Seven Questions to Ask When Evaluating a Faculty Information System
Almost every institution has similar problems when it comes to faculty data, and almost every institution will need a unique solution.
In our experience there is one universal problem: faculty data is fragmented. Everywhere, at every size and every type of institution.
What is not universal is the shape of it. At one university the faculty record lives in a homegrown Access database that someone in the College of Engineering built ten years ago and nobody has touched since. At another it is spread across the HRIS, the learning management system, the research administration system, and a shared drive of PDFs that nobody knows where to find. Everyone has the same fundamental problem, which is that faculty data is everywhere and nowhere. The specific challenges are unique to each campus.
So when there are multiple ways to address a problem, how do you decide what is the right choice for your institution?
Typically, you'll evaluate a faculty information system with a requirements matrix. You'll create a list of required features, send it to a handful of vendors, ask your internal IT team, and then score the responses.
The matrix is good at one thing: confirming that a system has a capability. Every vendor will check the box next to "annual review workflow." But that won't tell you whether the workflow can look how you want it to.
It is worth knowing why so many systems arrive with a fixed shape in the first place. Supporting every institution differently used to be economically impossible, so vendors built one or a handful of templates and asked institutions to map onto them.
Demos have a related limitation. A demo runs on the vendor's sample data, which is clean, consistently structured, and built to flatter the product. Your data is none of those things. A system that handles the demo beautifully can still fail on the first joint appointment split between two colleges, the first assistant professor who stopped her tenure clock for parental leave, or a school of medicine with seven ranks where the rest of campus has four.
Once you know a faculty information system has the capability you need, how do you determine whether it can be configured the way you need it? Here are seven questions to ask your vendors.
Seven questions to ask your faculty information system vendor
Can it hold our rank and track structure as it already is, or do we map ourselves onto yours? Ask for specifics. Clinician educator and physician scientist as separate tracks with separate criteria. Ranked renewable alongside tenure track. Multi-campus structures where a regional campus runs a different process. If the answer involves choosing the closest match from a list, you have your answer.
Whose CV template do we end up with, ours or yours? The CV is where faculty meet the system, and it is the single most common place an institution gets told to change. Ask to see a CV in your exact format, including the sections your disciplines care about that a generic template does not have.
Can two departments run different annual review forms without buying a second module? Most institutions discover after signing that departmental variation costs extra or is not possible. If Computer Science wants two additional components and Nursing wants a different rubric, find out now whether that is configuration, custom development, or a conversation about why you should standardize.
Was each part of this built or acquired, and what connects them? The category has consolidated, and several platforms grew by buying modules rather than building them: a promotion and tenure tool here, an activity reporting tool there, a course evaluation tool somewhere else. Each one worked when it was bought. What is often missing is the layer underneath that would make them one system rather than three systems with a shared login. Ask directly, then ask the follow-up that is more revealing: if we enter a publication in the activity module, where else does it appear without anyone retyping it?
What happens to the years before go-live? Accreditors and review committees ask about completed periods, not current state. Ask whether the system stores appointment history or only current appointments, whether prior reviews come across in a form anyone can read, and what reconstructing a 2022 roster would actually involve.
How does data get in, and how does it stay current? Publications, teaching assignments, and credentials all live in other systems. Ask which integrations exist today, as opposed to on a roadmap, and ask what the refresh looks like. The distance between "we have an API" and "your data stays current without anyone retyping it" is where a lot of implementations quietly fail.
After go-live, who makes a configuration change, how long does it take, and what does it cost? This is the question that separates a system that stays yours from one that freezes on day one. Policies change. Rank structures change. Ask whether your team can make the change, whether it takes a support ticket, and whether it is billable.
The bottom line
The question underneath all seven is the same one: what happens where their template and yours differ, does the system bend, or do you?
That is the thought behind a phrase our CEO, Rusty Cowher, uses when he talks to faculty affairs groups: one size fits none. A platform built around the average institution serves an institution that does not exist.
Whichever direction your evaluation goes, run the demo on your own material: your rank structure, your CV template, your most complex joint appointment, the policy document with the exception in it. The system that handles those is the one to take seriously.
Want to see how Scholarly handles your institution's specifics? Reach out to sales@scholarlysoftware.com to stand up your own sandbox environment or book a demo today.
About Scholarly
Scholarly is a modern faculty information system that centralizes faculty data and streamlines the manual work that buries administrators and faculty, so your team spends less time wrangling documents and spreadsheets and more time supporting faculty.
