Frequently Asked Questions

After reviewing numerous external options for a centralized Faculty Information System (FIS), including vendors and other peer systems, we found no vendor had a complete solution; most universities build their own.

After reviewing current systems on campus, the system at the School of Medicine offered many existing benefits, including:

• Addresses the complexities of the School of Medicine organization
• Has functionality missing from many of the external solutions, including contract and salary distribution
• Is built on common and new technology
• Includes activity reporting functionality

Case Western Reserve University has no centralized system of record for its nearly 5,000 active full- and part-time faculty despite its status as a Research-1 institution according to the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education. The Faculty Information System (FIS) portal becomes the central repository for faculty information (including information about non-CWRU-paid affiliate faculty), and establishes a hub for reporting and Faculty Affairs processes.

The Faculty Lifecycle Initiative (FLI) Team researched and reviewed many potential faculty information solutions, and held numerous solution demonstrations of possible faculty activity reporting systems. Surveys were administered to attendees of all demonstrations, and respondents provided an overall rating and feedback related to the benefits of each solution.

In 2021, a Steering Committee was created for the FIS that includes faculty representatives from each school as well as Faculty Affairs administrators. The Steering Committee will help guide development priorities moving forward.

The phase-in implementation began in the fall of 2018 with the Administrative portion of FIS. This included basic search, view and reporting capabilities. Additional capabilities for annual appointment forms and letters were added in 2019.

In 2020, the Salary Recommendations reporting and data integration with external and campus-wide data sources began. These integrations were critical in pre-populating the My Information portion of FIS, where faculty members record their professional efforts throughout the academic year into a profile for Faculty Activity Reporting. 

In 2021 and beyond, more data will be sourced and integrated into FIS, including course evaluations and grant information as the development team continues to tap into the DataLake. Ad Hoc Queries will help administrators create individualized reports specifically for their needs. ID Creation and Credential Verification are also in the product roadmap.

Initial access to FIS was for administrative staff involved in processing and maintaining faculty information, or internal/external reporting on faculty so that data could be pre-populated and verified before releasing to the wider CWRU community.

Access to the FIS is by request, and the level of access is determined by the individual’s role at the institution.

Administrative staff examples include:

• Provost Office 

• Deans

• Department Chair

• Faculty Affairs Officers

• Business Officers

• Financial Officers

• Institutional Research

Additionally, staff identified by deans, chairs, and directors that provide support for their unit (e.g., Data or Research Manager roles) can also be granted access.

The faculty portion will be released in late Fall 2021 and will enable members to import and record their professional and academic efforts (publications, grants, classes, professional development, etc.) and allow all information to be exported into a faculty annual report. 

The following faculty records are available in FIS:

Active Faculty

• Trustee-appointed Faculty (Instructor-level, Assistant, Associate, and Full Professor)

• Tenured and Tenure-Track Faculty

• Non-Tenure Track Faculty

• Special Faculty (e.g., adjunct, clinical, visiting, research faculty, and lecturers)

Inactive Faculty

• Some faculty originally in the Provost Faculty Database who are no longer active faculty show as ‘Inactive’ in the FIS.

• Inactive faculty do not appear in counts of a primary group, or on reports for that unit.

Emeriti Faculty

• Records previously available only to the Emeriti Office are now available in the FIS for Faculty Affairs administrators.

• Status for a retired faculty member, still active within CWRU, appointed to emeritus status by the Board of Trustees. Qualifications for emeritus appointment: upon retirement, usually January 1 or July 1, meritorious service to the university of 10 years or more and minimum age of 60.

Existing data from the Provost’s Office faculty database and the School of Medicine’s Faculty Information System has been migrated into the new Faculty Information System to populate the system with current and historical information on Board-appointed faculty. Legacy data on special faculty (e.g., lecturers, adjunct, visiting, and research faculty), has been handled on a school-by-school basis.

A series of How-To documents are available on the FIS webpage and will be updated as features are released. Currently, there are How-To documents available for the Administrative portion of FIS. Once the construction of the Faculty portion is completed, initial training and How-To documents will be created and available. The FIS team is also available for training upon request.

The initial data that populated the administrative portion of the FIS came from existing school databases and Quickbase, the Provost’s Office database. 

Administrators are also manually populating FIS using information available on appointment forms for new faculty. Existing campus databases such as the Student Information System, HCM, and the Data Lake are being used as well. 

For faculty profiles, data can be imported from third-party resources such as PubMed, Academic Analytics, and Scopus. Faculty members also have the ability to link their ORCID accounts to their profiles.

The FIS includes details related to your faculty appointment, such as rank and tenure status, as well as information about your scholarly activity. The FIS includes your salary but not other information that would be found in the university's PeopleSoft HCM system, such as Social Security number and benefits. Personal information in the FIS is limited and includes date of birth (used to prevent duplicate records), demographic data, degrees, and contact information.

As noted above, the FIS is accessible only through a secure single sign-on portal that requires your CWRU credentials and DUO two-factor authentication. If you are connecting to the FIS from off campus, you must first log in to the university’s VPN.

Access to the FIS is restricted to CWRU faculty and administrative staff who are involved in business processes involving faculty information. Faculty will have access only to their own data. Department chairs and division chiefs will have access to activity data for their departments or divisions, and deans will have access to data for their school or college.

^{A faculty search dashboard was created using FIS data for those who do not have access to the more confidential data in the FIS. The faculty search dashboard includes information related to faculty rank, department, administrative role, endowed professorship, work address/phone, and degree. All faculty and staff have access to this dashboard using their CWRU credentials to login and can view it here. Students do not have access.}