At its Dec. 5 meeting, the Professional and Scientific (P&S) Council approved a set of changes to its bylaws. The changes officially take effect July 1, 2025, but were presented this fall so the council's March election accurately reflects the new organizational structure and processes. Key changes will:
- Return three vice president positions (compensation and benefits, communication and community relations, and diversity, equity and inclusion -- DEI), to committee chair status. Several years ago, the council elevated three committee chair positions to VP with the intent of alleviating demands on the council president's time and creating areas of expertise for those vice presidents.
- Merge two committees (DEI, peer advocacy and policy) to form the community relations and advocacy committee. This also centralizes the council's communications function again, rather than delegating it to each committee. The change results in six standing committees instead of seven.
- Simplify the process for filling vacated council seats for the remainder of a fiscal year. Instead of a nomination and vote process at a meeting, the council president will make the appointment, which takes effect as soon as the appointee accepts. The governance committee will continue to maintain a roster of eligible P&S nominees based on the most recent election results.
- Standardize councilors' term length at three years and eliminate one- and two-year terms. The shorter options were intended to build in flexibility so about one-third of council seats were up for election each year.
Councilors approved the appointment of ISU Foundation employee Maggie Schonrock to fill a council vacancy in the president's division until the March election.
They also received an assignment from the DEI committee to complete in time for the council's Feb. 6 meeting: Ask at least three workplace-related, open-ended questions of three new constituents, and spend three minutes summarizing each conversation after it's completed. The intent, said committee chair Susan McNicholl, office of the vice president for research, is to gather feedback across the university's four divisions to help councilors understand better where to focus their efforts.
Technology projects update
In her update to the council, Kristen Constant, vice president for information technology services and project co-lead for Workday Student and Receivables implementation, summarized multiple ongoing projects:
- Workday Student implementation. Two small rollouts remain: Final grade submission and degree completion (this month), and processing fall satisfactory academic progress (for financial aid eligibility) and students' 1098T (tuition statement) form for tax purposes (begins in January).
- Artificial intelligence. Each of five subcommittees working on recommendations for a universitywide generative artificial intelligence (AI) strategy is drafting a report; two of five are complete. An all-campus AI Day is being planned for early February that will include discussion, tool recommendations and usage examples.
- Sign-on dashboard. The Microsoft sign-on dashboard went live in September, and the Okta dashboard it replaced was disabled Dec. 9. The new dashboard is included in Iowa State's Microsoft contract.
- Phone service. When the university's voice services contract with Cisco expires, the plan is to switch to Microsoft Teams Voice. Since July, many IT employees have been using and testing it. Teams Voice can do off-campus calls. Some individuals or functions (for example call centers or county extension offices) still may need a phone, so that assessment will be done. There needs to be a business reason, not simply a personal preference, to keep a desk phone. Various service proposal requests are open through January.
