New Business and Administration forms make work life easier

During the last year, the LITS Business and Administration team has looked for ways to reduce the amount of time and effort it takes for you, our internal customers, to get some of your frequently requested tasks accomplished. This month’s newsletter update focuses on some of the improvements we’ve made on the financial side of the house.

Thanks to the hard work of the IT Service Management department and the ServiceNow developers, LITS B&A has three forms in the request catalog that are “dead simple” to use. All three forms are in the “Request Catalog” in the ServiceNow system at http://help.emory.edu. These forms are only intended for use by staff in Library & IT Services and aren’t intended for campus-wide use.

LITS: Travel & Expense Report

Is completing your federal tax return easier than a one-item expense report? Have you burned your corporate card? Do you think you win the prize for the most number of rejected expense reports? If so, this form is for you. It’s brand new, so you may see some slight changes as we continue to refine and improve the form, but it’s ready for you today.

The goal of the form is to keep you out of Compass. The form asks you the fewest number of questions we could think of, and if you answer the questions accurately and attach one combined PDF file of all required receipts, we will take care of the rest for you! You still need to know your SmartKey, but the time to complete our LITS expense report form should be less than five minutes. For many of you, it might be less than one. If you still prefer Compass, you may enter your expense report there, but why would you? You are welcome to give this new form a try whenever you’re ready.

LITS: Invoice or Quote Processing Request

Have you found yourself with an invoice from a vendor, but you weren’t sure how to get it paid? Do you sometimes have a quote from a vendor, but you don’t know how to get a purchase order cut? Head over to this form to solve those mysteries. As with the travel and expense form, this form asks only the minimum number of questions needed to get your invoice paid or your quote processed.

You are not required to use this form. In certain departments in LITS, we have existing business processes where there is little transactional friction. In other areas, we aren’t as efficient with processing these types of items. If you have a method that works for you, don’t feel the need to change (unless you want to give this a try). But if you are frustrated or confused by the current methods in your department, I hope you find this form to be a welcome relief and nearly effortless. We (quietly) launched it more than a year ago, and hundreds of requests have now been fulfilled with it.

LITS: Project Smartkey

The third new form is one for people who need a new Smartkey to track a particular project (or other specific initiative). Only a few of you in LITS request new Smartkeys but for those of you who do, you now have a single, unified place to get your request routed and handled.

My team and I are excited about these new forms, and we look forward to hearing about an improved experience from our colleagues and customers. I welcome feedback on the forms and how my team and I can serve you better. Please feel free to let me know how we can better serve you at jconner [at] emory [dot] edu.