Title: WorkCenter of My Universe
Author: Chris Lopac, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Blog Series Overview:
The Featured Topics Education Blog Series is sponsored and hosted by the HEUG Campus Community Advisory Group, with the intention to assist and educate the user community about featured topics of interest to the community. To view other articles in the series, please go to the Article Index for the Featured Topics Blog Series.
Article Overview:
Imagine opening a cupboard in your kitchen and behind that one door, is EVERYTHING you need to make dinner for that entire meal! WorkCenters are beautiful. They house all of your “go to” queries. They are your favorites. They are pages you’ve bookmarked in your browsers. They are your one-stop shop.
I’m a strong believer in finding small efficiencies and whenever I talk about efficiencies, I like to talk about when I first started drinking coffee over a decade ago. At the time, I always poured in the coffee, then the cream, then the sugar. I’d then go over to the silverware drawer, get out a long spoon and stir the coffee. After mixing the coffee, I’d turn on the hot water, let the water run to get nice and warm, soap up the wash rag, and wash the spoon.
Every single day I did this before work, until my girlfriend, now wife mentioned to try a new method (business process). She mentioned to pour in the cream first, followed by the sugar, and then the coffee. By doing this the cream and the sugar mixed in with the coffee, as the coffee was being poured in. Therefore, I didn’t need to dirty a spoon or waste hot water and dish soap!
Now, when you look at this on a daily snapshot, the efficiency seems minor, but when you look at the cost and time savings over the course of a decade, the change to my business process for this daily/operational task was well worth it, as I’ve saved time and money, but not wasting hot water and extra soap.
With that being said, making a small change such as moving navigations, queries, links, etc under one page will pay off in the long run! We all have ways of completing our work and processes right now, but WorkCenters help streamline what we do and over the course of time can allow us to tackle larger tasks and projects.
Article:
Imagine…a world when a new employee starts and you don’t have to share a list of all your favorites, all of your queries, or the different external web pages we use. Imagine having the new staff member log in and there it is…a tile to a WorkCenter where the new staff member can dive in to EVERYTHING!
Imagine…having a set location that houses queries that staff should be using to complete the business processes…Imagine when it’s time to troubleshoot, you don’t have numerous versions of a private query that you’re working from, but rather one standard query!
Imagine…not getting lost down some deep navigation or scrolling through your favorites looking for that page you visit, whether it’s once a year or once a week.
With WorkCenters, the possibilities are endless. You can build WorkCenters to meet your business processes, whether it’s daily transactions or processes you run once a year! You can target a particular process and map out the separate pages, processes, and documentation needed or make a generic one-stop shop that covers a majority of your high level processing!
The WorkCenter Blog Series will dive into the configuration pages, as well as discuss possible options for tackling building out WorkCenters.