University of North Texas regents unanimously approved a UNT system-led human resources and information technology department, after several changes were made to the original proposal.

The UNT system would head up a council to restructure the two departments.

It oversees the UNT Denton and Dallas campuses and the UNT Health Science Center in Fort Worth, along with the upcoming UNT law school.

After a lengthy discussion about some of the potential pitfalls of the plan, regents changed it to include campus presidents on the decision-making council and implementing the new, and likely reduced, budget earlier.

The UNT system also plans to hire a chief information officer to oversee the process. 

The council, with system and campus representatives, including the new law school, will present Chancellor Lee Jackson with a plan to restructure and cut costs in the two departments by next October, according to the document presented to the Board of Regents.

Jackson said there are no plans to eliminate jobs. However, he said, that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t happen in the future.

“The decision-making process will now have an equal vote and it won’t be buried in campus silos,” Jackson said. “Everyone generally agrees it’s a good thing.”

By hiring a UNT system chief information officer, the restructuring process should be fair and represent all campuses, he said.

The restructuring wouldn’t necessarily mean a change in employees’ job locations and there are no plans to move the human resources and information technology personnel, Jackson said.

“What I’ve been through in the last two weeks, I’m not looking to change locations of anyone,” he said. “There’s certainly no space capacity in Dallas.”

However, the board could deem a location change if needed in the future, Jackson said, but it was unlikely.

“Assets most likely will remain where they are,” he said.

UNT President Gretchen Bataille said she was satisfied with the board’s decision on Friday.

Regent Steve Mitchell said it was important to have the key stakeholders, especially the campus presidents and chancellor, involved in the process.

“No one knows the campuses as well as they do,” Mitchell said. “It’s important to have all the stakeholders at the table. It’s a win-win for everyone.”

Regent Brint Ryan said the board’s action didn’t go far enough, but it was a strong first step to harvesting value from costly departments.

“I knew from the beginning this [the restructuring of business departments] was an issue, but I was surprised there wasn’t more progress made to address it,” Ryan said. “We’ll be able to save significant dollars on a high-level service.”

There were some faculty and staff members at Friday’s meeting who were concerned about the restructuring, and that worry trickled throughout the campus.

Maurice Leatherbury, the acting vice president for information technology and chief information officer, said it’s hard to tell how the board’s action will affect his 200 full-time and 70 part-time staff members.

“We operate efficiently, given the research goals of the campus,” Leatherbury said. “We recently had a grand opening of the high-performance computing research cluster and that’s an important thing to support on campus.”

There are also laboratories and specific research projects in the works in which access to critical information technology is needed, he said.

Researcher Jincheng Du said his materials research projects at UNT’s Discovery Park rely heavily on computers and timely support.

“It would be wise for the infrastructure to keep up with the computational requirements of the faculty,” Du said.

While Du said he couldn’t speculate if changes to the technology support staff would impact research grants at UNT, a slow reaction time to computer problems could hurt both student and faculty projects, he said.

“This is definitely important to us [faculty],” he said.

CANDACE CARLISLE can be reached at 940-566-6889. Her e-mail address is ccarlisle@dentonrc.com.