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,—

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—

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—

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—

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—

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—

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—

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—

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.

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.

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—

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—

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—

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 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.—