Changing procedures in the College Central Services

Abstract

The lack of a culture of professional management in Portuguese universities justifies a defensive attitude from the administrative system sheltered behind a barrier of bureaucratic rules and flooded by slow and complex processes. The establishment of an integrated information system (SiFEUP) at the Engineering Faculty of the Porto University created a basis for improved communication and a new level of expectations and requirements from the academic community. The two modules presented in this paper try to answer some of them. The first module is a ?trouble ticket? manager. It is intended to become the main interface between the service and everyone requiring its support, with clear advantages in terms of quality of service, information to the user and control. The second module is a workflow engine applied to the process of staff admission, a especially long and complex one. The main concern is to control the legal temporal limits and to improve document availability to the people involved at the several steps. The modules presented adapt to the university environment some concepts and techniques developed and applied in modern companies.