Schedule

Designing a new application from scratch is a daunting task. There are thousands of decisions to be made about business rules, workflows, and layouts, all in coordination with stakeholders ranging from clients to developers. An Agile project management approach emphasizing communication and iterative planning can make decision making manageable, yield effective and cohesive designs, and even help to deliver on time.

We will explore techniques that our team has successfully employed, using a recent software development project—

Overview:

• Drupal is one of the most popular open source CMS platforms out there. Many colleges and universities use Drupal as their CMS of choice.
• Amazon Rekognition is a tool that provides image and video analysis to your applications

This session will show you how to integrate Drupal 8 with Amazon Rekognition and see real time image analysis on consuming apps.

We will use React framework for our data consuming app.

Outcomes:

Learn basics of Drupal 8—

UCOP recently issued an updated Information Security Policy (commonly known as IS-3) in conjunction with their minimum security standards to require encryption on laptops and mobile devices. By July 2019, all UC campuses must have a deployment plan to implement disk encryption “over the ensuing 12 months.” Encryption has already been required on Protection Level 3 (PL3) data or higher. One does not simply encrypt all the devices though, because it’s difficult! Come find how we have—

Our development team provides development and hosting for a variety of custom built Drupal based websites.  Recently, we moved from locally self-managed hosting services to an AWS cloud based system with a Jenkins & Github based automation pipeline.  In this session, we'll cover the benefits of automation, our AWS infrastructure, our automation pipeline, server monitoring, as well as the challenges and things we learned during the process.

Here is your opportunity to learn from seasoned experts and “green” practitioners sharing their experiences with Lean Six Sigma. Lean Six Sigma is an effective methodology that allows organizations to streamline their workflow processes and increase efficiencies. It is based on common sense practices and is completed in five phases: Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve and Control.

Ask your questions, get the inside scoop, stories, and tips, learn what you need to be successful, how to get started,—

At the request of the presenter, this session was not recorded. - UCTech 2019 Planning Committee

Get the inside story of how and why the IT Project Management and Reporting Guidelines were created! Hear from the trenches: those that actively manage projects with a one-time project cost of $5 million or more. The panel will share how these systemwide guidelines have been applied to qualifying IT projects, the benefits and challenges of adhering to the guidelines, and—

Just because you build it does not mean that they will come… a gentle reference to "Field of Dreams," but a reality. How you define, develop, deploy, organize, and communicate your IT offering (application, service, software) directly impacts your audience. 

Silo Much?
Most IT properties reflect the structure and focus of their parent organization. But if no one uses your product, or they can't find your product, or they're frustrated by your product… then you either have—

Overview of how our Infrastructure team integrated automation into our data center.  Includes an overview of the specific tools sets and platforms deployed.   Focusing on the drivers and benefits.  Including specific real-world examples of how manual labor can be automated, what it means for the organization, what skill sets are required to achieve success, how to measure success, etc..  Automation is an important step in the maturity model for modern IT teams, yet not many UC’s are—

Like a river with a flood, or a forest with a fire, sometimes you need to destroy something to renew it. Our IT Governance Committee on Technology & Architecture had become stagnant, and participation waned. Our new steering committee chair asked each committee to review its charge and focus, to ensure we were maximizing our impact. We disbanded the committee and brought together business and technical leaders to create something from the ashes. We set out to—

Now, more than ever, IT professionals are feeling overwhelmed by the number and complexity of tools available to them. From Kuberneties to Teraform, Chef to Ansible, It can sometimes be difficult to tell where one tool ends and another begins. With such overlap and complex integrations, it becomes necessary to change the way you reason about and chose your technology portfolio.

This talk does not suggest or advocate for any particular set of tooling, but rather discusses some methods of breaking down—

Ready? Set? Innovate! Creativity can feel like we’re being asked to do the impossible -- you want me to do my job and what? Think of something new? I don’t have the time for that! Although IT is a place of innovation and cutting edge technology, it’s also the place of legacy systems and tech debt. As contributors, how do we balance what we need to do with what we want to do? As managers, how can—

When faced with solving a new problem, we often need to decide between buying or building the solution. Sometimes a third option is available - borrow. 

In this session we will share our journey in delivering an appointment scheduling system to our campus’ undergraduate advising offices. After extensive campus conversations with stakeholders, including governance voting, it was decided that we would build a custom system. However, a third and unusual option emerged during our pre-development research: borrow.—

If you've heard of Agile/Scrum, you might think it's meant only for software development. Not so! Scrum is not just for software, it is for problem-solving and getting work to done. Agile methods, such as Scrum, are built for speed, clarity, flexibility, and especially for reacting gracefully to change - even at the last minute! If your team has work to get done, Scrum can deliver huge value by setting your team up for success on any—

Calling all novice and experienced non-certified project managers! Becoming a certified Project Management Professional (PMP) can be a wise career decision, but is it right for you?

Whether you’re dabbling with the idea or already in the midst of exam prep, attend this panel discussion to learn more about why you should—or shouldn’t!—get certified. This multi-location panel will have a lively discussion around their journeys to certification, including:

1. benefits (opens doors, hireability, standardized language)
2. challenges in getting—

The greatest part of being a member of Information Systems is creating solutions that make work better and easier for the staff we serve.  Staff asked us: “Can you create a solution that saves our emails to project folders on the network? Doing this manually is truly a mind numbing office task which is driving us nuts.”  We researched and discovered Google Apps Script which was used to create a one-click Gmail add-on solution.

Learn how you—

It takes multiple teams working in concert to deliver a quality product. This coordination is difficult without a defined process in place.

In the beginning, users had to interact with each team separately which caused confusion, delays, and unpredictable outcomes.  To remove this burden from the user and improve delivery time, we designed and continue to iterate a process that ensures requests are fulfilled in the shortest time possible.

In this session we'll showcase our journey—

There is only audio for this recording so, with permission from the presenter, we have provided the slide deck and any supplemental materials in the Session Files section below. - UCTech 2019 Planning Committee

What if you could implement Shibboleth for your application as a plug-and-play, reducing the time and effort from months to days?

The AJS DevOps team at UCOP created a Docker container for Shibboleth that is deployed on AWS as a front-end to our web—

At the request of the presenter, this session was not recorded. - UCTech 2019 Planning Committee
 

By mid-2016, UCSB had worked for 4 years to implement UCPath.  Although 13 staff were allocated to the program, none of the 126 business process designs or 50 interfaces were complete, and over 85 departments still used paper timecards.  After changing how we managed the program, UCSB drastically accelerated its deployment schedule and completed deployment in September 2018. 

In this—

There is only audio for this presentation so, with permission from the presenter, we have provided the slide deck and any supplemental materials in the Session Files section below. - UCTech 2019 Planning Committee

We have achieved over $7 million in IT savings and cost avoidance during each of the past three years, with no impact on service or the delivery of solutions, by encouraging all IT leaders to be excellent business people as well as excellent—

Batman and Robin. Han Solo and Chewbacca. Mario and Luigi. Just like these famous pairings, so it is for Data Architecture and Data Governance — they’re aligned to support each other in a variety of ways. What tops this data management duo’s list? Their shared goal of creating standards and guidelines to support UC*'s strategic goals (increasing operational efficiency, decreasing costs, mitigating risk, promoting data as a business asset - the list is long).

Without the benefit of a—

Brief: This workshop will describe steps to stand-up a centralized Project Management Office in an IS environment.  The first half of the workshop will discuss one campus’s 12-month start-up journey, including the Project Management Maturity Model framework, STARS assessment, SWOT analysis, Visioning, Planning, Staff Development, Performance Improvement, and Execution... along with the “magic” key ingredients for success. The second half of the workshop will lead individuals through a STARS profile, mini-maturity audit and readiness checklist.

Materials: An—

Managing large projects and all the tasks and resources that go along with them may seem daunting or overwhelming. But what if you could simplify the project management process but get even more successful results? What if you could put aside complex concepts like “Dependency Mapping”, “Resource Leveling”, and “Work Breakdown Structures” in lieu of a straightforward customer-focused process? 

The ITS-PRO ontology stands for Project Management, Reporting, and Optimization and is based on breaking down—

Release Toggles allow incomplete and un-tested codepaths to be shipped to production as latent code which may never be turned on.  These are feature flags used to enable trunk-based development for teams practicing Continuous Delivery.  They allow in-progress features to be checked into a shared integration branch (e.g. master or trunk) while still allowing that branch to be deployed to production at any time. Release Toggles allow incomplete and un-tested codepaths to be shipped to production as—

For the vastness of IT solutions we provide to our campuses, have we scaled our Customer Service models appropriately to adapt to this growth? And if so, how do we know our support models are working? The field of Customer Experience (CX) offers practical tools for analyzing how well our organizations keep pace with the needs of our campus customers; designing strategies to adapt our products and services accordingly; and translating customer feedback to business results.

In—

Analytics across disparate applications has been am ongoing challenge in every organization. Proto typing an analytics solution across multiple applications can be time consuming. This usually involves moving data from multiple applications to a single data store - which is costly from a data movement, and modeling perspective.

There are several innovative solutions to this problem. One of the effective solutions is using Data virtualization. This session will explore possible solutions, focused on Data virtualization. The session—

Whether designing an app interface or a business process, the same philosophical principles drive both Lean Six Sigma and lean software design and development. By combining the two and understanding that they are complementary and mutually reinforcing, we can leverage our product lifecycle to achieve both process improvement and core UX goals. In this talk, we’ll dive into each stage of the Lean Six Sigma methodology, and how it applies to UX design with real-world examples and—

DevOps, CI, Build, Test, Deploy! There are a lot of different components flying around this buzzword-compliant practice. It’s hard to know where to start. (Spoiler: always start with low-hanging fruit!) But the promises are very attractive: Fewer bugs, faster deployment, greater confidence in your changes.

Learn practical tools and workflows from those of us already in the trenches. We will cover:

• Identifying the areas where automation will make the biggest difference
• Continuous Integration tools and services such as—

As global technology advances further into the digital age, it is imperative we continue to identify means to exploit the massive potential of data. Through the application of innovative artificial intelligent techniques on data, decision makers are now empowered to take advantage of the hidden potential of data. An objective of my presentation would be to inspire those in the technological world to reimagine the depth and breadth of the data we collect.

More specifically, I would like to—

Learn about UCLA’s Zenith App Platform (ZAP @ https://zap.ucla.edu), a powerful data driven Mobile App SaaS environment, created for Higher Ed.  A bloated campus app is not necessarily the right solution for your environment, users are used to leveraging niche apps for more specific functionality and they are better served with a personalized experience.    ZAP embodies several mobile principles that have always been core to an unbiased mobile experience:

• Apps should be Data Driven:  ZAP allows you—

Infrastructure as Code is a new paradigm to create resources in the cloud.  This paradigm makes it easy to launch/destroy cloud environments in a way that is repeatable, controllable, and versioned reducing cost and risk.

The AWS CDK is an infrastructure modeling framework that lets you to define your cloud resources using programming APIs in Java, JavaScript, Typescript, and/or C#.  Learn how to create a cloud resource with a CloudFormation template using the Open Source AWS-CDK.

Discover—

Ugly, large-scale, complex business and technical processes often have two fates: 1) multiple failed attempts at revision and/or implementation, or 2) slow, prolonged death because no one dares to tackle a revision. Neither serves the users or technical teams and both are incredibly painful for campuses. In this talk you will learn tools and tips about linking process improvement projects to break down complex processes into smaller, workable projects. A pilot project for process improvement in class and space scheduling will be—

Imagine your department or workflow is slowed down by functional silos, multiple hand-offs, unacceptable delays and backlogs. Or that you are working on a process that is mission critical to the success of your department but needs continuous manual tinkering.

Now let’s raise the stakes: You’re in the midst of multiple ERP projects, and you don’t want to carry bad processes into new systems. 

Enter the Lean Bench, a “go team” of process improvement experts made up of—

Spend a decade running a Ruby on Rails site for all prospective academics coming into the University of California and you're bound to mess up sometimes. In this talk we'll go over a few places where we fell down, what we learned from it, and how we incorporate our mistakes into our process.

We'll talk about an architecture mistake that haunts us to this day. We'll look at the deploy that broke our email system and the—

At the request of the presenter, the session recording will not be posted. Please reach out to the presenter with any questions. - UCTech 2019 Planning Committee

In 2016, our campus decided to retire its legacy learning management system and adopt the Canvas LMS. After a year or so of working towards this new LMS future, it became clear that the deeply integrated development+support team structure that had worked for the past decade was no longer optimal for—

There is only audio for this presentation so, with permission from the presenters, we have provided supplemental materials in the Session Files section below. - UCTech 2019 Planning Committee

Lightning talks are pretty great, but less so when you can tell how little prep time the speaker had. So we wanted the good parts, without the bad. Enter: MiniTalks! They're like Lightning talks, short and sweet, but our speakers have more notice so they can put more—

Note: This session is only for UC-affiliated attendees. At the request of the presenter, this session was not recorded. - UCTech 2019 Planning Committee

“Getting out of the Data Center Business” is a common strategy at many of our campuses.  This session will provide a comparison of the UC system agreements for the three major cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP) and discuss recent developments negotiating deeper discounts and incentives using our collective scale.  We will show what—

Studies show that multitasking at work reduces productivity by as much as 40 percent. The only proven way to get more done is to do one thing at a time, from start to finish. A year ago, our team recognized the need to stop starting and start finishing.

 Kanban was embraced as a visual system for managing work and a framework to make work visible. It limits work in progress so that team members concentrate on one—

IT project stakeholders such as administrators and faculty often want detailed, specific estimates about project cost before they agree to sponsor a project. Unfortunately, as any IT project manager knows, project plans are often full of educated guesses and complete unknowns, which makes any estimate highly uncertain. This session will introduce attendees to strategies for making and discussing IT project estimates that more effectively communicate that uncertainty to stakeholders. We will discuss French and Raven’s power theory,—

Centuries ago when UC Merced was just starting out ... OK so only 14 years go ... the Service Operations started as a typical configuration: Call Center and Service Desk. A complacency set over the land and the two team did not play well together. There was a lack of communication and we lost focus in our service orientation, and in a growing campus, this model would not take us from supporting 8800 (Students, Faculty, and Staff) in 2016 to—

In an effort to streamline and modernize our application development process, Educational Technology Services has started to implement new project management practices. We’ve recently started to create interactive, high-fidelity web application prototypes to promote collaborative conversations around the app’s structure, user interface, and workflow, as well as a collective understanding on the scope of the app’s features. The goal of this change is to reduce the friction between developers and stakeholders to create a final product that—

Is your campus clamoring for Tableau?  Do you have a proliferation of Tableau Desktop/Creator licenses but limited options for deploying visualizations and content securely and to the right audiences?  Learn how one UC campus is leveraging a consortium model to stand up a Tableau enterprise server with the shared goals of

• bringing on new campus partners quickly and efficiently;
• freeing analysts from software management tasks while offering them the control to manage their content and users; and—

The main campus website was built more than 6 years ago now, with only one small redesign between its launch and today. Our goal was to look at user experience issues with our existing content management system (CMS) and create a new website that would be easier to maintain and manage by public relations staff. At the same time, we upgraded to the most-recent version of our CMS, which improved our ability to maintain support for the—

Learn how the UCLA Health IT, Office of Health Informatics and Analytics Data Governance team leveraged the data governance platform Collibra to customize a solution to streamline access to data.  We'll share how we've enable the health sciences community including researchers and analytics centers of excellence to identify the right clinical, operational, financial or genomic data they need in a catalog and route approvals to improve efficiency.  The presentation will include a demo of the solution.

This past year at UC Santa Cruz, we changed our development methodology from Waterfall to Agile. This presentation shares some observations, experiences, and lessons our web application development team learned within the first 6 months of switching.

We'll discuss:

• Why we switched to Agile.
• How our new development team is structured.
• Things we changed over the first 6 months.
• Some of the lessons we learned.
• Take-aways from the developer perspective.
• And, in hindsight, whether we think it—

Do you have an enterprise data warehouse? Are you always challenged with integrating disparate sources? . Are your data integration  projects chaotic, labor intensive, with rapidly changing requirements and unhappy customers? Come and listen on how data virtualization helped our organization to unify data across different sources.   to reduce data duplication , to evolve quickly to changing requirements , to improve productivity in IT and by business data communities.

You may have heard about Process Palooza -- a one-of-a-kind extravaganza focusing on business process improvement that has taken on a life of its own, snowballing into a university-wide embrace of continuous improvement and business excellence. At the heart of Process Palooza is a high-stakes, fast-paced competition dubbed The Great LSS Race! LSS stands for Lean Six Sigma, a process improvement methodology built on reducing waste and improving efficiency. The competition puts teams’ LSS skills—

We’ve all got our data warehouses. Some are legendary. Some are decades old. All were built with love, blood, sweat and tears.These fine creations have served the ever changing BI needs for a long time. BI delivery timeframes have shrunk to such an extent that our warehouses cannot deliver high quality without compromise or risk. Can data warehouses be converted to data lakes? Can the data be salvaged? Can data lakes keep up with the new BI—

All UC locations have been transforming business using DocuSign for electronic signatures, forms automation, workflow and more.  It's a flexible and secure solution that you and your campus partners can use to make a big impact with little or no IT effort.

Learn, share and discuss how DocuSign is being leveraged with its core capabilities, Lean Six Sigma process improvement methodologies, software APIs for advanced integrations and more.

Prepare yourself to be awesome as you return to—

We all understand how important it is to have up to date integration information, but we want it to be easy to maintain. Each enterprise has hundreds of integrations across various systems, and it’s really hard to get all the information on whether and how they integrate with each other. Once in a while the CIO says, “I need all this information,” and a project is started to collect this data. This project team starts communicating with—

There is only audio for this presentation so, with permission from the presenter, we have provided the following links to supplement the audio recording: 

• Plain Text - "Handling Complicated Tasks with a Chatbot" slides
• Handling Complicated Tasks with a Chatbot Slides

 - UCTech 2019 Planning Committee

Last year out team starting using a chatbot named Zorgbort to handle the lengthy, monotonous, and critical task of deploying our code. The bot is able to take simple commands in—

As the lines between software, hardware and cloud products become increasingly blurred, more IT products are acquired as services provisioned in partnership with external suppliers.  Additionally, every institution business process owner, whether or not part of the IT organization, needs IT solutions (increasingly SaaS) to achieve their business outcomes.  These changes move the institutional role more from building and running IT, to managing a complex set of interrelated services and supplier relationships.  The rights and responsibilities of—

After a vendor pilot to provide student success tools to our campus failed, campus leadership asked us to determine the true needs of our academic advisors and other student support staff via a thoughtfully executed user-centric business analysis project.

Using the principles of design thinking and user-centered design, we tightly collaborated with these key stakeholders to understand existing workflows, identify gaps in data access and retrieval, and suss out the pain points that they’d long learned to—

UCXX IT PPMO struggled to keep up with demand for new JIRA projects and Confluence spaces. Result was frustrated teams and Cloud instances popping up around campus.

UCXX and IBM have teamed up to see how using Smart Chat technology and Robotic Process Automation (RPA) can make the experience of requesting new Jira Project and Confluence Spaces go from "Why is it taking so long to get my stuff created" to "Are you serious, that is wicked—

At the request of the presenter, the session recording will not be posted. Please reach out to the presenter with any questions. - UCTech 2019 Planning Committee

Delivering modern messaging (push messages and texts) into a native app involves reaching people where they are, in real-time, with current and pertinent information.  For example, as you pull up to the airport terminal, travelers greatly appreciate getting that text message, to inform you that your departure gate has changed—

Governance plays a critical role in vetting, approving, and prioritizing IT requests.  Common pitfalls in the life cycle of a service request typically result from inaccurate assumptions that all requests ought to be completed, and/or that all requests are of equal importance.  Often, such assumptions lead IT teams to allocate resources and expertise to requests that are high effort/low impact.  Likewise, this cultural phenomenon leads to a false sense of user-empowerment when it comes to the requesting—

This past year I was tasked with redeveloping/designing our campus class schedule. This tricky little application needed to sit inside of our campus CMS and inside department websites; while also being severless. This presentation is on how I architected and built a javascript single page application, with dynamic routing, as an embeddable widget that can be replicated anywhere.

Data is a valuable asset to any organization. Data Quality is an important and vital characteristic of  any data domain.
This session will explores a unique approach to data quality through a centralized AWS cloud-based framework, scalable to be used with any data source.
Proactively address and remediate data quality issues. Maintain data consistency and reliability.
Join us to discover an AWS Cloud-based Data Quality Framework.

Topics include

• Framework Architecture
• Data Quality Mart
• Data Quality agent
• Data—

It’s not just about standing up IT services anymore!  Project success is also about the quality of the underlying business processes and their adoption that leads to successful outcomes…or not. We all know how important business processes are to operating seamlessly and efficiently. And we know how challenging it is to create, optimize and maintain those processes. Learn how one campus is leveraging a state of the art Business Process Mapping (BPM) tool to address these challenges—

It can be easy for a team to get so caught up in doing agile "correctly” that the team stops actually being agile. When applying agile methodologies to different teams, it can be more beneficial to respond to the needs of the team than to adhere strictly to one agile framework or another (ex. Scrum, Kanban).

This panel, which consists of representatives from multiple agile development teams at UCI, will start with a short presentation from the—

This session was not recorded, at the request of the presenter - UCTech 2019 Planning Committee

IT Change Management is an established process which manages the risk of technical changes to an organization. Traditional waterfall development and SDLC have given way to Lean and Agile frameworks for getting work done.  Kanban boards and Gemba walks are a way to make work visible.  Cloud and DevOps is the new rage.   So, is Change Management still relevant? How can—

Television, computers and smartphones, have trained us to look at screens for information.  In response, digital signage has emerged as an effective way to tell your story and get your message out.  In addition to being cheaper and more environmentally friendly than print, it is also better at engaging audiences with dynamic and easy to update content.  

In this workshop, you will learn how to:

• Turn any screen into eye-catching digital signage using simple & affordable—

UC Campuses are all growing, and sometimes the way we provide our IT services must grow and evolve from small, localized practices, to more of a Centralized, and Enterprise-driven approach.  Enterprise Workload Automation has been around for years as a powerful IT tool for driving Organizational goals.  We encountered the challenge of reaching out to our IT partner teams, examining their current localized processes, and presenting solutions to them that can transform the way they conduct business—

Customer experience matters if a product or service is going to succeed -- and even with limited resources, customer success and empowerment is entirely achievable. At this session, learn how the Web Platform Services team at Berkeley provides training, support, and tools to our users so that they can build highly effective (and accessible!) websites using the Open Berkeley platform. 

We have witnessed a lot of extra effort wasted over the years in the UC system, costly endeavors to build huge and expensive one-off projects as well as efforts to build even bigger systems to consolidate and centralize these systems.This session will cover an alternative IT strategy that will make data-informed decision making more accessible for campuses. By leveraging existing campus-wide solutions and business processes, campuses can integrate and streamline them together using highly customizable platforms.—