How to manage obsolete organisational units in learning module

[Sarah_Rothery]

We have a business need to be able to see, and easily interpret the current organisational(org) units (against active employees) and their structure in the learning module. We use the org unit connector (in learning administration) to import the organisational units. We don’t use Employee Central.

What we have found is that connector only works one way. Making org unit’s active. It never deletes them. Thus, we have a build-up of org units that are no longer active, and we can't clearly make out the org units with active employees against them.

Note: The inactive org units are still used against inactive employee’s details. They are essentially frozen in time. 

When we search the org structure in Learning Admin>People>Org Units>Search, we find there is a lot of obsolete data. After a number of mergers we have over 8000 Organizational Units in the Organisational Unit Connector, and 3500 of those are no longer in use.

My understanding is we can only delete an organisational unit (not archive). We can only delete an org unit in the system if there are no employees against the org unit. And deleting an org unit has to be done manually- one by one. There is no bulk action.

Do any other organisations have this issue? And if so, how do they overcome it? 

[MaryKatherineJ]

@Sarah_Rothery, we use the Organization Connector to manage our inactive organizations. We use the Organization Type field in the LMS to hold a value of either ACTIVE or INACTIVE. We confirmed the ORG_TYP_ID field was mapped in the Organization Connecter section of our CONNECTOR configuration file in the LMS. Then we used Integration Center to create our organization_data connector file. In the integration center file, we added a calculated field for ORG_TYP_ID that populates a value of ACTIVE or INACTIVE based on the Cost Center status value. Integration Center then uploads the data to our specified connector file location on a scheduled basis. When the org connector runs, it populates the Organization Type field. Our admins can then use Organization Type as a search or report filter.

Like you, we have a long list of org units that are obsolete but still linked to inactive user records, and we have had to make our peace with them. But the Org Type search filter allows our admins to find the active org IDs without wading through all of the junk data.

Good luck!
Mary Katherine Johnson

[Sarah_Rothery]

This is a great idea- we will test it. Much appreciated. Thank you!