Portfolio managers hurtling though space in gigantic silver tubes seeking ever greater returns. Millions of dollars moving instantaneously to fund new investments. New borrowing structures more complex than HAL. Treasury Operations professionals boldly going where no team has gone before! Sound like science fiction? If not, it should, since this is the science fiction issue of New Directions. But in reality, it often seems as if the things that are happening now on “Spaceship Treasury” would have seemed like some futuristic dream just a few years ago.

On the endowment side, the Investment team, led by Keith Ferguson, has been looking overseas lately to find higher returns than have been available in the US. Recently, UW investment staffers have traveled to Russia, Brazil, and Mexico. Their goals are to meet directly to the people who would be investing UW’s money and determine whether their “investment thesis” is sound and something that would be a good fit in UW’s diversified portfolio. Recent investments include Asian real estate and venture capital in India.

The Treasury Operations group has also been keeping busy. Recently, the team set up a securities liquidation database to manage stock gifts that are made to the university. There are also two new team members Alana Askew and John Maltman, who are lending their considerable banking expertise to the group.

On the borrowing side, the “Debt Dudes” (Doug Breckel, Chris Malins, and Wayne Sugai) have been quite active creating an “internal lending program” or ILP. The ILP is the wave of the future in Treasury and will be the way that university borrowers can access funding for capital projects on campus. There is still much work to be done implementing the ILP and many of the details still need to be ironed out. When fully operational, the ILP will assure campus borrowers a stable interest rate, no matter how actual interest rates are behaving. Look for more details on this exciting new program in future issues of New Directions.

Another important event occurred on the spaceship in the last few months: the permanent debt for the UW Tower was issued. As diligent Directions readers may recall, when the UW Tower was purchased in 2006, it was funded with short term debt that had to be paid off within a year. With some help from the State legislature, the permanent debt was issued over the summer at a favorable interest rate and terms.

And so Spaceship Treasury continues its epic journey, with its captains in full command of the control panel. A few more crew members have signed on, but the nimble vessel keeps moving; its sights set on a distant planet called: “Buy Low, Sell High, and Borrow Cheap”.

Did you know the University does not automatically provide insurance for equipment? Since 1996 the Office of Risk Management has offered the Equipment Insurance On-Line Program to provide optional, low-cost property insurance for equipment owned, borrowed or leased by University departments. There are two types of insurance coverage. The domestic policy covers the United States, Canada and Puerto Rico. It also covers laptops worldwide, including while in transit.

The foreign policy covers areas outside the United States and its territories and possessions. Art, computers, lab, office and audio visual equipment can be insured. Coverage includes physical damage to insured items as a result of fire, flood, lightning, earthquake, volcanic eruption, accidental damage, vandalism, theft and damage during theft. Items can be insured while in transit. Some exclusions and restrictions apply. See website for detailed information.

By popular demand, EIS is pleased to announce a recent customer service enhancement. In response to past survey results, on October 10, 2007. Equipment Insurance transitioned to ASTRA for authorizations and budgets. ASTRA (Access to Systems, Tools, Resources and Applications) is an integrated, distributed, auditable authorization management service for use with UW administrative software applications.

This change, a collaboration of the UW ASTRA team, C&C, Equipment Insurance and UW web publishing, enables individual departments to authorize system access and budgets themselves, without waiting for Risk Management to process those requests. Equipment Insurance will continue to explore ways to enhance the system to make it more efficient and responsive to customer needs.

Space, the final frontier. These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise. Her five year mission: to explore strange new worlds. To seek out new life and new civilizations. To boldly go where no man has gone before. (From the Opening of the Star Trek Original Series Opening Monologue)

And there we were, the Student Fiscal Services’ Advisers, boldly going where no financial – man (or woman) had gone before. We were ascending new heights at the APAC (Association of Professional Advisers and Counselors) Advising Summit, reaching that final frontier previously not open to administrative folk such as us. We felt, and we still feel, that Academic Advising cannot exist in a vacuum, whether the vacuum is the cold expanse of space or a university academic community.

The second annual APAC All Advising Summit was held on September 5th, 2007. The goal of the All Advising Summit was to provide a forum for advisers and counselors all over campus to talk about pressing issues and to network with other like-minded souls. This year’s focus was on “Advising and Counseling at its Best”.

We SFS Advisers – Myself, Kyra Worrell, Outreach Lead Adviser; Frannie Gladney, Customer Service Lead Adviser; and Susan White, Rachel Reichert, and Michael Farris, all Customer Service Advisers, along with Diane Cooley, Outreach Assistant Director, all jumped at the chance to show APAC the best practices that SFS Advisers and Outreach have achieved. We wanted to show them how the Program Coordinator positions had recently changed to become Advisers.

These new positions spend time problem-solving with students to help them work out their issues with money. The SFS Outreach unit also reaches out to students, counseling and advising on a large scale through orientations and other group sessions. There was one nagging issue, though: the perception that SFS is only about numbers and money and not about people and students and advising.

Like Captain Kirk, we furrowed our brows, we tensed our muscles, we wondered, if, indeed, now, this, was, something, that, could, be solved (now, dear reader, you need to say that last sentence with appropriate William Shatner pausing and rushing of dialogue). And like the Vulcan Spock, we looked at the problem logically because we knew we could be persuasive with logic and cold facts. And, as Bones would say, “Damn it, Jim, they’ve just got to believe us!”

We (the Advisers and the Outreach unit) set to work. The Advisers were assisted by the newest member of the Outreach unit, Stan Wiegman. Our proposal was accepted, and we provided them not only with a PowerPoint presentation, but also a collection of SFS Advising FAQs. Here were the cold, hard facts to convince them of our sincerity and connection with the student world. We worried that we’d have to go that extra step, and bare-knuckle fight (Captain Kirk style) the Alien life forms we’d come to think these Academics might be – but no! Our proposal was accepted and the Voyage of the Starship SFS Adviser had begun.

It has been a five year mission – and then some – to come to this point for SFS Advisers and the SFS Outreach unit. It began with the merging of two offices (Student Accounts and Student Loans and Receivables) into one (Student Fiscal Services) over five years ago, and continued with the creation of the Outreach group and the remodeling of the SFS Customer Service Unit space. It has ended for now with the acceptance by the larger campus community of SFS as knowledge workers, problem solvers, and advisers to students.

With our inclusion in the Advising Summit as participants and presenters, the journey is complete. Well, maybe that’s not entirely true. Like the Star Trek series and movies, we will continue on this journey -- by the way, did you know that there’s another Star Trek movie on the way? And you thought they were finished! That five year mission is never really going to end!

Say what you will about the future, but if intelligent machines are growing humans in pods for bioelectrical energy and we live in a software-created reality, at least we have the option of fantastic training. Plug yourself in, and you have instant knowledge and abilities with whatever exists in the training database.

Likewise, the “Three Amigos” of MyFinancial.desktop—Dawna Grand, Jerrica Kallio, and JR Sloan—are bringing the best possible MyFD training to Financial Management. While it may not teach you kung fu (in this first iteration, at least), you will become a MyFinancial.desktop master.

Plugging in Through E-Learning

While there is a wealth of training available for the Desktop, the MyFD team felt that more could be done, especially with e-learning. By necessity, in-class time for training must be limited, so how else to provide excellent learning resources? In studying e-learning approaches, they found “screencasts,” which are online screen recordings, provide an effective learn-at-your-own-pace, training-at-anytime service.

“It’s all about anticipating demand and creating more flexible training solutions for campus users,” Dawna Grand says. The Transaction rollout, which will take place during the Spring and Summer of 2008, will bring in several new users to the Desktop. With the ability to do JVs, RSTs, and RTEs online, the demand for training is expected to skyrocket.

Learn Anytime, Anyplace

According to Jerrica Kallio, the planned e-learning screencasts are “essentially an alternative to coming to class.” For people who need a brush-up or prefer to use the screencast in place of in-person training, the online tutorial provides a step-by-step introduction of how to use the Desktop basic features.

“We took the content from the ‘Introduction to MyFinancial.Desktop Reports’ training courses offered through C&C and have put that into an online e-learning presentation using Camtasia,” Jerrica says. Initial feedback has been very positive. “Our user groups are excited about it. Professional & Organizational Development (POD) is also interested in what is going on.”

For the first release, one screencast will be offered, but many more are planned. As for the traditional MyFD training, expect great changes here, too. The MyFD team is redesigning the online help to be more accessible and easy to use.   

So the real question is, when can we get the instant downloads directly to our brains? Well, there are no plans in the near future, but when it does become possible, expect the MyFD team to make it so.

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An intrepid six-member crew from various universities in Korea visited Financial Management in August. Their mission was twofold: 1) deliver a letter from the President of  Kyungpook National University (KNU) to establish a closer relationship with UW, and 2) learn how Financial Management uses the Balanced Score Card to achieve efficient administrative processes.

The delegation was led by Professor Sang Hyun Kim from the School of Business Administration at KNU. He was joined by five of his colleagues from KNU and other top universities in Korea.

KNU is the core University of the Daegu and Kyungpook regions in South Korea. The goal of KNU is “to be one of the world’s top 100 universities by 2010 through a focus on innovation of education, research and service.” 

Charles Bennett, Jeanne Semura, and Jon Bostwick, who has lived in Korea, welcomed the visitors. They described their mission and jumped into questions about Financial Management’s Strategy Map for 2006-2011, the requirements for success, and challenges ahead.

Executive Vice-Provost Anna Marie Cauce then met with them about the letter from KNU’s President. While they were exhausted from their long flight from Korea to Seattle, they enthusiastically greeted Kyra Worrell, “tour guide extraordinaire,” for a walking tour of the campus.

When last seen, they were continuing their journey to Oregon, California and other benchmarking sites.

As you pass through time and space and enter that door to the unknown, one question remains on the threshold of eternity: Whatever happened to ProCarta? OK, so there may be just a few more pressing questions on the threshold of eternity, but at least ProCarta is in the top ten.

PROLOGUE:

“Welcome to your first day of flight training on the Martian shuttle. In addition to your flight gear, you will find a tablet PC. Loaded on this PC is all the documentation you need. ProCarta was used to set up this documentation so you should find it easy to use and informative.

“Let me go over how the documentation is organized. First, you have the bird’s eye view of all the processes. They are as follows: Pre-Flight Checklist, Engine Startup and Launch, Maintaining Flight Plan, Environmental Processes, Landing and Refueling, Dealing with Hostile Alien Life Forms, and Post Flight Checklist.

“Once you have selected a process, you can drill down to the next level of detail, the activities. Notice when we select Maintaining Flight Plan, we see activities listed such as In-Flight Checklist, Preparing For Hyperdrive, Engaging Hyperdrive, Exiting Hyperdrive, and Refueling, among others. Now each of these activities has tasks, which are step-by-step instructions on how to complete the activity. What really makes ProCarta useful though are the attachments.

“Notice this attachment from Commander Fredricks regarding the importance of being thoroughly strapped in your chair during the hyperdrive engagement. We don’t need to go into the details here since I’m sure you are quite familiar with the outcome in his case. All the star charts (so you don’t get lost in space), mathematics, even the menus in the restaurants are included. With the 50 terabyte hard drive, storage has not been a problem. This set of procedures represents approximately 200 years of interstellar experience.”

TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY: ProCarta Today.

ProCarta isn’t on the Earth-to-Mars shuttle (yet!), but it is alive and well in Grant and Contract Accounting. A couple of years ago when GCA was undergoing a major reorganization, it was recognized that there was going to be a learning challenge for the employees. The existing knowledge spread over the entire office had to be examined, documented and new procedures developed. This included incorporating many existing documents such as government regulations, spreadsheets, PDF’s and websites. A tool was badly needed to organize all this. Enter ProCarta.

In addition to the ProCarta software, the company also provided training on how to develop a plan based on Processes, Activities and Tasks. Teams formed to put together information and enter it into the system. Now the system covers the following major processes:

1) New Accounts
2) Interim Budget Management
3) Invoicing
4) Financial Reporting
5) Budget Reconciliation and Closing

As employees leave and new ones arrive, ProCarta plays a major role in new employee training and being able to keep service at a high level. GCA is continuously making process improvements and ProCarta is helpful as a tool to review existing procedures and find opportunities for improvement. As improvements are implemented, the revised procedures are documented in ProCarta. More about ProCarta can be found at www.procarta.com.

EPILOGUE:

“Now that you have completed your training and orientation on the EMS42000 space shuttle, here is your own ProCarta Flight Plan tablet. Oh yeah, and you can ignore the processes on New-Accounts and Budget-related activities, they are relics from an earlier age.”