An online marketplace for employees and supervisors to bid on short-term, temporary projects has ambitions to become an eBay for employment at the university.
According to John Unsworth, the director of the Illinois Informatics Institute, the Job-Share System was created by I3 to demonstrate how online business-to-business auction systems could be adapted for use in a university setting.
“There’s a fair amount of helping each other out that goes on across campus, especially in the information technology community,” he said. “The idea was if there was a more formalized system, we might be able to collaborate more in order to optimize the human resources we have on campus.”
With the Job-Share System, university employees can post projects or tasks that require extra time, personnel or expertise to complete.
For example, if a unit or department is setting up a new Web site but no one on staff knows Drupal, “you could use the Job-Share System to see if anyone on campus could help you with that short-term project,” Unsworth said.
Unsworth noted that employees may bid on a project as representatives of units, or as individuals, provided they have the advance consent of their supervisor for service in excess of 100 percent.
“If you post a job, you should be certain that you have the authority or permission to transfer funds to pay a successful bidder,” he said. “If you bid on a job, you should be certain that you have the authority or permission to reassign the staff time necessary to carry out a successful bid.”
Unsworth cautioned that the Job-Share System is only for posting and bidding: financial transactions pursuant to a successful bid would be completed in Banner, which is not connected to the system.
In the system, bidders can’t see each other’s bid, and posters are not automatically obligated to accept the lowest bid – or any bid at all, Unsworth said.
“It’s not a completely blind auction,” he said. “The highest bidder doesn’t automatically win, like on eBay, so price isn’t the only determining factor. The person posting the job can take various factors into account, such as experience or relationships the candidate might have with colleagues or other units or departments across campus.”
Bids and posts can be edited or withdrawn, in which case an e-mail notification is automatically sent to the bidders or posters.
While the system is not intended as a workaround for long-term staffing issues, it is meant to be a “creative way to cope with the slowdown in hiring, and the need to keep people employed at a time when the university is facing uncertain budgetary future,” Unsworth said.
Since the authentication is done through Administrative Information Technology Services (AITS) of the Urbana campus, the Job-Share System could potentially be scaled out for use on all three university campuses.
“I would be happy to work with anyone who’s interested in trying it but is unsure of how to go about it the first time,” Unsworth said.
Unsworth, who also is the dean of the Graduate School of Library and Information Science, said I3 periodically underwrites projects that are intended to make the university a more effective information organization, whether it’s in an academic, business or social capacity.
“The Informatics Institute is interested in finding news ways that information technology can make the university itself a more effective and efficient organization.”
