Academic Units in Workday Student

Academic units will be the primary academic organizational structure in Workday Student. They will be used to represent our colleges, schools, and departments that admit students, offer programs of study, teach courses, and grant academic credit. Academic units will be structured together to manage academic process flows, security access, Workday rule inheritance and reporting. Within the context of the Workday Student system, academic units will reflect the university’s existing organizational structure.

Academic Unit Structure

Within Workday Student, related academic units will be organized together to form the university’s academic unit structure. The academic unit structure:

• determines process/workflow routing for student tasks and transactions, such as tuition payments or course registration;
• drives access to relevant student data; and
• determines which Workday rules – such as academic calendars, grading policies and student payment types – apply to which academic units.

Similar to supervisory organizations in our existing Workday human resources system, academic units can be designated as “superior” or “subordinate” to one another to form tiered relationships. Within the academic unit structure, Workday rules assigned to a superior academic unit are inherited by some or all of the academic units below it in the structure, depending on the rule.

Academic Levels

In the same way many of our academic departments offer undergraduate and graduate studies, many Workday Student academic units will have more than one academic level. Academic units, paired together with academic levels, are comparable to our current structure and our programs of study. LSU, collectively across all institutions, enrolls students at three academic levels: graduate, undergraduate and professional; and the academic levels within an academic unit will reflect the level of studies (i.e., graduate, undergraduate) offered in an academic department.

Academic Units vs. Supervisory Organizations

LSU’s Workday human resources system employs supervisory organizations as a method to reflect the university’s organizational structure. Every employee at LSU falls within a supervisory organization. When Workday Student is fully deployed, academic units will be complementary to our supervisory organizations. Both academic units and supervisory organizations are foundational to Workday and drive workflows, security and other rules. While similar, there are some key differences between the two. The most important difference is that academic units house academic functions, while supervisory organizations group workers into a management hierarchy. Supervisory organizations within the human resources domain of Workday will still reflect personnel reporting structures. Conversely, the academic unit structures may not necessarily reflect how people report to each other but will represent the organization of academic programs.

As the university progresses forward toward the launch of Workday Student, these core organizational concepts are paramount to navigating through our information system, which will bring greater unity while still respecting necessary differences between our student information and personnel information repositories.