Watermark Faculty Success (Digital Measures)

Watermark Faculty Success is a commercial faculty activity reporting (FAR) platform: faculty and staff enter or import teaching, research, service, and administrative activity data once, and the system repurposes that single data set into multiple outputs — annual activity reports, CVs and biosketches, promotion and tenure (P&T) dossiers, accreditation compliance reports, and public faculty web profiles. It is one of the more widely deployed products in this space at U.S. and Canadian higher-education institutions, alongside tools such as Elements (Symplectic).

History and naming

The product originated as Digital Measures, a Milwaukee-based company whose flagship offering was called Activity Insight. Watermark (formed in 2018 by combining several higher-education software companies, including Taskstream, Tk20, and LiveText) acquired Digital Measures on June 27, 2018. The product was subsequently rebranded from ‘Digital Measures Activity Insight’ to ‘Watermark Faculty Success’ — institutional documentation and vendor materials still commonly refer to it by both names interchangeably, which is why search interest in ‘Digital Measures’ and ‘Faculty Success’ overlaps heavily.

What it does

Per Watermark’s own product documentation, Faculty Success centralizes faculty accomplishment data across teaching and mentoring, scholarship and research, service, and administrative contributions, and supports: annual activity reports and CVs, P&T dossiers, accreditation compliance reporting, faculty review workflows, career/workload tracking, and public-facing faculty profiles. The platform offers document-parsing import tools intended to reduce manual CV re-entry, and integrates with institutional HR/ERP systems (e.g. Ellucian, Oracle, Workday) and scholarly-output data sources (ORCID, Scopus, Web of Science, PubMed, Google Scholar) so activity records can be partially pre-populated rather than typed from scratch.

How it relates to a CRIS

Faculty Success is best understood as adjacent to, rather than a substitute for, a full Current Research Information System (CRIS). Its primary unit of record is the individual faculty member’s activity profile, used for internal HR-adjacent processes like review, promotion, and accreditation. A CRIS such as Elements or Pure is typically oriented more toward institution-wide research output harvesting, grants, and external reporting (e.g. to funders or national assessment exercises), though the product categories increasingly overlap as vendors add each other’s capabilities. Institutions sometimes run a FAR tool and a CRIS side by side, or feed data between the two, rather than treating either as a full replacement for the other.

Examples

• A university requiring faculty to log teaching, research, and service activity in Faculty Success each year, then auto-generating that year’s annual activity report and updated CV from the same records.
• A promotion and tenure committee reviewing a dossier assembled directly from a candidate’s Faculty Success activity history rather than a manually compiled document.

Counter-examples

• A general-purpose HR information system that stores employment and payroll data is not Faculty Success, even though Faculty Success may integrate with one.
• A bibliographic database such as Scopus or PubMed is not Faculty Success, though Faculty Success can import matched publication records from it.

CASRAI takes no position on the relative merits of specific commercial FAR/CRIS vendors; this entry describes the product category and terminology neutrally for research-administration audiences who encounter both ‘Digital Measures’ and ‘Watermark Faculty Success’ in institutional documentation.

References

• Watermark, ‘Faculty Success’ product documentation (watermarkinsights.com/solutions/faculty-success).
• Watermark press release, ‘Digital Measures Joins Watermark to Advance Educational Intelligence Solutions for Higher Education’ (June 2018).