Creg Empey, an enterprise developer at the University of Idaho, has kicked off 2019 in a positive way by winning January’s Staff of the Month award at UI.
Born in Pocatello, Idaho and raised in Tri-Cities, Washington, Empey, 39, came to Moscow in 2006 and has spent the last thirteen years in Moscow as a student, and employee of the university.
Empey graduated from UI with a Bachelor of Science in mathematics in December 2009.
“It’s a good school,” Empey said. “It’s not my first college — I did spend some time at BYU-Idaho before coming here — and obviously there are some cultural differences between here and there with it being a religious school.”
Empey said his job as an enterprise developer entails him working a lot with Banner 9, and other core internal systems of the university.
“What I do is I work mostly with Banner 9, which is the university’s enterprise resource planning software,” Empey said. “I work a lot with (human resources) and payroll, those kinds of things — just a background layer to help keep the university running smoothly.”
Empey said it was his recent work with Banner 9 — a system that has been subject to modification and upgrade — that allowed him to win the Staff of the Month award.
“We recently upgraded Banner to a new major version, and that was a large project coordinated across many departs at the university,” Empey said. “After the upgrade, the Office of Sponsored Programs realized they were missing some critical functionality.”
With his department undergoing “philosophical changes” on how software that works with Banner is created, and coinciding with future plans to move Banner to a cloud server, Empey said his department can no longer modify the source code of Banner.
“Where we have had the source code, and have been modifying the internals of Banner for 20 to 25 years,” Empey said “We now have to get all of our modifications out because we won’t be able to modify the internals.”
However, one of those modifications that was pulled from Banner was the Office of Sponsored Program’s ability to print invoices for university grants.
“One of our modifications was to print invoices for grants so that the Office of Sponsored Programs can send a bill to the funding agencies that fund our research — that was the functionality that was then missing,” Empey said.
Heather Nelson, the associate director of the Office of Sponsored Programs said losing the ability to print invoices was a critical problem that had to be fixed.
“The way a grant works is not somebody saying ‘we’re giving you $100,000’ and then they just hand us the money like a gift,” Nelson said. “It’s more like we get up to $100,00 dollars and we bill them regularly for that. So, we have to have that invoicing process.”
Nelson said despite a little bit of tension between their respective departments, Empey was able to find a fast and efficient solution to the missing functionality.
“Knowing that someone was there actively working toward getting us up and running again and how quickly he was doing it made a huge difference about how I felt about the whole thing. I was extremely frustrated before then,” Nelson said. “He’s a sharp guy, and he knows what he’s doing.”
Nelson said she felt compelled to give Empey a “kudos” for his work, ultimately allowing him to win Staff of the Month.
“We’re all expected to do our jobs, right?” Nelson said. “But sometimes you just really appreciate how somebody does their job. He’s respectful, and professional, and we should all be appreciative of that.”
For now, Empey said he is content where he is at in life, and enjoys the challenges his job brings him on a regular basis.
“Right now, I’m enjoying where I’m at,” Empey said. “Every problem that comes in is different and requires a creative solution. Like this one, it required a creative solution to meet both department’s goals. I enjoy my job.”
Andrew Ward can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter @WardOfTheWords