ConnectCarolina is just one of the systems that Mike Barker oversees in his role as Vice Chancellor for Information Technology and Chief Information Officer. He’s also a ConnectCarolina user and recently, we had a chance to sit down with him and we asked him how and when he uses ConnectCarolina.
How Do You Use ConnectCarolina?
“I think the last time I used ConnectCarolina was to look at my paystub—to see if the deduction for the “Recreational Membership” to campus recreational/exercise facilities is still being assessed (it was/is). I seem to go in to ConnectCarolina more frequently than one would expect to access my benefits information (this probably says more about my memory than it does anything else). I’ve tended to go directly to TIM for time entry and, on occasions I need to look at some HR or Finance info, to Infoporte. With that said, I find myself going through ConnectCarolina a bit more to get to TIM and Infoporte these days.
In a sense, then, I think I’m in some ways very much a “typical” user of ConnectCarolina: the business of the university runs, and I dip into the systems basically as any other employee.
Like most of the campus employees, I enjoy the support of talented and dedicated administrative staff. Hence, I experience ConnectCarolina not just via the modest ways I use Employee Self-Service, but via the capabilities ConnectCarolina presents to professional staff campus-wide. The experience of those professional staff who support us becomes a large part of the experience we have of ConnectCarolina. This, I think, is true across the institution.
It isn’t just via the core administrative functions that I “use” ConnectCarolina. Though less obvious, it is due to the data in ConnectCarolina that my ONYEN continues to function, that my OneCard works to get me into a building, or in a datacenter, or that my travel reimbursements appear, and so on. There’s more to it than ConnectCarolina, to be sure, but ConnectCarolina is an essential element of these and so very many other activities we depend on not just on occasion, nor once a month, twice a month, daily, but several times every day.
ConnectCarolina’s breadth, depth, and reach, boggles the mind!”