Browse our accepted proceeding abstracts. The sessions are divided into 3 tracks: Leadership Development, Operational Excellence, and Technology Topics.
Check out our Table of Contents providing free access to Abstracts and Papers in the ACM Digital Library.
The conference program is also available.
Leadership Development
Here and There and Everywhere: Leading Hybrid Teams
Laurie Fox (SUNY Geneseo), Andrea Tanner (Morgan State University), Jean Tagliamonte (Vassar) and Nick Pistentis (MSU Denver)
In a post-pandemic workplace, many employees are continuing to work remotely. Organizations must learn new ways to manage employees and maintain a culture of excellence. This panel features leaders of hybrid teams who will each discuss their experiences. Attendees will learn about remote work policies from other colleges, discuss engagement ideas for hybrid teams, and discover how we are solving management challenges presented by this new work model.
Leadership Improv – Again!
Ella Tschopik (MERIT, School of Education, UW Madison)
Improvisational theater may seem distant from our daily meetings, emails and tasks, but as we will learn through doing this session, there are many connections between the two. For example, what do you do when someone gives you a problem and needs an immediate solution? Learning improv skills helps you develop quick thinking, flexibility and collaboration. Come find out how and start improving through improv!
Making Accessibility Accessible: Quick Tips for Making Inclusive Contents.
Mo Nishiyama (Oregon Health & Science University)
Accessibility might sound like a popular buzzword that is commonly thrown around by executives, designers, and user experience practitioners. But it’s more than that–accessibility ensures that your services and systems are usable by a greater audience. Accessibility also helps bring equity to all users of your service. And accessibility considerations assist with complying with federal mandates.
This Lightning Talk will cover why accessibility matters in our workplace, and why it is not an optional “nice to have” feature. We will discuss how to evaluate our contents with accessibility in mind. We will also discuss several tips and design strategies for making your contents accessible.
My 2022 SIGUCCS Report
Laurie Fox (SUNY Geneseo)
The SIGUCCS Book Club reads six books each year on topics ranging from leadership to personal productivity. This lightning talk will cover our 2022 titles. The book selections were:
- Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals Oliver Burkeman
- REMOTE: Office Not Required Fried & Hansson
- My Own Words Ruth Bader Ginsburg
- Drive: the Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us Daniel H. Pink
- The Manager’s Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth & Change Camille Fournier
- Leading from the Middle: A Playbook for Managers to Influence Up, Down, and Across the Organization Scott Mautz
Neurodiversity in the IT Workplace
Mo Nishiyama (Oregon Health & Science University)
Based on different studies, neurodiverse individuals represent anywhere between 15 to 20 percent of the population. They experience neurological differences in the way they think and interact, compared to neurotypical population. Neurodiversity covers Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), Dyslexia, Dyspraxia, Dyscalculia, and Tourette syndrome.
Neurodiverse individuals experience challenges navigating in a workplace. These challenges include managing job interviews, fitting into their workplace culture, communicating their work style preferences, mitigating distractions, and facing workplace discrimination on the basis of their “invisible disability.”
This panel will be comprised of members of the SIGUCCS community who identify as being neurodiverse. The talk will discuss how neurodiversity impacts their work styles, interpersonal communications, and support structures that are in place to ensure their safety.
One Institution’s Approach to Collaborative IT Strategic Plan Development
Nick Pistentis (MSU Denver)
Publication of a technology strategic plan is a crucial step in most organizations’ maturity, articulating the upcoming technology priorities identified by tech leaders and relating them to the success of the organization at large.
In this session, we will share the approach taken by MSU Denver ITS to brainstorm, curate, analyze and publish our strategic plan in the hopes that our method may benefit other institutions who wish to pursue a similar path.
Out in Tech: An Open Discussion about Inclusive Workspaces
Robert Fricke (Whitman College), Brandon Hopkins (Harold Washington College) and Nicholas Hardy (SUNY Empire State College)
The drive for both diversity and Inclusion has become more and more central to the core values of many instructional institutions throughout the world. Until recently, many LGBTQ+ people felt the need to hide who they were. As a somewhat invisible minority status it was often difficult to participate in many of the personal discussions that our “straight” co-workers regularly engaged in; finding ways to still converse without giving away our secret. It is those tough and, frankly, scary conversations that are so very important to not only our own psyche, but also for those around us. In this facilitated discussion we will open the floor to the topics of LGBTQ+ inclusion in the workplace, coming out to coworkers, what it means to be an ally, and much more. This will be a welcoming and affirming environment, regardless of where you are on the spectrum. Let’s have an open and candid conversation of our experiences, be you LGBTQ+ or not!
Surviving an Owner-less Software Implementation Project
Kathryn Fletcher (West Virginia University)
This presentation will present lessons learned during a software implementation project where the software in question did not have a clear business owner. WVU Information Technology Services (ITS) served as the service owner, providing administrative support for a vendor-hosted solution. However, there was not a clearly defined executive administrator, external to ITS, to serve as the final authority on implementation project decisions. Instead, WVU’s Chief Security Officer led the project with some guidance from WVU’s Assistant Vice President for Finance and with the assistance of an ITS Project Manager. The project was successfully completed on time.
Operational Excellence
Careful or Correct?
Becky Klein (Drake University)
Does technical accuracy get in the way of your communication skills? Working in IT, we understand the importance of making sure we’re sharing accurate information with our end users, especially because mistakes and inaccuracies can prevent technology from cooperating with us. But being technically accurate can get in the way of communicating your message.
This lightning talk will be formatted as a pecha kucha and will help you think about what effective communication is, why it’s more important to communicate effectively than to stress making sure you’re technically accurate, and what you can do to be a more effective communicator. You’ll gain some tools to think through your mindset and also learn a new style of presenting!
Creating a New Knowledge Base with TeamDynamix
Carol Sobczak (University of University of Maine System)
The University of Maine System identified a critical need for improved knowledge management in early 2020. At this time, a contract had recently been signed with TeamDynamix for a comprehensive Service Management application, but implementation was delayed due to impacts of the pandemic.
In June 2020, the decision was made to implement TeamDynamix initially only for knowledge management. Much training and development took place over the next 16 months and a new knowledge base was launched in the fall of 2021.
In April 2021, review of existing content in Confluence began. A period of transfer was conducted for some content. Because our service catalog would also be re-developed, that review was done and the content there was used for identifying categories in the knowledge base.
Initial training was developed for article creators and approvers. That training is ongoing as people are added and as teams outside IT (for example, HR and Procurement) are added to utilize TDX for their knowledge base development.
Delivering an IT Professional Development Program
Carol Sobczak (University of University of Maine System)
The University of Maine System identified the need for someone with training and development expertise in their IT department. It was established in late 2015.
An initial IT professional development program was developed in 2018. Phase 1 of the program included establishing a centralized budget and marketing the program and forms to all IT staff. Phase 2 was the full implementation of the program and was interrupted by the pandemic. Phase 3 begins in late 2022 and includes a mentoring/coaching/job shadowing process. Phase 4 will include elearning vendor(s) available to all IT staff and the creation of a micro credentialing system upon completion of certain coursework.
Few to Zero-Touch Deployments with JAMF
Jason Dailey (California Institute of the Arts)
The need for automated deployments is something that we at CalArts had to try out due to the sudden impact of COVID-19. We leveraged a relationship with a JAMF support consultant to use trigger hooks and prestage enrollments to deploy new laptops to our clients. I’ll share best practices and pitfalls to avoid in this journey to a truly zero-touch deployment.
From Gatekeeping to Building Guardrails: Modernizing Document Management
Mo Nishiyama (Oregon Health & Science University)
The Help and How-To user support documentation at Oregon Health & Science University is about to celebrate its 9-year anniversary. From its humble roots as a knowledge base article collection running on an ancient Content Management System, the Help and How-To system has evolved into a dynamic Wiki-based end user document library.
With success comes new challenges. With the number of IT services offered increasing each year with no corresponding increase in dedicated support staff, it has become essential to modernize the content management processes. We have moved away from having a single source of content approval to a distributed method of collaborative maintenance and changes. By moving away from a gatekeeper model to nurturing a Friends of Documentation community, we have spread the editing work amongst staff members across the IT organization, discovered opportunities for new content formats, and built new partnerships.
This Lightning Talk will discuss what we did to transition content management strategy to a decentralized model, its impact on keeping contents up to date, and enable scalability for support documents.
Implementation and Initial Operation of IDaaS as Integrated Authentication Infrastructure in TUAT
Takahiro Nemoto, Kazuhiro Mishima and Shigeyoshi Aoyam (Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology)
Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology (TUAT) replaced our Academic Information Infrastructure System in October 2021. This system includes an educational computer system, a printing system, a library system, and an authentication infrastructure system, and it is replaced every five years. In this system renewal, we migrated a part of the authentication and ID management functions performed by the authentication infrastructure on the private cloud to IDaaS, which performs authentication and ID management in the cloud. In addition, the migration to IDaaS has led to the gradual implementation of Single Sign-On (SSO) and Multi- Factor Authentication (MFA), which had not been in operation at our university, and this has resulted in a significant change in the authentication environment for our university’s users.
The system has been in operation since October 2021, and it has already performed many authentications. In this article, we research the usage of this system as a result of the initial stage of operation. In this research, we use the authentication logs of IDaaS to tabulate the number of successful and failed authentication attempts and the number of logins to services that use this system as an Identity Provider(IdP). Furthermore, we will discuss the usage trends of this system and its impact on users, taking into account the timing of events such as the implementation of MFA and the entrance of new students, which occurred after the introduction of the system.
In this article, we introduce IDaaS and its operation in the initial stage and summarize the impact on users caused by the replacement of the authentication infrastructure, which cannot be known only by user inquiries.
Lessons from a Combined Service Desk
Ella Tschopik (University of Wisconsin – Madison School of Education)
Returning to campus in fall of 2021, MERIT Library combined our Library Service Desk and our IT Service Desk into a one stop shop. It was a year of learning and growth as we collected feedback and worked to train our students on everything that could come their way. Come hear lessons and takeaways from our first combined year.
Looking Forward to An Improved Service Desk Experience
Miranda Carney-Morris (Lewis & Clark College)
At Lewis & Clark, we had an old and outdated ticketing system which no longer met our operational needs and prevented progress on strategic goals, such as improving student engagement. In 2022, we decided to select and implement a modern ITSM tool to retool our service operation to better meet the needs of our community, which is increasingly shifting away from a preference for face-to-face support. Additional goals include increasing engagement with IT Services, improving student awareness of services we offer, and finally, enabling a shift towards self-service problem resolution that we could capture and document. This presentation will discuss our steps to success and lessons learned along the way as we transition to a modern ITSM tool.
Looking Forward to Service Desk Excellence
Becky Klein, Sam Solheim, Liam Cunha and Maddie Backhaus (Drake University)
Allow us to set the scene: you are the first full-time manager of an IT help desk on a college campus. The few policies and procedures in place are immature, and training and documentation provided to staff is minimal. The approximately 20 student techs are eager to work but deliver inconsistent service to end users. Student pay is stagnant and woefully inadequate for the breadth of information they’re expected to know. In addition to this, scheduling is made more challenging as nearly all students are in the same academic program and therefore taking the same classes together. There is no official recruitment program in place, and staff turnover is a constant low-level churn.
You’re determined to provide outstanding support to campus, develop a robust student staff with strong technical and soft skills, and contribute to improving the overall department’s reputation in the campus community. But how?
This scenario might scare some away just at the thought of the increased stress levels, sheer amount of work to be done, and risk of failure. After all, this kind of operational excellence is almost as elusive as a unicorn.
This paper will share how the Drake University ITS Support Center faced this exact situation and did the work to overcome every challenge. Job descriptions were formalized, training was structured and expanded, student wages were revamped, and a recruiting plan continues to develop. More improvements are planned for the future. We’re looking forward to achieving our operational excellence goals and beyond!
SIGUCCS User Support Academy
Karl Owens (University of Oregon)
One of the major criticisms of sending someone to the annual SIGUCCS conference is an inability to quantify the value to the organization of an employee’s attendance. SIGUCCS’s value has always been the personal professional development of the attending individual. Content has always been peripheral to the personal growth one receives by interacting with their higher education peers. However, the building of human capital is hard to attach to a budget line.
To raise the likelihood a supervisor will fund conference attendance, let’s propose the development of a user support academy hosted by the SIGUCCS annual conference. A workshop series focused on providing high-level standardized training for novice and intermediate higher-ed technology support workers. The workshops would be led by expert SIGUCCS members (directors, managers, coordinators, trainers). Recruiting for instructors will encourage member participation from folks who have changed positions, retired, or simply matured in their position to a point they are no longer innovating.
The academy will provide the necessary business purpose supervisors need to justify conference attendance. Attendees will then have the opportunity to experience professional development from interaction with peers from other higher education institutions.
This paper will outline proposed course content and provide a framework that will provide a sustainable process that will allow the academy to persist from conference to conference.
Then and now: The evolving landscape of technology training
Beth Lynn Nolen (Indiana University – UITS IT Training)
As technology changes, so do learners’ needs for training. In the eleven years I’ve spent working as a technology trainer, IT Training’s offerings have evolved quite a bit – from three hour long, instructor-led in person workshops to self-study online courses and short webinars focusing on current needs at Indiana University. In this poster presentation, I’ll discuss the changes in IT Training’s offerings and why they came to be.
Using Data to Overcome Staffing Issues in Higher Ed IT
Matt Darrington, John Felushko AND Wally Hasslinger (LabStats)
The purpose of this report is to understand the staffing challenges faced by Higher Education IT departments, and to utilize information that is already available, by combining it with other data sources to identify possible solutions.
We Built It, and No One Came: Visualization Lab Redesign, Take 2, in a Pandemic
Nancy Cunningham, Jimmy Murray and Dj Wyrick (University of Oregon)
While visualization labs draw initial enthusiasm, they are difficult to maintain, support, and refresh to sustain and grow usage. In 2016, University of Oregon (UO) Libraries opened a renovated science library equipped with a makerspace and high-definition visualization lab. After substantial investment of time and technology, by 2020, the lab was not living up to expectations. Complicated, vendor-dependent system design and support coupled with restrictive use policies resulted in low use and unreliable technology. At the time, the need for an exclusive visualization screen for research was oversold, resulting in a space that was not flexible to accommodate the diverse needs of faculty across campus. Lockdown of the science library during the pandemic provided time to re-envision the lab as an innovative space to encourage collaboration between students and faculty to compile, render, and visualize research. It also allowed time to develop a training program for student employees to support users and secure campus IT partners to redesign the space to enhance performance.
Technology Topics
An attempt to acquire terminal information using endpoint security software
Ayumu Haruta (Kyoto Institute of Technology), Hideo Masuda (Kyoto Institute of Technology), Hiromi Yamaoka (Kyoto Institute of Technology), Tsuyoshi Akiyama (Kyoto Institute of Technology), Kazuki Yamamoto (Kyoto Institute of Technology), Keisuke Tamai (Kyoto Institute of Technology) and Sunao Adachi (Kyoto Institute of Technology).
In this report, the Endpoint Security software used by users will be changed from Symantec to ESET, and we will report on an attempt to acquire information on PC managed by the university using the API of ESET. At the Kyoto Institute of Technology, we have distributed the Symantec Endpoint Protection software to faculty and staff computers used at the university. Symantec Endpoint Protection registers the terminal information with the management server on campus at the time of installation. Our contracted Microsoft Enrollment for Education Solutions license allows desktop versions of Office products to be installed only on university-managed devices, otherwise Microsoft 365 is used. Until now, in order to install the desktop version of Office, the MAC address was requested in the application form, and the installation media was loaned after confirmation at our Center of Infomation Science. With Symantec, we obtained the MAC address from the information collected by the management server of Symantec Endpoint Protection and confirmed can be used on the PC which Microsoft Office has been used. However, the Endpoint Security product contracted by the university will expire at the end of 2022, so new endpoint protection software by ESET will be introduced instead. The management server for ESET cannot easily get the MAC address of a registered device like Symantec Endpoint Protection. Therefore, we made an attempt to identify the registered PC using ESET’s management server API.
An attempt at an on-demand automated connection test suite for updating network infrastructure.
Ayumu Haruta (Kyoto Institute of Technology), Hideo Masuda (Kyoto Institute of Technology), Hiromi Yamaoka (Kyoto Institute of Technology), Tsuyoshi Akiyama (Kyoto Institute of Technology), Kazuki Yamamoto (Kyoto Institute of Technology), Keisuke Tamai (Kyoto Institute of Technology) and Sunao Adachi (Kyoto Institute of Technology)
Kyoto Institute of Technology updated our network to improve security and stability in the spring of 2022. When we updated the network, we changed routing points and dynamic routing settings. It was necessary to test the new network settings to check if there would be any problems. The large number of VLANs on campus made it was difficult for humans to perform the tests manually. In addition, since the work was done at night to reduce the impact on users’ network usage such as research, education and office work, it was difficult to assign workers who are familiar with the network. To address these challenges, we created an automated connection test suite by combining the virtual infrastructure and automation software such as Ansible. In this paper, we will report on the details of the automated connection test suite we created for the Spring 2022 network update, the automation method, and its application to other operation tests in the future.
CMDB Assessment and Remediation
Dan R. Herrick (Washington University in St. Louis).
The Configuration Management Database, or CMDB, provides a means of organizing an organization’s IT hardware and software assets and understanding the relationship between them, making it a critical foundation for service management and asset management. Designing the initial implementation normally involves a significant organizational effort, but once the implementation team goes away, what happens to the CMDB? Who cares for it? What could go wrong with just letting it do its thing?
Say your CMDB has been humming along quietly for a few years and you want to make sure it’s working as intended; or you suspect it could use a tune-up; or you are seeing some questionable data and it’s not performing as expected. In this session, we will go over why and how to perform an assessment of CMDB health, what steps to perform and prioritize to remediate poor CMDB health, and how to develop ongoing evaluation and remediation. Real world examples from a ServiceNow CMDB will be used.
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Robert’s Rules of Order
Eric Handler (Macalester College)
As a result of the COVID-19 Pandemic Macalester was no longer able to have in person faculty meetings. As a result, the academic technology team was consulted on how best to address voting.
As there were a handful of contentious votes over the 2 years of virtual faculty meetings many interesting topics needed to be addressed like what does anonymous voting mean to the faculty, how do the faculty trust technology and how does that impact anonymous voting, etc.
I’ll also discuss lessons learned about validating, virtually, who is and is not an eligible member of the voting faculty. I’ll conclude with a quick summary of the state of the faculty meeting as a hybrid event as of Fall 2022.
End of Basic Authentication and Migration to Modern Authentication for Exchange Online
Yoshiaki Kasahara (Kyushu University)
At Kyushu University, Information Infrastructure Initiative provides an email service named “Primary Mail Service” for students and staff members with Microsoft Office 365 Exchange Online. On September 20th, 2019, Microsoft announced the end of support for Basic Authentication for Exchange Online, which is considered vulnerable to identity leakages such as phishing and malware attacks. Microsoft would require users to use Modern Authentication such as Exchange protocol or OAuth 2.0 authorization with IMAP, POP, and SMTP. Historically we had instructed our users to use IMAP or POP and SMTP protocols for their email applications, including Microsoft Outlook and Mozilla Thunderbird, so disabling Basic Authentication should significantly impact our user population. In September 2021, Microsoft announced the end of September 2022 as the hard deadline for disabling Basic Authentication. Based on available information, we prepared migration documents from Basic Authentication to Modern Authentication and started to notify users to abandon Basic Authentication. Sending messages to users did not seem to be effective after a couple of notifications, so we tried to temporarily disable Basic Authentication to realize the remaining users through authentication failures. In this paper, we would like to share our experiences about the effect of retiring Basic Authentication for Exchange Online on our service and users.
Gadgets Made for Preventing the Spread of COVID-19 infection in a Small University.
Takashi Yamanoue (Fukuyama University, Japan), Takashi Ozeki (Fukuyama University) and Naoki Kagawa (Fukuyama University)
The prevalence of COVID-19 affects activities of universities in world-wide in 2020 and it is still affecting in the summer of 2022. Many campuses were closed, and online classes were held instead of in-person classes during spring of 2020. Some universities started in-person classes after that.
The crisis response headquarters of our university announced the health survey, on April 8th, 2020, in order to have in-person classes safely, once the danger for infection was mitigated. Every student and staff member are asked to fill out their health status, every day in the survey.
However, many students and staff were feeling annoyed by answering the survey every day. In order to mitigate this annoying feeling, we are developing an easy input system in the health survey using Raspberry Pi and some peripherals. When a student comes to a classroom without answering the survey at home, they can answer the survey in the classroom using the input system easily.
Good ventilation is said to be good for reducing virus particles in our room and keeping COVID-19 from spreading. In order to ventilate our classrooms, we would like to know how a classroom is polluted and it can be realized by measuring the carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration in the room. And we also want to have the alarm when there is high CO2 concentration in the classroom. We designed a simple CO2 alarm using an Arduiono microprocessor, which alarms us about the high concentration of CO2. and we made several CO2 alarms. We have placed them in several classrooms including two computer laboratories.
Fortunately, there is no COVID-19 cluster until Summer of 2022 in the classrooms which are equipped with the gadgets.
How to Achieve an Easier, Cost-Effective Hybrid Event Environment: Actual Equipment Cases and its Way to the Future.
Kazuhiro Mishima (Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology), Hiroki Kashiwazaki (Kindai University) and Yoshiaki Kitaguchi (Tokyo Institute of Technology)
With the outbreak of COVID-19, the lecture environment at universities has increasingly turned into online environments. In addition to those delivered entirely by online tools, there are hybrid, online and in-person, lecture environments. Hybrid casting environments are growing not only in the classroom, but also in various conferences. In an online-only meeting environment, web conferencing tools such as Zoom and Webex can be used to approximately achieve the objective. In a hybrid environment, however, a face-to-face environment is also necessary, and it is essential to build an environment that is aware of both online and face-to-face interaction. It would be fine if the venue already has the equipment to serve the purpose, but in some cases, there are no facilities, and the equipment must be carried in and arranged. At this point, the most difficult point is in the audio system configuration. This requires a certain level of technical knowledge and a certain level of cost expense. For a reasonable cost, it is possible to outsource to a specialized service provider to create a perfect casting environment. However, in many situations, it is difficult to take significant costs and many people are trying to manage the situations by trial and error. We have experienced various hybrid casting situations. Recently, we try to consider how to reduce costs from various aspects, such as “avoiding high costs in terms of manpower, equipment, and expenses,” “not requiring operators to have lots of knowledge,” and “minimizing the amount of equipment to be carried in, as it is integrated with the existing equipment at the venue. In this presentation, we provide actual examples of hybrid casting environments in which the author experienced, mainly by bringing in, setting up, and operating equipment by one person, and outlines the key points of these operations, as well as considering what kind of casting environment can reduce various costs and achieve hybrid casting more easily. We would like to share with the SIGUCCS community what kind of total peripheral environment is needed to make hybrid delivery more familiar, not just the delivery technology itself, such as Zoom or Webex, and to think together about how it should be.
IPv6 and Network Security Deployment Use Cases
Sho Fujimura (Fukuoka University) and Masaru Okumura (Fukuoka University)
As the digital campus rapidly develops, universities are faced with the issue of a lack of IP addresses and demands for even greater network security. What measures should we be
taking to answer these challenges? In order to make up for the lack of IPv4 addresses and to maintain future internet connectivity, 12 years ago Fukuoka University commenced the task of moving to IPv6 in the campus network. In addition, to meet the challenges of the ever increasing diverse and advanced nature of malicious network attacks, there is an acute need for a more and changeable approach in creating a wide-ranging multi- layered system for campus network security. This paper analyses the implementation, operation and current status of the IPv6 network and network security at Fukuoka University and examines the results and future implications.
A Lightweight Abnormality Detection Mechanism by Stray Packets Analysis.
Yong Jin (Tokyo Institute of Technology), Satoshi Matsuura (Tokyo Institute of Technology), Takao Kondo (Keio University), Tatsumi Hosokawa (Keio University) and Masahiko Tomoishi (Tokyo Institute of Technology)
An academic organization network, e.g., a campus network, is running with limited financial support and manpower while it faces the same operational issues and cybersecurity threats as other organizations. Including the existing network facilities and computers for service providing, the increase of mobile devices such as BYOD becomes an issue in terms of misconfiguration and vulnerabilities. The current security systems focus on the backbone network so that the detailed traffic monitoring and data analysis cannot cover the abnormal behavior of all individual endpoints. In general, a misconfigured or intrused computer conducts some abnormal behavior, e.g., sending stray packets, compared to a normal device. Based on this point, we propose a lightweight abnormality detection mechanism by monitoring the stray packets in order to mitigate the above issues. As a result, not only the abnormal behavior can be detected but also maintain the performance of the existing security systems. In this paper, we describe the design and architecture of our proposed ‘Traffic Analyzer’, including the implementation and evaluation of our prototype system.
Looking forward to.. (and back) IT Asset Management
Parrish Nnambi (UC San Diego), Dan Herrick (Washington University in St. Louis), Kendra Strode (Rollins College), Brandon Hopkins (Harold Washington College) and John Felushko (Labstats)
Looking back to…: ITAM generally grows organically in an organization, and maybe you started with spreadsheets or a COTS database, or if you’re lucky, a customized database with a web frontend that’s developed and maintained by one person. Refresh reports are ad-hoc at best. Inventory snapshots are what you strive for. The lowest maturity level is reactive, manual, resource intensive, and has no standardized processes or definitions. Accuracy and confidence may be low, but it’s better than nothing!
Looking forward to…: A more mature ITAM program provides and articulates benefits for customers, service providers, and decision-makers in the form of reports, data, and workflow. Discovering assets and integrating data from your endpoint management tools, procurement system, facilities management system, and HR. Using industry best practices, standards, and definitions. Automated reporting by device, location, warranty, refresh date, and other essential information. Customers monitor and manage their own area’s assets, and employee on/offboarding is enhanced. Accuracy, completeness, and automation to support workflow is high!
Join us (Dan Herrick, Kendra Strode, Brandon Hopkins, Parrish Nnambi, and moderated by John Felushko) as we talk about:
*Where are you at in the ITAM maturity spectrum? Where are you heading?
*Where did you come from? How did your/your org’s asset journey begin?
*Why did you decide to invest in ITAM? What are the value points to IT organizations at various levels?
*And More
Making Accessibility Accessible: Quick Tips for Making Inclusive Contents
Mo Nishiyama (Oregon Health & Science University)
Accessibility might sound like a popular buzzword that is commonly thrown around by executives, designers, and user experience practitioners. But it’s more than that–accessibility ensures that your services and systems are usable by a greater audience. Accessibility also helps bring equity to all users of your service. And accessibility considerations assist with complying with federal mandates.
This Lightning Talk will cover why accessibility matters in our workplace, and why it is not an optional “nice to have” feature. We will discuss how to evaluate our contents with accessibility in mind. We will also discuss several tips and design strategies for making your contents accessible.
New Tools for Old Services: Implementing Web Checkout for UW-Madison InfoLabs Technology Circulation.
Jeremiah Ray (University of Wisconsin-Madison) and Reina Werth (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
UW-Madison’s InfoLabs program, which runs and manages computer labs and associated services across campus, has circulated technology in various forms for over two decades. Once the program’s Technology Circulation service was established, an application was locally commissioned to support it: the Equipment Checkout System (ECS), which began support in Spring of 2005. In 2020, ECS was flagged as in need of replacement due to its aging code base and lack of campus support. A small team was formed from stakeholder groups to find and decide on a third-party, hosted solution to bring the service into modern norms and provide room to grow into the future. Focusing on the successes and pitfalls of migrating from a first party, tailor-made application to a hosted third-party application, we will discuss the process that led to the implementation of WebCheckout to replace ECS, including team formation, decision-making, and rollout processes. We will also include several service benefits and takeaways relevant to managers, technical staff, operators, and support professionals regarding thoroughly documenting and supporting a new application in a mature environment with high expectations of service.
Solve Your Google Storage Problems in only 516 Days!
Allan Chen (CA Institute of Arts)
With Google’s announcement of a storage cap in 2021, effective mid-2022, many schools had to scramble to decrease their footprint rapidly, often with a constituent base that was disengaged and not checking for announcements. At CalArts, where students and alumni are in the same domain and whose work is very media-intensive, we were 800% of the coming storage cap, and facing a significant communications, policy, and technical challenge to become compliant in time. Come learn about our approach and outcomes in what has proven to be a dynamic and fluid project involving the entire CalArts IT team.
Taming Invisible Realms: New Tools For Managing Learning Space Wireless Environments
Owen McGrath (UC Berkeley)
Wireless communication technologies underlie a wide range of teaching and learning activities in higher education today. The scope and reach of wireless systems now extend to most activities that occur inside lecture halls, classrooms, computer labs, and informal study areas. Instructors and students rely upon continuous wireless connections in traditional lecture, seminar, and newer active learning formats, as they coordinate their activities around digital material. Unfortunately, the very success of the wireless revolution regularly contributes to chronic problems as so many people and activities rely upon this convenient mode. In particular, the very invisibility inherent in wireless technology tends to obscure the state, capacity, and coverage options for managing the many and varied connections across different providers, multiple protocols, and hundreds of users in the same space all remain invisible. When it works, we take it for granted. When it fails, we experience a crisis. There’s little in between in terms of visualizing, analyzing, and forecasting the performance of this vital but invisible realm. Front-line educational technology support staff are left with little information to analyze about what’s going on, let alone be able to contribute towards sustainable solutions for making it more reliable. This paper surveys low-cost devices along with PC and smartphone software applications to show how these can be put in the hands of academic technology support staff, potentially giving them at least auxiliary or triage roles in helping identify and track down connectivity problems in the ever-more complicated wireless environments on campus.
Taking Your Work Home: On Being the Family Tech Support
Tom Gerace (Tulane University)
If you are in a technical field, no matter what you do from web design to developer to CIO, you likely have something in common with others in similar positions – you are the family technical support. We graciously accept the challenge to look into the cause of a family member’s slow computer or erratic mouse movements, and over time become victims of our own success.
While most of us don’t mind sharing our knowledge with those close to us, we can sometimes feel overwhelmed with the cries for help at night when you simply want to rest, at lunch when you seek quiet time to clear your inbox, or at holiday gatherings when you’d rather be talking kids, art, or football.
The phenomenon is so widespread that there is even a meme called Family Technical Support Guy, first discovered in December 2010, that is popular due mainly to its relatable nature. Our colleagues commiserate with us in the break room about their own family tech support woes from the weekend, feeling very much like a support group for family tech support. And while little is written about the topic, what is available gives little more advice than “take a deep breath.” Still, we all know that despite the occasional frustrations, requests for help from family are a recognition of our knowledge and skill and we do get intrinsic satisfaction from helping.
In this paper we present the Family Technical Support problem as we all know it and relate some common frustrations that the important position commonly encounters. We provide suggestions to help solve and even mitigate some of the most common problems, especially recurring problems. And we present ideas to break the cycle of family, extended family, or neighbor support should that be your goal. Most importantly, we hope the reader finds a support structure within this paper giving them the assurance that they are not alone.
What is HyFlex?
Robert Sobczak (University of Maine System)
In 1989, the University of Maine System (UMS) began a Distance Learning program to help get Higher Education throughout the state without building costly campuses. This system became the Interactive Television System (ITS), designed to deliver live, interactive classes, statewide. In 2018 our classroom gear was upgraded to support high definition video. This left us well positioned to continue classes in 2020. With only a few, minor adjustments, UMS ITV classes continued and were able to be part of the UMS transition to HyFlex: hybrid courses with flexible participation.
The pandemic only slightly changed the way we operated. We still have three broadcast classrooms at the Augusta campus, but they now all have HD Digital equipment. Two and a half years of the pandemic has eliminated the One-way video, two-way audio scenario. Students can participate in classes at the same locations with new upgraded video conference equipment or sit at their homes, work or a park and utilize their own equipment to participate in their education.
Wireless LAN Operation and Behavioral Inferences from Usage Analysis
Masaru Okumura (Fukuoka University) and Sho Fujimura (Fukuoka University)
Most network connections on campus are shifting from wired to wireless. Understanding and analyzing the usage of wireless LANs can lead us beyond mere network management to the analysis of users’ behavior on campus and the discovery of new insights. In 2022, campus activity has returned to levels seen before the pandemic, the effects of the COVID-19 disaster remain. Compared to pre-pandemic years, the use of wireless LANs on campus has increased significantly due to high smartphone ownership rates and the promotion of distance learning reliant on personally owned devices (BYOD). The use of multiple devices per person has also increased, creating new issues such as congestion and IP allocation problems. To accurately understand and improve these situations, we are collecting and analyzing connection information of our wireless LAN systems. Interestingly, our analysis of wireless LAN use provides information beyond the mere discovery of technical problems. From the results, we were able to identify ways we might improve the operation of the wireless LAN, as well as information to make inferences about the time spent by students on campus, their flow lines, and their behavior patterns. In this paper, we will report on the current status of the operation of the wireless LAN at Fukuoka University and the behavioral information inferred from our analysis of wireless LAN usage.