Today, BUworks Answers Your Questions

Peter Smokowski, vice president for auxiliary services, and Tracy Schroeder, vice president for information services and technology, lead a panel of six experts answering questions from the BU community about BUworks during a live online chat. Photos by Kalman Zabarsky and Vernon Doucette

BUworks, the business project designed to update and streamline the tracking of expenditures and move human resource functions from paper to online, among other things, hit some turbulence when it launched in July. It went down three times, worked too slowly to satisfy many people, and its language could be hard to understand. Many people said it made things harder, not easier, and some found the training more confusing than clarifying.

Since then, much progress has been made on what is the largest business process change initiative in BU’s history. “We are all over this every day,” says Peter Smokowski, vice president for auxiliary services, and a BUworks project executive. “We’ve fixed a very large number of problems and we realize that there’s more ahead of us, but we are on this. It’s people helping people.”

Numbers show that the efforts of the BUworks team and power users across campus are paying off. Help requests have decreased from an initial high of 1,817 tickets in July to 367 in January. People who use the vast new system are clearly adapting, but many still have questions.

So today, at 10 a.m., BU Today will host a live video chat with six BUworks experts, who will answer questions and talk about what lies ahead. Dean of Students Kenneth Elmore (SED’87) will host the conversation.

“It’s safe to say we make progress some days and still have a sense of some frustration,” says Smokowski, who is one of today’s panelists. “That’s the nature of a complex project like this, which takes time and patience.”

Today also marks the launch of the BUworks Community Forum, an online forum where all BUworks users can log in and search for answers. If they don’t find what they need, they can post a question and wait for a colleague’s response. BUworks staff and the Information Services & Technology help desk will scan postings to ensure that questions are correctly answered. Smokowski says the forum was created by the BUworks team in response to user requests for an online environment where they can help each other.

“The forum is intended as a way to help users connect with each other, collaborate, and share knowledge, not as a replacement for the support process, or for submitting a ticket,” says BUworks program sponsor Tracy Schroeder, vice president for information services and technology and one of today’s panelists.

Postings will not go through an approval process, but “if someone writes something that is inappropriate,” Schroeder says, “we will address that and reserve the right to do so.”

Nearly six years has passed since the University began planning BUworks. The first phase went live last summer, moving all budget, payroll, grants, and employee self-service online. The second phase supports reporting on grants, position posting, and improved central procurement services, and should be fully functional in March. The final stage will launch in July and provide improved shopping capabilities and additional central budgeting tools.

The BUworks live chat begins today at 10 a.m. Send questions before or during the event to today@bu.edu.