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China Grove Doobie Brothers

No, it’s not a title to a new musical with lots of singing and dancing. It’s my true story about an amazing adventure I had last November.

I received a call in early October suggesting I accompany a delegation of UW faculty to China. The focus of the visit was to follow-up on a visit to China made by UW President Mark Emmert in June of 2006. Our objective was to visit with the top Chinese universities to explore opportunities for expanding the UW’s presence in that far away country. My particular objective was twofold:

• To convey to Chinese officials that any UW activity would have to be financially self sustaining, and

• To gather information about doing business in China, primarily from a financial perspective. For example, from the perspective of contacts there, were there banking, tax and other financial challenges that would need to be overcome to effectively operate in China.

Leading the delegation was Vice Provost for Global Affairs Susan Jeffords. Also along were Jackson School Director Anand Yang and Professor Madeleine Duong, Nursing Professor Patricia Butterfield and Constance Adams from the Office of Global Affairs. We were met in Shanghai by Hank Wang from the Beijing office of Garvey Schubert and Bayer, who also have their main law office here in Seattle.

We came away from the visit with a better sense of new or increased opportunities for research and education, particularly in the areas of health and medicine, technology, law and environmental sustainability.

My overall impressions of China are that it’s a fascinating country with wonderful people, beautiful culture, scenery and a dynamic history, especially most recently.

We traversed along the coastal region of China and visited with officials from the following Universities:

Shanghai: Fudan University
Shanghai Jiaotong

Impressions of Shanghai: Shanghai is like a juicy stew of old and new cultures with the latter clearly dominating right now. With a population of 16 million (and growing!), the degree of construction is unbelievable with skyscrapers going on for miles and miles. The investment in facilities at Shanghai Jiaotong alone is quite impressive—staggering actually. The development and subsequent economic opportunity has resulted in unbelievable pollution in all the medium to large cities in China. This will likely present significant public health issues in the coming years.

However, about an hour out of town, the countryside takes over to a lulling and calming effect. Thus, our arrival in Nanjing.

Nanjing: Nanjing University
Provincial Ministry of Education
Nanjing Normal University (kind of like our regionals, ala WWU)

Impressions of Nanjing: While Nanjing University is an old and quite prestigious institution, the provincial ministry is aggressively moving forward with plans for a “university city” in which more regional-type institutions would work and partner with institutions from abroad to establish joint campuses. They have heavily courted a partnership with the UW. However, President Emmert has clearly and publicly stated that the time is not right for the UW to establish a campus in China, but rather our next steps will be cautious and measured. Again, the investment in educational infrastructure is quite unbelievable. It was as if we’d arrived in some future galactical destination that would make George Jetson comfortable. I’ve never seen so much concrete in one place in my life!

After a whirlwind visit in Nanjing we headed by plane to Beijing. I was excited and nervous about this destination. I was anticipating some rare free time in which we would see the Great Wall. Our main visit in Beijing was with representatives from Peking University, also called Beijing University, or as the locals refer to it, Bei Da (Bei meaning Beijing and Da meaning place of higher learning, pronounced Bay Dah). Also in attendance were representatives from Microsoft. The focus of the discussion was a potential law/technology education partnership. Bei Da was a truly beautiful campus, with its traditional Chinese architecture, park-like setting and quiet atmosphere. It was there, I learned, that the students that protested at Tiananmen Square had studied. In fact, one of our trip colleagues from the Jackson School was there in 1989 when the massacre happened. It was quite something to walk along the Square with someone who was there at its most infamous moment. No surprise that talk of those events is discouraged in public settings.

The highlights of our visit to Beijing were a quick one-day trip to the Great Wall and to the Forbidden City. Too quick, but nonetheless awe-inspiring. I enjoyed Beijing the most. Perhaps it was because we had a bit more time to explore, perhaps because the visit the to Bei Da was so fascinating. Either way, I would love to return.

Following the visit to Beijing, Constance and I headed off to Hong Kong. Our objective was to obtain “business specific” information that could have implications for our expanding activities in China. We met with representatives from KPMG, Bank of America and a few other folks with particular and helpful insights into doing business in China. I enjoyed Hong Kong very much. It’s experiencing a similar development boom yet there are still remnants of the old colonial culture that came with British rule until 1999.

Overall, our visit was quite an experience. A whirlwind of meetings, travel and meals. We came away with a much better understanding how the UW might expand activities in China, how to go about it, and confirmation that a cautious, yet visible approach will be not only welcomed by our colleagues in China, but yield benefits to our faculty and students for several years to come.

Getting Better The Beatles

When published every January, the UW’s annual report captures a year of activity on campus, from outstanding students to cutting edge research to our favorite subject: financial management. The Balance Sheet, Statement of Revenues, Expenses, and Changes in Net Assets, and Cash Flow Statement provide a complete picture of the University’s financial health. This document is vitally important for regents, bondholders, donors, and citizens of the State. It’s also a very interesting read for anyone who works at or cares about UW. The most recent and archived Annual Reports can be found at:

www.washington.edu/admin/finacct/annual.report.archive.html

Not long after the annual report is published, it’s time to start on work on the next year. It’s an interesting and challenging process, because each year we find new ways to make the process easier, faster, and more accurate. Some of those improvements can seem small and esoteric, and yet taken together, they get us to a better and better product each year.

The process of creating the Annual Report requires gathering and organizing masses of information from the Financial Accounting System, Capital Projects, Treasury, the Budget Office, and Grant and Contract Accounting, just to name a few. In addition to the standard financial statements listed above, the Annual Report includes detailed footnotes along with a high level description of the UW’s fiscal year, something called Management Discussion and Analysis.

Currently, metrics are being developed to measure the effectiveness of the Annual Report planning process. We are creating two measures; 1) the timeliness of issuing the report, broken down by each of the processes to get us there, and 2) the degree of effort – how many person-hours are required for each process. Our first step was to create a flowchart, which includes all of our processes. It is quite detailed with over 50 separate processes! The flowchart shows where and how all of these processes depend on one another, and when each must be completed in order to meet the final deadline of sending the completed annual report to the printer.

Creation of the flowchart and metrics has led to the discovery of better ways of gathering information from academic and administrative departments. One of the improvements are the planning discussions with the investment group in Treasury and the creation of a standard “template” which is in the exact format of a particular schedule in the Investments footnote. That way, we can provide a template for each grouping of investments to Treasury so they can know exactly what information we need to create the final footnote schedule. And we can be more assured of getting the information that is required the first time.

Another major step in this process is consolidating the financial statements of certain related entities with UW’s, in compliance with governmental accounting standards. There are now 10 related entities including the UW Physicians Network and the Alumni Association. So, we also created standard “templates” to send to each of these entities to gather all the information we need – not only their financial statements, but additional data that we need to include in our annual report footnote. This made the process more orderly, improved communications with the related entities, and made the data much easier to assemble.

So now it is time to start again, and we are already looking at more ways to streamline our process and make it more efficient for this next time. Who knows what wonders of improvements will evolve? Stay tuned!

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The Lion Sleeps Tonight Written by Solomon Linda

I-TECH (International Training and Education Center on HIV) is a major program at UW. Over the last few years, UW has received over $100 million in awards from the federal government to train doctors and nurses on AIDS prevention and treatment in various countries throughout the world.

I was lucky enough to have had the opportunity to visit two of those operations­, headquartered in Ethiopia and Namibia. I was traveling with Bill Nicholson, an Assistant Attorney General with the University. Our mission was to learn more about our foreign operations and what lessons we could apply in future foreign operations as the UW continues to expand its international reach.

In the middle of October, I flew to Addis Abbaba, the capital city of Ethiopia. At sixteen hours, this was the longest flight I have ever experienced.

In Ethiopia, I-TECH contracts with over 100 people throughout the country. I spent one week at the central headquarters, which is a five story building occupied almost solely by I-TECH. The first floor is occupied by the local telephone company, which made for an interesting sight every morning. In Ethiopia, people pay their bills in person, in cash. As a result, people were lined up outside the phone company’s door every morning, cash in hand. Order was kept by a 70 year old machine gun toting security guard.

The I-TECH headquarters in Namibia consisted of a small compound of 3 small houses. The Namibia operations are slightly smaller than Ethiopia at around 60 contractors.

Windhoek, Namibia had a much different feel than Addis. It is a much smaller city and was also newer. On the surface, it could have been a city in Arizona. However, once we traveled outside of the downtown, we quickly entered a shanty-town area where thousands of people were living in tin shacks. It was quite a contrast from the downtown.

I learned a great deal about the operations in both locations. I was really surprised to learn how many staff members are employed in each country. As mentioned earlier, Ethiopia has over 100 staff while Namibia has grown to over 60. These individuals are spread throughout the respective countries to train the doctors and nurses in the urban and rural areas. Each country office was at a different stage in terms of developing their financial infrastructure. Ethiopia was the most established office and had a fairly large accounting/finance team in place (5) and an accounting system up and running. Namibia was rapidly catching up. In Namibia, we got to visit a local hospital to see some of the great work that the I-TECH program was providing. The staff was incredibly welcoming and professional. It was interesting to see in person the balance between effectively operating in the local environment and being cognizant of UW’s rules and regulations. It’s often a difficult balance and can be quite challenging.

Bill and I visited many local attorneys and other Non-Government Organizations (NGO’s) to learn about the experiences of other groups that have done similar work before us. For instance, we learned about other organizations’ experiences in establishing legal identity, audit experiences, etc. Each country has different laws and regulations, so it is critical to have legal representation in each country. Although accounting and internal controls are needed no matter where an operation is located, the actual reporting and tax requirements can vary, so that is another area where local expertise (CPA’s, etc.) are useful.

We are working to apply the knowledge gained from this trip to future global operations in the following ways:

• Recognition status in the various countries is a critical component in setting up operations
• Local legal, A/R, and H/R advice is also critical given how much variation there is among countries
• Cash flow is a critical issue in operations and we need to continue to improve our methods of sending cash globally
• Accessing UW financial data remotely would help local operations in tracking and maintaining their budgets.

This adventure was by far the most exciting work-related trip I’ve ever been on. I’m constantly amazed at the great work that the University does locally and the international work is equally inspiring. Seeing this operation in person has reinforced my belief that we’re really adding value to extremely critical operations of the University.

What a Wonderful World Bob Thiele and George David Weiss

The UW is home to broad global research and education activities, which have grown dramatically in scope, volume and complexity over the past few years. Like many universities, the UW struggles with the multiple demands involved in global work, including financial, logistics and legal and compliance issues. To get a new global project off the ground, faculty and staff often find themselves in unknown territory; either they do not know about previous experiences elsewhere in the university, or appropriate resources just do not exist. How do you set up a field office anyway?

To address these challenges, the Department of Financial Management and the Office of the Provost launched a cross-University effort called the Global Support Project in May 2006. The Project seeks to optimize administrative processes to support global activities in a way that balances the needs of researchers, students, administrators and foreign research and business partners, while minimizing institutional risk. Global health programs make up a large portion of the University’s overseas activities and thus they are an important focus. To our knowledge, the UW is the first U.S. university to develop an institutional framework for supporting global activities.

The Global Support Project modeled itself on previously successful cross-University projects; its membership consists of representatives from across the tri-campus community. To date, we’ve consulted with a variety of faculty and staff on their global activities and needs through one-on-one meetings and a series of five focus groups.

We’ve learned that the following areas are among the most challenging for global work: getting and accounting for cash overseas; navigating the human subjects review process with multiple institutions; negotiating and issuing foreign subcontracts quickly; finding appropriate legal information about doing business in a country; hosting foreign visitors; and knowing who else at the UW might have insights to offer about similar projects, or in similar settings.

Over the next few months, we’ll be working with relevant units to develop strategies to streamline and connect these areas. We want to get to a point where even complex global activities (like registering in another country) draw on processes and procedures that are well developed and easy to find. That way, as the UW pursues its strategic agenda of expanding global activities such as global health and study abroad, the administrative and logistical procedures that support this work will keep up. We’ll also turn our attention to educational activities and consult with students and relevant faculty and staff. We hope that the institution-wide approach will lend consistency and enhanced problem-solving abilities to processes that were previously handled in a fragmented manner across departments and projects. The Project’s emphasis on flexibility will allow the University community to continue to adapt to new research, education, and compliance needs.

Stay tuned for more exciting developments throughout the course of the year.

Holding Out for a Hero Bonnie Tyler

The University of Washington is a very large place. Mind-bogglingly so. If you are new to the University, one of your first quests will be to find the institutional knowledge superheroes, the folks who have gathered bits and pieces of information from here and there to create a knowledge repository in their heads. Most of the time, they have the answers to your questions or know where to go to get them for you.

However, at some point you are going to encounter a question so complex, even your superhero can't answer it. Such a question may cross multiple departments and share processes, and one superhero will not be enough. Or, because of the complexity, you may not even know what your question is. You need a logical place to start, a place that can help you define your questions and where you can be accompanied on your quest. You need SPoC.
For those otherworldly and "fascinating" financial questions, Financial Management has a new initiative: the Single Point of Contact, otherwise known as "SPoC." While not the one and only place to answer every question about life and the universe, SPoC will be that starting point to assist you and all UW employees to make sure that you get the right answer to complex financial questions.

What is SPoC?

First off, a caveat. The SPoC initiative, lead by Jeff Folman and Charles Bennett, is still in the early stages of being defined. The current goal is to create a one-stop shop to triage those hard to answer financial questions, but that may change as the initiative develops.

Okay, with that caveat out of the way, we know that we have a problem. Virtually all recent feedback from our customers indicates a desire for a single point of contact when they have complex questions to be answered or issues needing discussion. They only want to ask once; they do not want to be passed on again and again.
Within Financial Management, many departments have their own customer service centers, with varying standards for when a question is answered and how it is tracked. SPoC is envisioned as working with these customer service centers to make our customer service more consistent, uniform, and integrated, ensuring that wherever you go to get an answer, your question will be answered and answered correctly.

Boldly Going Forward

Over the next few months, several departments within Financial Management will work on the SPoC team to figure out what kind of service we can provide. What kind of questions will SPoC help to answer?

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Down in Africa Toto

Africa. It’s huge. In size, in population, in our collective imaginations. It is in a constant state of change; it is timeless. For many of us, it seems so far out of reach as to be a dream world, unobtainable, unreal, and mysterious. Not too long ago, I remember thinking that I would probably never step on African soil in my lifetime. I didn’t know how wrong I would end up being.

And I don’t think I realized how wrong my perceptions of Africa as unobtainable, unreal and mysterious really were. What was once far away is now coming closer and closer to North America, to the United States, to the University of Washington. What was once mysterious and perhaps unreachable is now part of a one world, Global initiative and is more accessible than ever before.

My journey began after I found out I had won an Adviser’s Pangaea Award in June of 2006. Applying for the award involved writing a one to two page essay describing how joining an Exploration Seminar relates to my advising functions and to my department as a whole; my top three choice destinations and a letter of nomination from my director. Originally, the Award was only open to Academic Advisers; however, Ruth Johnston sent an email to David Fenner, the Vice Provost who was heading up the Pangaea Award search committee, questioning this distinction, noting that Student Fiscal Services’ Financial Advisers can also have strong interest and influence on the lives of students and should be included in the pool of applicants. He agreed, and the rest is history! I learned I was to participate for ten days in the Mombasa, Kenya Exploration Seminar under the direction of Professor Seyed Maulana. The Award was to include economy-class airfare, 10 days of accommodation, and course-related excursions. The Exploration Seminars take place during the Early Fall Start of late August and early September.

I had only been off of the North American continent once before this – when I was 18, touring Great Britain and France with my family. I flew from Seattle to Amsterdam, and then Amsterdam down to Nairobi and finally transferred to the costal port of Mombasa. It was warm and humid as I stepped off the plane in Mombasa. My host, UW Professor Seyed Maulana and his friendly, white-bearded Brother-in-law, met me at the gate. They both wore the intricately embroidered hats favored by observant Muslim men in Kenya. Professor Maulana’s Brother-in-law wore the long white robe also commonly worn by Muslim men in the region. Though three fourths of the population of Kenya identify themselves as Christian, the majority of the people of the coast identify themselves as Muslim. So here I was, American Kyra Worrell from SFS in Seattle, Washington, not only stepping foot on the dusty ground of the African continent, but also meeting with people of a faith often misunderstood and sometimes seen as odds with US policies and culture.

The sun was setting as we stepped out into the airport parking lot. It was then that I began to see some of the dichotomy that is Kenya. We exchanged pleasantries as we walked (English is the official language of Kenya, harkening back to the decades that Kenya was a British colony; my hosts were excellent English speakers); our pleasantries were abruptly halted when our paths crossed a young soldier loitering next to a car, casually swinging an AK-47 rifle with one hand. The parking lot was modern and paved; shortly after we exited the airport, we were traveling over dusty, bumpy, barely drivable dirt roads.

The next two weeks passed in an incredible blur as I learned and listened and observed and absorbed the rich culture of the Coast of Kenya. The Study Abroad program I had joined of the ‘cultural immersion’ school. I was to live with a local family, just like the students I was joining. I lived for ten days with a widow who ran a clothing shop out of her home. It was a house of women: Sharifa, the widow, who was my host mother; her daughter, an accountant who had recently graduated from Oxford, and who left shortly after my arrival to work in Dubai, United Arab Emirates; her niece, Fatima, who had come to live with her to fill the empty nest now that both of Sharifa’s daughters were out of the house; and a middle-aged cousin of Sharifa’s who was divorced. Most of the events I attended were sex-segregated, but I found that was welcomed into this community of women. I learned that many of my assumptions (and prejudices, really) about Muslim women in general were unfounded: the women I met were strong, educated, opinionated and firmly devoted to their religion. I met articulate and educated women studying all sorts of disciplines, including religion – and a surprising number of Accountants! Some of the women seemed to more options than I had previously realized: the Widow I lived with had turned down several offers of marriage and preferred to remain single, supporting herself with her shop.

The Exploration Seminar group met daily: the students, myself, the Professor and his sister Amira, who was the former Director of the Fort Jesus museum. We listened to guest lecturers speaking on topics ranging from the origins of the Swahili language to the modern problems with drugs and AIDS. We took several day trips – visiting the ruins of 10th century coastal cities and heading up the Coast to the less developed town of Malindi. We visited the interior of Kenya for a Safari and ended up seeing the current president of Kenya as he came through to meet with local dignitaries. We visited a school where youths are being taught lost arts and we saw a modern hospital; we also saw the effects of government corruption in Kenya – the lack of running water, unfinished roads and uncollected garbage. When I first arrived at my home in Mombasa, I was told that there was no running water; I naively asked why they just didn’t call the water company and have the water turned back on. My host mother looked at me rather strangely and did not reply right away. There were also incredibly beautiful moments: I attended a prayer service honoring yet another one of my host mother’s female relatives going away to work in Dubai (I believe she was a Pharmacist), and was anointed with oil while I listened to the room fill with the voices of women chanting verses from the Quran, washing over me like the warm waves of the Indian Ocean. I saw lions hunting water buffalo just inches from our jeeps -- in the dim light of the sunset in the background of the African Savannah, their pink tongues hanging between their teeth. I watched Masai tribesmen dance for tourists while earning money to build their schools and educate their children; we learned that this tribe brings in outsiders to teach their children because the tribal elders do not have formal educations. They tell us they are slowly building up the next generation. And I learned that not all places are like the US; but soon our campus will be more than the US.

After just a few days in Africa, the students began to come to me with their questions and concerns: financial and billing questions, primarily, but they also saw me as a representative of the University of Washington during their study abroad experience. After my return, I helped facilitate a meeting between SFS, the Office of Student Financial Aid, Comparative History of Ideas (a department that coordinates the Exploration Seminars), The Office of Global Affairs and the Deans Office of the College of Arts and Sciences. This meeting led to the creation of a special scholarship for Exploration Seminar participants. I believe that my foray into the global university heralds an exciting time for SFS specifically, but also Financial Management as a whole. We are now truly becoming integrated into the University culture and into the University’s global vision as a whole.

Please join me with the FM Diversity Team when I talk more about my experiences and narrate a slideshow of my trip on April 25th from 12pm 1pm in the Ethnic Cultural Centers Black room.