Who do you work for?
A number of projects have come up recently where we are keenly interested in the work people do on the University campus. This leads us to questions like, how much time is spent doing activity in a certain job code. Then an MDM (Master Data Management) issue reared its head. Our HR system is an Enterprise implementation of Peoplesoft. It sits on its own and does its operational HR type tasks. Our financial system is separate, our student system (and therefore instruction) system is separate (Mastered with our Financial Data), and our Research System is separate. So, when someone does work, if they have more than one "job" what "job" is that work attributable to?
Take, for instance, the case of a hypothetical Graduate Student, who is promised some instructional work to help pay the bills. This person is then hired under a certain job code to teach a class. Well, lets say this student is also a part-time Programmer, and is hired as such, and as part of his Programming duties, also teaches a course to teach a certain programming language to staff and inquisitive students.
Now, this student is hired under 2 job codes. The HR system doesn't track what he does under each job, just that he is an employee with a certain job code for 2 different units on campus. Those individual units know, on paper, what he does for them, and are happy to pay him for that work. When we look in the Student System, we see him teaching two classes, one basic programming class, and another class that was promised to him for being a grad student. There's no way in the student system to determine with what capacity this person is acting to do this teaching work. There's no easy way to say in the HR system which job encompasses this activity either.
Our solution to this is to examine the cases where people are hired under more than one job, and to investigate each individual case as required, and manually move some numbers around. Not the best solution, but it works for us, we only have ~7000 employees.
