General Interest

Berkeley CAL PACT team wins CAUSE Best Practices Award

Berkeley's CAL PACT (Cal People and Computer Training) team was recently honored in the 1997 CAUSE Awards Program for Best Practices in Higher Education Information Resources, Professional Development category, for its efforts to bring the University community up to new baseline computing training requirements. The presentation was made on December 4 at a general session of the association's annual conference in Lake Buena Vista, Florida, before nearly 3,000 CAUSE97 conferees. Accepting the award for the large team involved in the project were CAL PACT co-chairs Marissa Peck Comins of Human Resources--Employee Development & Training, and Laura Kim, Information Systems and Technology--Workstation & Microcomputer Facilities.

The CAL PACT project grew out of the University's effort to replace legacy financial and human resources systems with client/server applications. See the CAL PACT website and the article CAL PACT offers free computing classes for staff employees elsewhere in this issue. Staff recognized that the campus community would need training in basic desktop tools such as spreadsheets, word processing, and email, and so Human Resources and IST formed a partnership to define baseline computing training requirements and objectives for the campus. The CAUSE selection committee was particularly impressed with the extensive and effective collaboration among units, the integration of a variety of approaches to the project, and the use of students as a training resource.

The other winner in this year's CAUSE Best Practices awards program, in the Applications category, was a team from UC Irvine, honored for its well-designed project to streamline a labor-intensive parking permit application process, BYPASS: Using Interactive Voice Response Technology in Parking Permit Sales.

The CAUSE Awards Program for Best Practices in Higher Education Information Resources was established to recognize individuals and teams in higher education for significant achievements in areas related to information resource management. Descriptions of the winning projects are on the CAUSE 1997 Winners web page (http://www.cause.org/pd/awards/bp/97/97bp.html).

This is the second consecutive year in which a UC Berkeley team has won a CAUSE Best Practices award. See BIK team gets international recognition from CAUSE in the Winter 1997 issue of BC&C.

CAUSE, the association for managing and using information resources in higher education, has a membership of more than 1,400 campuses and 3,900 individual representatives. Headquartered in Boulder, Colorado, the association's mission is to be an indispensable partner in enabling the transformational changes occurring in higher education through the effective management and use of information resources--technology, services, and information. It places a high emphasis on helping individual member representatives develop as professionals in information technology management.