. For Opus to be successful, both administrative and academic users must trust the data in the system. As such, it is critical to assign and document campus books of record, whether that data currently exists in paper form, or within a system that will be subsumed by Opus. For some of this data, Opus itself will become the book of record.
To date, UCLA has never developed institutional policies around the management and stewardship of institutional data. Instead, each data-owning unit manages its own set of regulatory policy requirements, and any associated UC and UCLA policy requirements and practices. This network of policies and practices impact the ways in which data is accessed, shared and/or coordinated across data-owning units and customers, as well as the structure of the campus data warehouse.
The outcomes of the Book of Record Initiative will include:
Documentation of campus Books of Record and Data Stewards assigned to specific Opus data elements in order to provide transparency to end users.
Assurance that Opus is using the most accurate/authoritative data.
Documentation of the data lifecycle for data elements within Opus in order to further data transparency, and to assist with error resolution.
Documented agreement regarding the responsibilities of data stewards to downstream systems, such as Opus, in order to ensure data quality and to protect data stakeholders.
Policy compliance. Opus will make it easier for all academics and staff to be aware of, and adhere to, existing policies and procedures around the representation and use of data. Note: For the purposes of academic personnel review, Opus does not change existing policy.