The Datafeed provides a curated feed of HR staff data to the school, which the school can then use to support local and essential HR processes. Image Following on from the successful deployment of the HR Datafeed for the School of Informatics, ISG have recently collaborated with HR, and College/School IT teams to launch a live Datafeed for the School of Physics and Astronomy. Tim Colles, the Principal Computing Officer at the School of Informatics, explained why up-to-date access to reports from the HR Datafeed is crucial to daily operations: “We use these reports for estate and space management, room allocation within the school, contact lists, web pages, mailing lists for contacting particular groups or categories of staff. We also have a local duty allocation system so we use it for allocating duties to staff within each session. We also use if for automated account generation within the school. […] All the schools use their staff data for similar kids of things.” Work continues in the background to deliver this HR Datafeed to more schools across the University. Those working on the service are readying queues to deliver service and support accessing the Datafeed to the schools of Biological Sciences, Engineering, Geosciences, and Mathematics. They will also provide a feed to Edinburgh Innovations. The Datafeed provides a curated feed of HR staff data to the school, which the school can then use to support local and essential HR processes. Drawing all golden-copy data directly from the People and Money system, the HR Datafeed provides any changes almost immediately, unlike previous systems which provided a daily feed. For the first time, users will also be able to see information on pending workers. This means that as soon as a pending worker appears with a contract start date (even if this is months or years ahead of the actual start date), it will appear in our data set straight away. This will be useful for onboarding staff more effectively. Phil Spencer, the Director of HR Services recently spoke at a Lunchtime Seminar about how important it is for HR Services maintain “corporate responsibility,” to ensure data is accurate and can be accessed by the right people: “[…] all line managers and employees hav[e] the responsibility to ensure their own data is up to date.” This data feeds will continue to be rolled out across the University for the rest of the year, providing a clear example of how ISG, HR, and school IT teams can work together to build solutions that meet the needs of Schools and business areas. Publication date 05 Sep, 2023
