Schedule

Everyone talks about building capacity for research, but how do you actually do it? In this presentation we'll share the story of the Scholarly Innovation Lab (SIL) as a "small startup" framework for digital research services, support and community.  The SIL is our answer to meeting the needs of the newer entrants to research computing — the arts, humanities, social and information sciences — with modest resources and a vision for a bigger future. We'll share lessons learned from our—

About a year ago, our campus stood up a high performance computing (HPC) cluster by networking together several different department’s research data centers. This consolidated compute nodes and storage into a single, much larger cluster which could then be utilized by any lab. We followed a co-operative model where a department could donate hardware to this cluster, and their jobs will be “niced” at level proportionate to their contribution value. Researchers could also access the cluster for—

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—

In this session, you will learn how mobile app design can be strategically leveraged in innovative ways to make data collection easier and to increase participant engagement. This information includes insights on user-centered approaches for applying design thinking methodology and includes a discussion of design best practices. Case studies of research apps for special populations will be demonstrated.

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—

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—

SeedMeLab is a set of modular building blocks to create powerful data management and data sharing websites. It enables research teams to manage, share, search, visualize, and present their data in a web-based environment using an access-controlled, branded, and customizable website they own and control. It supports storing and viewing data in a familiar tree hierarchy, but also supports formatted annotations, lightweight visualizations, and threaded comments on any file/folder. SeedMeLab can be easily extended and customized to support metadata, job parameters, and—

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 no recording for this session. The presenters have opted to provide the slides for attendees. These can be downloaded below in the Session Files section - UCTech 2019 Planning Committee

The battle to make research computing more accessible and secure, while extremely engaging, remains complex. This talk will focus on some of the cutting edge containerized research computing implementations that UCSF has designed, attempted to expand, and used at the Center for Digital Health Innovation—

This session will reveal the journey that the UCLA Web Services Team is going through in transitioning from a traditional web development shop to a data first web services organization in support of research and researchers. Areas of focus will include transitioning from traditional infrastructure to cloud infrastructure as-a-service, APIs for data sharing, and creating new knowledge through collaboration.

Because research IT has become a commodity, we need to look for other avenues for adding value. One way of doing 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—

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—

In early 2018, our campus rolled out a AWS environment for research computing with PHI, limited to a certain number of use cases, the idea being that if a researcher has a use case matching an approved one, they will have a much more streamlined option to start working on AWS, while still meeting all the security and compliance requirements. We also limited this to a few research projects at first so that we could refine the—

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—

Research facilitation is serious business. Such support is critical to the research and research-coupled academic enterprise. Annual sponsored research in the UC System has grown to over $6 billion dollars (2016-17), yet national sponsors are requiring more external collaboration and are scrutinizing the IT infrastructure that supports research projects. All of this requires complex IT solutions and technology expertise - it is no longer possible for the researcher to act independently, except for the very largest of—

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—

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

Several teams at our campus are building a research data platform, called Information Commons. Along with software tools and data models this forms an infrastructure serving the campus research community with many different types of de-identified clinical data. Currently available/planned data are electronic health records, images, clinical notes, omics and—

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—

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,—

ArcGIS is a powerful suite of spatial tools that scales to private enterprises, small cities, and likewise, universities. Structuring enterprise tools in a highly federated environment, such as a university, presents unique challenges, but when done correctly enables researchers to utilize an adaptable research toolkit and collaborate effectively without the overhead of administrative resource constraints. In this session, GIS and IT Professionals from multiple campuses, as well as from the GIS software company, Esri Education Team, will—

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—

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—

Information security of research data is often an afterthought, until there is a data emergency.  We, in our department, have collaborated with data governance, security, CTSI, and privacy, to establish a procedural and technical plan to help ensure the security of our data delivery.  We have focused on 3 methods to improve our IS: quick disclosure, recurring data requests, and Service Now practices to tighten up our security methods.  In this session I will review these methods—

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—

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

Recently we have launched a new initiative in our institution called “Research Enablement” . This initiative has paved the way for IT to understand the research community’s technology needs, so that we can provide them with secure and sophisticated IT solutions to conduct—

Researchers generate lots of data, and want to store all of it.  As a Research IT group supporting labs and groups with over 1,250 TiB of primary storage, we've built storage solutions of all sizes.  In this session, we'll go over our current solutions for groups with storage needs in the following categories: less than 2 TiB, 2 TiB-200 TiB, and 300+ TiB.  We'll talk about systems built on both flash and magnetic drives, and discuss backup,—

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—

Many research support groups across the UC system are not engaging with (or may be completely unaware of) the many regional and national organizations that exist to support research IT professionals. As such, they are missing the chance to connect with peers, learn about how others are addressing challenges, and what good practices are emerging. This leads to time and resources lost to reinventing wheels, and ultimately to less effective support of research on our campuses. Organizations in—

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—

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—

As the University of California, San Francisco prepares for a containerized future across many different platforms, environments, and teams, the School of Medicine Technology Services team (SOMTech) has begun experimenting with cross-platform containerization solutions. In this experimental architecture, deployment, and development effort, the School of Medicine has built and tested a multi-tenant Kubernetes solution on top of its existing Amazon Research Cloud implementation (ARC + Elastic Kubernetes Service) previously described in the 2018 talk Accelerating Secure Medical—

Many research computing services are seeing rapid growth in the use of virtual machine (VM) and container images to support research computation, applications, and workflows (Belmann et al., 2015). These images are used across a range of compute models and disciplines. Researcher interest in VMs and containers is driven by a wide range of considerations, including need to provision and run VM images when using cloud resources; portability of environments to multiple computational resources or platforms; efficiency in—