OFIS Notes from 7 Oct, 2010

Past CS tasks

• Daniel: Research Book work: investigating webpage, prof comments. data cleanup.

Today

• Daniel:
  • 53 faculty down, 29 to go. admin staff person volunteered to chase people down.
  • concern about data that can't be edited: faculty member wrote in his profile: "... is now an Associate Professor. If it still says "Assistant Professor" above, this is because UW's (sorry, Waterloo's) new Online Faculty Information System doesn't trust the faculty to honestly report their rank."
  • Beth: two sorts of errors: transient, and "real". How should we handle transient errors? getting right data at right time, eg: early july for HR yearly update (the above title problem). She has had conv. with Alan George, who will be having conv. with Pam Fluttert on data-integrity. could we get a live HR feed? marlon would prefer a read-only view into HR database. Daniel: but will temporal errors be correct in HR? Beth: no. ... is IAP data better than HR?
  • Marlon: data errors should be emailed to person within the Dep't who has authority to fix?
  • Daniel: what are problems with faculty fixing temporal problems in OFIS? Yes, we have to track multiple versions of data and reconcile them.
  • Marlon: What if the faculty member puts in bad data?
  • Daniel: then we don't trust the faculty to report their rank?
  • Resolved that some data can and should be editable by faculty, even if it's going to be non-authoritative. We can update OFIS records based on faculty supplied data; and report the error upstream; and tell the faculty it will be overwritten on the next HR update, hopefully fixed.
  • Marlon working on various time-sensitive changes; can do new GSO import close to mid-oct Reporting Date. ... Jan course critique on schedule; Beth turned his ideal schedule into:

• Beth: Can we figure out which fields overall get updated vs. fixed? For HR updated, once a year. Promotions happen in July; admin/leaves occur all over calendar. We should get HR data daily/weekly/monthly.
  • Marlon: HR import involves some guesses. Beth: Alan George was surprised that HR data is so difficult to use.
    • as example: Peter Douglas's HR record has him Dean for computing. OFIS fixed via Vu and Harry checking our new active flag.
  • Daniel: other data getting overwritten: webpage data: yes, ofis_import.uwdir for many out of 80 are blank.
    • Why does "webpage" entry have user-entered "your personal webpage URL" connected to that field?
  • we can tell faculty: please update in watIAM - will be overwritten on next update. Vu will do.
  • ray: watiam updates to work with ie8: held up by blocking projects, will happen dec. 15th, so it is said.
  • Vu: on research support (he's gone for December; wants to get this done). question of what to report on webpage / report; displaying 1 year, vs. fiscal year. Resolved, Vu will put changes into dev.

Daniel did not get to reporting:

• • Awards: two people selected "Early Researcher Award (current version of PREAS)" - do we need the "(current version of PREAS)" in the name of the award?
  • Contributions display: "11 pages": Vu has fixed.
  • Employment History: looks OK; in production, but: any edits will add '0000-00-00' still. * I couldn't get the excel .txt import to work: Vu said possibly because it contains quotes?... mac excel defaults for "save as tab-separated text?

Future Tasks

• Daniel: research book stuff, ct'd.; reporting further questions above

-- DanielAllen - 07 Oct 2010