Conference Schedule

If a University provides no other IT service, it will always need to manage identities. Otherwise, it has no way of knowing who its students, staff and faculty are. This panel will bring together Identity experts from several campuses to discuss the future vision for identity management, how you’ll be logging in and keeping bad actors out in the coming years and decades.

Transforming data into value is an essential task in areas of scientific discovery, medical research and healthcare. Research from the physical and social sciences to molecular dynamics and proteomics all explore the possibility for new cures and treatments awaiting discovery via the smart application of high performance data analytics and computation, AI and deep learning. New discoveries require best-of-breed technologies integrated into balanced systems that meet the need for speed and provide the best performance. Learn about IBM's Cognitive investments in Watson, machine learning, natural language and hybrid cloud as well as how these leverage the industry's most advanced CPU with GPU Accelerator technology from IBM and NVIDIA. IBM and NVIDIA work together to bring sophisticated Deep Learning GPU Accelerated Frameworks and Big Data tools, world-leading storage software, and extensive HPC management software. These platforms can extend seamlessly into the cloud under a unified software environment, bursting scientific, medical research, and health care jobs and data as needed with a single namespace regardless of where the data resides, and with one management interface for easy administration by users - whether they are Sys Admins, PIs, Students, or Health Care IT professionals.

kraken provides a modular infrastructure for the complete lecture recording workflow; from scheduling to distribution, including encoding, processing and publishing. We leverage some off-the-shelf technologies and developed some components in-house where we can provide added-value such as automation, processing, and integration between sub-systems. Scheduling uses Google Calendar events to automate lecture recording and encoding while providing event notifications via Slack and in-class recording lights controlled via IFTTT. Both the instructor’s camera and the presented content are simultaneously recorded with Wirecast. Processing and automation are achieved with scripting and Cycling ‘74 Max and published to our LMS, where students will watch recorded lectures using our interactive player. All recordings and metadata are archived using Box.

Like all the UC's, UCSF has a staggering amount of data available for all areas of its mission. Making sense of what data is available has been a challenge that results in multiple sources of the truth, differing values for the same measure on separate reports, etc. We will present learnings and outcomes around the design, build and deployment of a home-grown enterprise-level metadata cataloging system.

In the current cost-constrained environment of our UC-System, we often have to come up with innovative and unconventional deployments of hardware and software. Researchers need quick access to the latest technology, and we can often repurpose existing hardware combined with open-source software to build avant-garde systems.

A real live developer and system administrator will share the stage and tell the tale of how to provision application services the devops way with docker and Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Are you tired of committees and collaborations that seem to never make progress? Have you started calculating the cost of excessively long meetings using public salary data? If you enjoy collaborating with colleagues for the greater good, that is probably why you attend UCCSC every year. Our campuses are diverse, and we need to work together to advance the mission of our universities. Instead of more collaboration and committees, we can more quickly solve big problems utilizing a coordinated approach across organizations by adapting industry standard agile practices to initiatives that have nothing to do with software development. We are using this approach for Aggie Desktop, an initiative to redesign the service delivery model of desktop computing at UC Davis inspired by Berkeley Desktop.

As IT professionals, we are looked at by our colleagues, friends and families as knowledgeable about cybersecurity. We have built a 2-page checklist for personal cybersecurity and privacy practices that we have successfully used as the basis of a 'Cybersecurity Checkup.' In our experience, the checkup sessions improve cybersecurity and open the door to discuss larger IT topics, such as those affecting research projects, departments, and divisions. These in turn lead to greater engagement with campus leadership. In this session, we propose to share the contents of the checkup instrument and discuss how it has been used to open channels of communication that were previously closed or undeveloped. Our hope is that you adopt the checkup as a tool to help you expand dialog on larger IT related issues across campus.

UC Merced brought it's very first Technology Enhanced Active Learning (TEAL) Room online this spring and it's been quite an adventure! Come to this show & tell, lessons learned about technology choices, administrative considerations, and process development that may help you in the future!

The UX design process strives to create the best experience for users while meeting an organization’s business goals. The UC San Diego Library consciously applied this process in its most recent website redesign, from initial planning to the design and build stages of the project. We will discuss our decisions about selecting and using multiple UX tools and methodologies and the effect this approach has had on the project.

Share our technology review process that is utilized for all IT purchases at UCD Health. Lessons learned and successes. How can we leverage our review process and share with other UC's?

The University of California system is world-class with its impactful mission and strategy, not to mention its desirable geographical location. But it’s the culture of an organization that keeps employees there -- engaged, productive, and excited about what they do. Culture builds a brand, builds loyalty, and makes it a place no one wants to leave. Defining and establishing the right culture in any organization takes time and thought. It’s a hard thing to get right, but there are seeds that can be planted to cultivate the right culture. Learn about some of the seeds that we’re planting in our IT organization to make it an engaging place that people will flock to, including Passion Inventory, Values to live by, Peer Advocates, and Culture Club!

Developers and system administrators should not be at odds with one another. In the DevOps culture, we are on the same team working arm-in-arm to create and support applications critical to the mission of the organization. The UCLA Library's developer and operations teams are using Ansible as the common tool to empower each other to build robust reproducible environments. This presentation will demonstrate the procedure we use for creating local Ansible test environments that mimic our production Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems. We will review the open source tools used to create this test environment (vagrant, virtualbox, and kickstart) and the support workflow our teams use for our web services and applications.

A project initiative at UCSB to perform a “Risk Assessment” of a campus “critical system” with the objective of creating a “Downtime Prevention Plan”. The assessment process identifies components of a critical system and includes recommended actions to prevent or minimize downtime. This presentation will define the “Risk Assessment” process and present a case study to illustrate how the risk assessment was performed.

In 2016 the UC chief information officers developed their first joint IT strategic plan. Learn about the "True North" process and the initiative highlighted in the plan. Come be a part of the discussion about how they may impact you and your work environment.

Teaching with online technology lets us "thin the walls" of the classroom, opening up students' access and perspectives to the wide world of people and resources. Finding and reusing digital resources is central to open education, but the stories and examples that will be shared in this session suggest that openness can enable more than that. They illustrate why Canvas believes to openness is also crucial to growing innovation in both technology and in teaching.

Wildlife monitoring is essential to a wide range of scientific activities and societal interests. Digital photography provides an effective, non-intrusive way to monitor wildlife. It is safe, cost effective, and accessible to people with a wide range of backgrounds. To scale the process of wildlife monitoring in remote locations, researchers are increasingly turning to automatically activated, battery, or solar powered trail cameras. We present a hybrid cloud application that leverages UC IT and Google Cloud Platform to perform automatic classification of images collected by trail cameras. Our system integrates recent advances in Internet-of-Things, open source software, and cloud services for deep learning, data analytics, and image processing to provide easy access to labeled images by scientists and citizen scientists via the web.

As a programmer Analyst at the UC system, we often face the challenge of performing a diverse variety of IT tasks from applications, system administration, and support to application development in order to provide a solution to the problem where there is no over the shelf-solution. Symfony 3.0 provides an easy to use, flexible, and well documented and professionally support framework.

How to build a sustainable Research Computing community on campus and encourage the community members to exchange research computing ideas and learn tricks of the trade from seasoned HPC users and experts.

Learn how the Ilios team at UCSF is using a micro-application architecture and the EmberJs framework to do everything from prototyping new features to putting small interactions with large data sets into production.

Can cloud storage replace the on-premise file server? Will we save any money if we use cloud storage? We will cover how the costs shift: hardware, staff time, operational expenses. The cost of running file servers on premise can be very expensive. Ensuring reliability, backups with disaster recovery, and business continuity can be a challenge. We will cover lessons learned from applying the Amazon Storage Gateway as a file server volume at our college. During this presentation, we will compare premise solutions to the AWS Storage Gateway and provide a demo on how easy it is to provision cloud storage. We will leave adequate time for discussion and questions.

Learn about healthcare's newest application development and integration standards and how to use them to build secure, scalable applications that are launched from the electronic health record (EHR) system. SMART-on-FHIR is a combination of two new healthcare standards: HL7's Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resource (FHIR) standard is the modern API architecture for healthcare and Substitutable Medical Applications and Reusable Technology (SMART) is an applications architecture built on open technology standards. We will provide examples of how UCSF researchers have built SMART-on-FHIR applications to improve patient care. Also learn about how the UCSF Center for Digital Health Innovation is partnering with Cisco to co-develop a platform utilizing these standards to build apps that improve patient outcomes, increase care efficiency, and improve treatment effectiveness and organizational performance.

Last year, a small team from 5 UC locations worked together to develop and offer system wide resources and events for National Cyber Security Awareness Month. The collaboration was so successful that the team decided to transition this one-time effort to an ongoing collaboration on information security awareness. The workgroup that resulted includes representatives from 11 UC locations and has been meeting regularly since January. Come learn about this unique workgroup, why we think it is important, how we operate, our goals, what we’ve tackled so far, what we still hope to accomplish, and how to use this resource.

Build collaboration and engagement into your culture, nurture your rising stars, and develop your future leaders with an IT staff development and mentorship program. Learn how to start your own, or enhance the one you have. Everything from getting buy-in and support from leadership, building your brand, designing a curriculum, selecting a cohort, running a mentor match, creating value for the organization with team projects, and how to tie the work you do to the mission. Build your own IT development and mentorship program – you can do it; we can help.

In 2016, the eSports industry produced an estimated $493 million in revenue and in 2019 it is projected to surpass $1 billion. With eSports growing as fast as it is, your University may look into starting its own eSports program. We would like to share our experience and knowledge of both eSports and the technology that makes it work. We will also share some of the challenges we experienced and more importantly how to avoid them. A team of FIVE panelists will cover various aspects of the eSports program. The Topics to be covered include: The creation of the eSports program, The UCI eSports Arena, the Technology behind the arena, Women in eSports/gaming, and what we think the future holds for eSports. Panelists: Mark Deppe - Acting Esports Director Kathy Chiang - Esports Arena Coordinator Aakash Shah - UCI Windows Services Group Patrick Lemon - Classroom Technology Support Sarkis Daglian - Associate Director of OIT Client Services Moderator TBD

TBD

As a programmer Analyst at the UC system, we often face the challenge of performing a diverse variety of IT tasks from applications, system administration, and support to application development in order to provide a solution to the problem where there is no over the shelf-solution. Symfony 3.0 provides an easy to use, flexible, and well documented and professionally support framework.

Zoom has been adopted as a video conferencing platform across the UC. Is it a tool for Faculty? Business Services? Or Students? YES! Each audience uses this tool in very different ways and this session will cover rolling out to different audiences and lessons learned/helpful tips for supporting each type of audience.

UC has a legal requirement to make sure we buy technology that meets our electronic accessibility policy, which was sponsored by the IT Leadership Council (ITLC). This talk will introduce you to the UC purchasing guidelines for accessibility and help you understand how to read responses from vendors. Learn best practices to make sure what we are buying is accessible to all members of the UC community!

Linking high stakes curriculum management tools with evaluation management software is a challenge faced by many institutions. This session will describe how one health professions school bridged this gap and transformed the generation of their course and lecturer evaluations from a complex manual process into an automated process. This has resulted in better support for both students and faculty and has freed up school IT resources for higher-level projects. We’ll look at the challenges faced by the project team (a highly collaborative group from across our campus including central IT, educational technologists, curriculum management programmers), examine the model that was developed and discuss how our work could be reused by others in the education technology space.

The cloud is changing higher education and is already enabling leading academic researchers to conduct groundbreaking research faster and more cost-effectively than ever before. PI and post-doc researchers are able to provision supercomputing-magnitude resources quickly, access massive data sets, perform compute-intensive analyses, share data for collaboration, and share results for peer review and publishing. The cloud enables them to access massive technical resources rapidly and pay only for what they use. We would have panel member from each campus to discuss how each campus is handling research computing in the cloud.

There has been a lot of conflicting research as to whether telecommuting is good or bad for an organization. Ultimately it always comes down to "it depends" on many different factors. Join us for a conversation on determining if telecommuting is right for your group, management and tools for a mixed environment, and strategies you can use to convince, encourage, and accept telecommuting as an alternative to a typical work schedule.

This session will present ways that UCOP has integrated tools such as Tableau Reporting, Quest Stat into Service Now. We will present four case studies (two on reporting and two on Integration with Stat) of this integration and how each case provided efficiencies and time savings for staff. This presentation will also go into some technical details regarding how it was achieved.

*This session runs until 5:30PM* This Birds of a Feather facilitated session is about unique and innovative learning modalities and the role that technology plays. There will be a case study presented by Minerva, who has set out to radically improve education delivery in higher education. Participants are highly encouraged to join the discussion, ask questions, share experiences and outcomes. Topics will cover challenges and innovations in the learning space, the impacts, as well as considerations for the future.

Integrating the EHR (Electronic Health Record) is a key strategic component for many Medical Centers, more so now than ever. Whether integrating within the organization or beyond, there are many problems to solve. At UCSF, we would like to share the use of the tools we implemented to solve some of these challenges. In addition to our traditional interface engine, we have implemented an EMPI (Electronic Master Patient Index) to tackle the issue of patient identity across organizations. In addition, we also implemented an ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) and API Manager to integrate modern applications using API’s and to support FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources). We hope to share the lessons learned in implementing these tools and to show their value to our enterprise.

Come and learn about CAP, UCLA's new Content App Platform, built by the Mobilize Labs team at OIT. Creating mobile apps has never been simpler, regardless of your level of technical skill. Whether you want to engage your faculty, staff, or student populations, enhance your department’s communications or improve customer satisfaction, creating a powerful mobile experience can be done in no time with UCLA’s new simple solution called the Content App Platform (CAP). UCLA’s Mobilize Labs (ML) Team at OIT is developing CAP to be a next generation system, using React JS, React Native, and Couch DB. CAP lets you enter data into a web-based cloud, which then sends the content in real-time to the iOS and Android native app clients via JSON based APIs.

The UC Davis Trusted Data Platform is a NIST 800-171 compliant environment entirely hosted within Amazon Web Services. In this talk, we’ll walk through the architecture and discuss ways that other UCs can leverage the model for secure research computing.

We launched UCSF Box in 2013, and our users immediately asked, ”Can we store PHI on Box?” Box signed a BAA in 2014, but we still had to tell our users, ”No PHI” until we had a technical solution for protecting it. Enter CipherCloud, which monitors changes in Box and passes files to our DLP system to be scanned for UCSF PHI. PHI is encrypted and stays encrypted when downloaded. Users get a Secure folder where all* content is encrypted. We launched Secure Box in 2016, and use exploded. We can report on PHI, stop people from sharing it outside of UCSF, and be certain that no one from outside of UCSF can read it. Say ”yes” to storing PHI in the cloud!

UCSF moved its Moodle online learning environment to the cloud using AWS (Amazon Web Services) in 2016. AWS is great, but we had to learn which AWS products work and don’t work for us, and how to work around them. We'll show you our architecture and how we automate deployments with Ansible and Git.

In a world of development containers and cloud-based solutions where new application environments are created as quickly as they are destroyed, there is a need for developers to not have to register each new application instance they standup with the campus's SSO authentication service. At UCSC, we recently wrote an app to abstract our campus's single sign-on auth service. This presentation will discuss and demonstrate our approach to this topic.

As IT takes an increasingly more strategic role in the UC mission, it becomes an imperative that UC encourage an engaged, skilled IT workforce. Recruiting, retaining, and developing the workforce and work environment in a way that promotes a deep focus on research and education while satisfying employee aspirations is an amazing opportunity. Learn how the UC chief information officers are addressing the challenges of the IT labor market.

This session will provide an overview of Google Cloud Platform and what sets it apart from other providers. Whether for disaster recovery or high-performance computing, GCP frees you from the overhead of managing infrastructure, provisioning servers, and configuring networks. Today, inside Google, developers working on products like YouTube, Gmail and Maps never write deployment scripts, but their code is pushed into production multiple times a day. They don’t share databases, write failover scripts or patch software stacks. And yet their software is some of the most resilient and secure ever created. This approach lets our developers code without thinking about infrastructure; consequently Google Cloud Platform allow universities to do a lot less un-productive infrastructure work. It’s an actual global, elastic, on demand set of services, that doesn’t require you to figure out how to build it and make it work. It’s not about having enough machines, cables and disks. It’s about having the right abstractions that let you simplify complexity.

The UC Health Hack 2017 focused on improving health care delivery using leading-edge technologies and methodologies. The event brought together a diverse, multidisciplinary group of technology professionals, engineers, clinicians, students, etc. to propose and create solutions to various challenges in health care today. Teams designed and rapidly developed their solutions over a two-day period, and then presented their concepts and prototypes to a panel of judges for prizes, recognition, and honors.

We have been talking about Accessibility for years. It is the right thing to do, it is UC Policy, and it is the law. Bring your laptop, roll up your sleeves and let’s start the work of making UC Digitally Accessible for all! In this hands-on workshop, participants will: - Walk-through several, mostly free, testing tools - Gain an understanding of the WCAG 2.0 Guidelines - Receive guidance to interpret and share testing results -Share experience and participate in open dialogue

How does a small downstream system create a connection to one of the biggest process and technology effort of the university - UCPath - when the latter is moving at its own force and pace with its own priorities and razor sharp goals? We will walk through the experience of the TCS Web Inquiry integration with UCPath Project - our assumptions, goals, barriers, and challenges, and how by staying flexible and agile, we are able to successfully establish our connectivity to UCPath.

Building and sustaining an IT Service Catalog focused on ease of use and driving toward self services and effective request management.

In every interaction, people make deposits or withdrawals of trust with individuals and organizations. Trust is the basis for great customer service, building strong collaborations, and alleviating tensions during challenging conversations. UC Berkeley’s Campus Shared Services IT has built a culture of trust to deliver 90% customer satisfaction rate for the last 4 years. Most campuses function on individual trust with many morale surveys pointing to great individual team trust but limited trust across silos. Viewing trust from an organizational perspective helps create an environment of innovation and resiliency and breaks down behaviors that create walls. Learn through an interactive game and discussion on how to build an organization that facilitates opportunities for trust deposits that cascade to encompass the entire organization.

The rapid growth and availability of data has created both an opportunity and a challenge for university researchers, students, and staff. This talk will focus on recent efforts at UCSF to provide instruction to the campus community in core analytical tools such as Python, R, SQL, and Unix. We’ll discuss the benefits of joining the Software Carpentry organization and how to identify staff and researchers who would like to join as instructors or assistants.

UCLA’s Mobilize Labs Group at OIT is collaborating on the exciting PRISMS research project to personalize the prediction of asthma symptoms in pediatric patients. The OIT group is building an EMA mhealth research app and dashboards to visualize data from the app and data collected from the wireless sensor kit that includes an android watch, a sensor equipped inhaler, spirometer and a wearable air beam particulate matter sensor. The PRISMS app (currently in the Google Play market) collects 15 different data sets, which include participant responses as well as user analytics around notifications and responses. Insights from this project are aimed at informing personalized algorithms for asthma symptom prevention in pediatric patients.

UC IT experts deliver technology for our users. It's what we do, and we’re really good at it. However, despite knowing how to deliver technology, we tend to ignore why that specific technology was chosen in the first place. A strategic technology decision that doesn't center on the higher ed user experience is likely doomed from the onset. This presentation will focus on a robust and highly structured methodology called Experience Analysis and Design (EAD). We will tell the story of how EAD helped our UC San Diego edtech team discover exactly what our students and faculty want in a Learning Management System (LMS). We will also show you how to get started with EAD and thus avoid the pitfalls of picking the wrong technology.

We have been talking about Accessibility for years. It is the right thing to do, it is UC Policy, and it is the law. Bring your laptop, roll up your sleeves and let’s start the work of making UC Digitally Accessible for all! In this hands-on workshop, participants will: • Walk-through several, mostly free, testing tools • Gain an understanding of the WCAG 2.0 Guidelines • Receive guidance to interpret and share testing results • Share experience and participate in open dialogue

You've written beautiful code, but how will your users know what to do? Including good documentation is the first step to keeping everyone on the same page (!) in terms of expectations and results. We will go over some basics of technical writing to enhance your skills.

The UCOP i-Innovate Initiative promotes constant innovation throughout our daily IT activities. We value imagination, new ideas, collaboration, and risk-taking. We invest in IT staff by creating opportunities to engage these values in the pursuit of innovation. We embrace failure as a learning opportunity. We believe that the best ideas can come from anyone in the organization. At one of our i-Innovate events this year - Innovation Week - our ITS staff took a deep dive on their most inventive ideas to demonstrate what is possible. Hear about how i-Innovate came together and what’s next.

In every interaction, people make deposits or withdrawals of trust with individuals and organizations. Trust is the basis for great customer service, building strong collaborations, and alleviating tensions during challenging conversations. UC Berkeley’s Campus Shared Services IT has built a culture of trust to deliver 90% customer satisfaction rate for the last 4 years. Most campuses function on individual trust with many morale surveys pointing to great individual team trust but limited trust across silos. Viewing trust from an organizational perspective helps create an environment of innovation and resiliency and breaks down behaviors that create walls. Learn through an interactive game and discussion on how to build an organization that facilitates opportunities for trust deposits that cascade to encompass the entire organization.

UCSD and SAP have been collaborating on a high-speed, in-memory analytic solution that simplifies student success analytics and reporting. This session will reveal the unique approach this solution uses to ingest any student data from any source and how it converts the data into easy-to-use curated views that have low levels of data granularity and can be accessed from any visualization and reporting tool. This new tool also enables event-driven personalized messaging to students that can accommodate needs ranging from in-class learning analytics to more traditional student success interventions.

Groups across the UC are innovating and looking to expand IT services so they can be made available to other campuses, universities, and commercial entities. Learn about the UC IT program to assist staff with expanding the scope of their services and develop entrepreneurial opportunities.

Join Ellucian to learn how the Ethos Platform changes how Colleges and Universities integrate, access, and gain insight into the data contained within their administrative and point solutions on campus. This presentation will focus on how today’s higher education institutions can unlock data to improve decision making and performance, embrace integration to create a seamless user experience, and extend capabilities to add features to systems rather than replacing them. Join us as we discuss this and more in our Ellucian Ethos session and leave with a clear understanding of how this comprehensive platform built exclusively for Higher Education is making a clear and compelling difference.

Learn how UC San Diego and UC Davis collaborate on the open source campus mobile app for a better student experience and stronger campus engagement.

This presentation will illustrate how analytic tools enhance training programs for Physician Residents and Fellows at UCSF. UCSF IT partnered with the Director of Quality & Safety for the Graduate Medical Education office to provide Residents and Fellows a summary of their clinical care experiences from the electronic health record (EHR). Previously, this information required laborious assembly by each trainee for licensing and accreditation purposes. Information was also made available to Program Directors to proactively manage the patient care experiences of their trainees. Two solutions were implemented including a dashboard and a reporting tool that automatically emails reports to trainees and Program Directors. Review of the project and demonstration of the dashboard will be provided, as well as presentation of individual and program specific scorecards.

Science is a team sport with teams that often span institutional boundaries, sometimes even international ones. We will review a CI vision, as well as its present implementation that addresses the need for an integrated CI broadly defined across multiple institutions and disciplines. We will discuss Science examples from a diverse set of disciplines stressing how these different examples make use of resources across institutions and business models. This infrastructure will include aspects of PRP, OSG, XSEDE, and commercial clouds. The Science examples include particle physics, gravitational wave detection, dark matter direct detection, as well as life sciences.

How can your Service Desk leverage knowledge management to improve operational efficiency and consistency through constant organizational change and staff turnover? This talk will focus on a balanced approach of: Tier 0, knowledge base self-service. Tier 1, service Desk Resolution Rate and Tier 2, escalation process improvement to minimize turnaround time.

Self-coaching is a technique used to monitor personal effectiveness and bring about a higher self-awareness. It is used best in monitoring negative thoughts, which can greatly affect one’s emotions, actions, and ultimately the bottom line. Participants will learn how to effectively self-coach, create an individual growth plan, and gain tips to effectively set and monitor goals.

The web development field is exploding right now with amazing tools, automations, and services. Let’s compare notes. This panel will engage with the audience to chat about the following topics: development workflow, tools and services, automation, deployment, stacks, frameworks, tips and tricks, experiences learned, and the future of higher-ed web.

Advancements in clinical research by universities like ours, the rest of the UC system, and others, result in millions of lives saved and improved. The medical community's understanding of all clinical conditions is contingent on the research done by our laboratories and clinics. It is for this reason that only one of the many research institutions - the NIH - spends 32 billion dollars a year on grants. However, it is our responsibility as researchers and leaders to protect the safety and privacy of our participants and patients. In this presentation, we will discuss the importance of HIPPA and the current methods we are using to de-identify all patient data that is collected.

Information technology continues to evolve at a rapid pace and is increasingly central to every aspect of teaching, research, and public service. New technology products and services can provide great benefit to the University in improving the way we work and innovate, but must meet a broad set of needs and be obtained in a timely manner. New technology can also present new risks that need to be effectively addressed. The new UC IT Sourcing Committee and UC Procurement Services have partnered to meet these needs and address these challenges. By working together to identify and prioritize new UC-wide IT agreements, we can effectively source and purchase technology products and services, while also appropriately addressing associated risks, and leveraging UC-wide demand to do both at the lowest total cost of ownership.

The UC Tech Slack has been a grassroots movement that took shape a year ago at UCCSC 16 with the merging of multiple UC-wide Slack teams to one inclusive UC Tech Slack team. Since that time, we have grown to almost 2,000 UC technology professionals sending over 600,000 messages. Come learn more about the UC Tech slack community and offer your opinion on how we should manage this going forward. Also hear how some of our community are using UC Tech to broaden their collaboration across campuses.

Research increasingly shows that IT can have real and transformative impact IF we are part of the business and academic conversation alongside faculty and administrators – BEFORE decisions are made. This is a change in the way of doing business —not just using tech expertise to do technology as well as we can, but using tech expertise to inform academic choices and design academic solutions with technology in mind. It means being in the room, “in community” with faculty and administrators from the get-go. How to do this? Hear about two successful examples of IT at the center of academic community at UCLA: (1) technologists and faculty co-hosting a regional infrastructure symposium, and (2) resident technologists at the center of an academic innovation hub.

Introduction to "Strategic Data Modeling", a structured approach for performing an enterprise-level “top down” data analysis. “Islands of data” exist within any organization. When successfully followed, a data model is created that can help consolidate these “islands”. The approach relies on functional analysis so the data model is resistant to changes to internal work flows. The structured approach will be described as will a case study.

Starting with an open source vendor provided product, UCI customized enterprise research administration software to fit the needs of the university

Training is an excellent way to educate customers, employees, and partners about your department’s products, services, and processes. The complexity of material, the cultural environment, and the needs of your target audience are considerations to take into account -- along with resources and constraints, such as budget, availability of trainers, and implementation schedules. Thankfully, you have a variety of training methods to choose from to ensure your product rollouts or technical implementations are successfully received by your audience. In this session, we will explore the advantages and limitations of five training formats, and the scenarios that suit them best.

Migrating enterprise applications to the cloud can achieve high availability, increased performance, better security, and cost optimization, so long as there are clear migration goals and a good strategy. In this session, you will learn about UCI’s enterprise cloud migration strategy and get insight into the various phases of our migration project, including our application assessment criteria for evaluating cloud readiness. You will also learn about some aspects of our architecture in AWS, including our scheme for separating applications in AWS, our use of AWS accounts and VPCs, and some details of our security design and how our AWS environment connects to campus and to the Internet.

Hiring the right candidate can be difficult. Most recruitments include a familiar set of questions and settings that the candidate can prepare for and complete without having the necessary skills or experience. Academic Web Technologies at UCI developed a new interview method inspired by our own Agile process and the real world demands of the job. By participating in a simulation of workplace challenges, candidates were introduced to our team’s workflow and culture. Our hope was that we would identify candidates with relevant skills and the potential to excel. We will discuss our process and evaluate its success, in hopes of inspiring other teams to break out of the interviewing mold and improve their chances of finding the right fit.

The Drupal content management system lets you build data management applications quickly, while leveraging the functionality of Drupal core and thousands of contributed modules. I'll describe a code-based approach to building a data management application with Drupal as the framework. This approach takes advantage of core Drupal features including roles, permissions, access control, form validation and processing, and templating. The system is built as a collection of related Drupal modules, taking an aspect oriented programming (AOP) approach. This allows building a generic framework that supports different capabilities for different installations. The system can operate stand-alone or with data feeds from outside systems.

Does the idea of consolidating and migrating highly available systems keep you up at night? Do you worry about the sustainability of large enterprise applications? Is your organization stuck on aging platforms? Do you wonder how you will be able to update your systems while minimizing impact on patient care and critical business functions? So do we! Come learn how the UCSF ECM team used careful planning and an interactive testing approach to migrate 4 environments, 38 clustered physical and virtual servers, and 22 million document images from San Francisco to Quincy, WA with less than 2 hours of downtime.

Instructional Design Faculty Support Mobile Special Interest Group will share experiences in developing a cross-campus project on mobile learning. Particular attention will be paid to the IRB process with more than three UC campuses, the nuts and bolts of collaboration strategies, and developing a research project and agenda. We will discuss the role that defining mobile learning had in the design of our research. Finally, we will share preliminary results from our mixed-methods study.

Come hang out and chat with UC's CIOs.

In alignment with the UC Information Technology Architecture Committee (ITAC) vision, our department embarked on developing an Enterprise Architecture discipline and established an Architecture Review Board (ARB) in July 2014. Over the years, and working together with SMEs across the department, the ARB has matured, developed processes and standards, and reviewed and adopted standardized technologies. We are now able to demonstrate and measure the value of our enterprise architecture discipline. In this session, we will share how we moved what were great ideas and concepts into working solutions and standards that solve real architecture challenges.

In our roles as IT professionals, we may be called upon to teach both individuals and groups with varying levels of confidence with technology. However, as technologists we may feel more comfortable behind a computer screen than in front of a group. Here, we'll explore techniques that will help you navigate the murky waters of public speaking while touching on useful skills for any workplace, such as communication and presentation skills, creativity, flexibility, and active listening. We'll also focus on ways to minimize technical jargon while leading sessions that inspire adult learners, building their confidence for a better overall learning experience.

Whatever your development methodology, good project planning is important. Agile processes, like Scrum, Kanban, and Lean, address how to conduct iterative development day-to-day, but they don’t directly address how to plan a focused project. Bookending your Agile (or even traditional!) project with inclusive kick-off and closing activities can help set the stage for success. We will discuss practical activities that help earn buy-in and develop a focused vision that is shared by the development team and stakeholders alike. We will see how that vision helps to control scope and deliver value. And lastly, we will talk about the importance of creating space to look back and learn from our experiences.

Management says "Cloud First", now what? --Step 1: Determine a migration strategy. What moves and when? Check! --Step 2: Gather a talented group of engineers. Check! --Step 3: Begin architecting for the cloud... If only it were that simple. UCSC's migration of enterprise systems from our on-premise data center to IAAS (Infrastructure as a Service -- AWS) is made possible by breaking down traditional silos between functional groups within IT. Learn how System Administrators, Application Administrators, DBAs, Developers, Security and Network analysts are rolling up their sleeves and putting aside traditional roles to get the job done.