New business model for USU coming soon
The USU Division of Student Services was selected to test and refine a new business model which will be applied to the entire university within the next few years.
Vice President of Student Services James Morales said the model will consolidate the currently scattered responsibilities of overseeing business services, such as managing human resources or organizing travel. The changes are meant to increase the efficiency of these processes.
“There were approximately twenty-one people across the division across our 17 departments that were doing some sort of business services work,” Morales said. “Not all of them were doing it as 100 percent of their job, but as some percentage of their job … We realized that wasn’t an efficient model, and as we’re rolling out this new model, we have a chance to consolidate things and create a new unit.”
According to Morales, development of the new model began with USU President Stan Albrecht and the Vice President for Business and Finance, Dave Cowley. Morales had been independently considering implementing similar changes in the division of student services.
“So when we realized that the university was heading in the direction that we had already identified was good for our division to head, we jumped right in line and said, ‘We want to be first, we want to be first, take us,’ and so we became the pilot area officially for the university to roll out this model,” Morales said.
He said though some of the responsibilities of the 21 employees are being consolidated, those employees will not be laid off.
“The promise from the president when he rolled out the model and from VP Cowley is that no one would lose their job in this process, and so we as a division have held to that very closely and no one has lost their job,” Morales said.
However, the implementation of the business model was a likely factor in the resignation of two employees affected by the changes.
“You know change is change, and people who have been used to doing something a certain way for many years would look at a new model and say, ‘Well, you know, that’s not what I signed up for, and that’s okay,'” Morales said. “They can make the decision and say, ‘It doesn’t work for me.'”
The finance officer directing the unit created by the new model, Taya Flores, met with the department heads within the Division of Student Services.
“What we noticed when we met with all of the departments is that we’re growing in every way possible in student services,” Flores said. “So by taking the business transaction part out of their departments and making it more unified, it opens up opportunities for them to pursue other goals and to enhance their programs.”
Morales said after the new model is introduced to the Division of Student Services, there will be an undetermined amount of time for the model to be evaluated. Any problems will be corrected before it is implemented to the rest of the university. Although most of the division will not begin to operate under the new model until the first of January, Student Involvement has already begun to implement the changes.
“We have one of the largest departments as far as financially because we have all of our student leaders, all of the Statesman, radio, all of the different accounts in student involvement, and so we are the first to try this within our division,” said Linda Zimmerman, executive director of Student Involvement. “… There’s obviously a transition of people doing different jobs, but in the end, I think it
‘s going to be a very positive thing.”
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