Navision nightmare: Staff, professors not happy with IT system

Humanities professor Johnny Kondrup describes how he spent days trying to get an outlay of DKK 1,095 back.

“I was just following the log-in procedure I received by email,” he writes. “At first I noticed that my user name to ‘RejsUd’ was not the same as the user name that has just been standardised for UCPH’s other systems (the so-called Swedish number plate), but instead the first six digits of my CPR number followed by KU. From now on, I had to remember a new user name. The strange thing is just that the Swedish number plate functions as a user name to the new system’s other module called ‘IndFak’,” he writes in a featured comment on Danish university news site Uniavisen.dk.

The nightmare was just beginning.

UCPH: Should be easier

Professor Kondrup takes the reader through a painful tale of menus that won’t scroll, IT support centre calls, browser changes and new browser uploads, a 23 page long pdf support file, frozen screens, and even a call to the relevant expert in the Danish Ministry of Finance. And then only with the message that he should start all over again.

“We are hired to teach and do research,” says Kondrup, ”and university management assures us regularly that we should do a little bit of both. Administration is here to help, they assure us, so we can concentrate on our core tasks. But it is not a core task for researchers to try and be office assistants. And it cannot be rational to ask us to find our way around systems that are complicated, rigid and dysfunctional,” he says.

See the original comment in Danish here.

The University of Copenhagen has stated earlier that it expects the new Navision system will make it easier to do refunds for travelling outlays and more.

Head of finance: We apologise for any negative experiences

Antonino Castrone is vice director for finance at the University of Copenhagen and is responsible for the system.

“We apologise for the negative experiences that users have had with the new modules on the Navision system. At the same time we are happy with the specific feedback we get, so we can correct errors, improve the system’s functionality, the screen guidance and the written guidelines,” he says.

“With 11,000 new users on ‘RejsUd på KU’ and more than 2,000 users on the payments system IndFak we don’t expect either zero errors or zero negative experiences, but we hope to have as few as possible – and for the individual user it is frustrating in every case where the new system is the cause of the problems,” he says. He adds that when the errors are corrected in RejsUd, and when the users get used to the system, he expects that it will work as a good solution, and an improvement on previous manual outlay solutions.

universitypost@adm.ku.dk

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