Join us for a conversation with three Chicago-based Chief Information Officers. Learn how each has navigated the disruptions and changes associated with COVID-19 pandemic at their institutions and how their IT departments are faring under new conditions of remote and hybrid work. We’ll look at the biggest challenges facing their institutions today and how they approached possible solutions. Meet our CIOS below.

Growing as an IT professional can (and should) look different at different points along your path. For some, this never involves official management or leadership roles, and for others that’s the goal from the get-go. It can be tough to figure out what is right for you without wide-ranging support along the way.

This panel invites Mark Davis, Jr., Director of IT Services and Interim CIO at Swarthmore; Parrish Nnambi, Director of Endpoint Management at UCSD; Shawn Plummer, Director of ITS Infrastructure & Operations at RIT; and Kendra Strode, former Director of IT Support & Outreach at Rollins; to share their stories of growth and change in IT and IT leadership, with surprising twists and turns. Come hear answers to a range of questions like “what does leadership look like from where you are now,” and “how has SIGUCCS been part of your journey?”

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

One of the main criticisms from campus administration of attending the annual SIGUCCS conference is, what is the quantitative value to the sending organization of an employee’s attendance? The real value of SIGUCCS membership and its annual conference has always been the career development, networking and personal growth provided by meeting with industry peers who encourage, inspire, and motivate you to improve yourself in your chosen profession. But managers need a business reason to justify expenditures. Generally, administrators consider payroll enough motivation to perform well on the job. Professional development that isn’t directly connected to skill-based training continues to fail to see support.

Recognizing this, I propose including the SIGUCCS Academy in association with the annual member conference. A series of conference tracks that will provide skill-based training for user support services to act as anchor content providing business reasons for administration to approve attendance. These attendees will then be able to attend conferences and experience the personal growth that being a member of a professional association provides.

This paper will outline proposed course content and provide a framework that will create a self-sustainable process that will allow the academy to persist from conference to conference.

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!

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 intruded 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.

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.

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/off boarding 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

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 at 8 times 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.

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.

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.

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.

We have continued to receive positive feedback on this panel, and as positive mental wellbeing is an ongoing and increasingly relevant topic, I am once again proposing a panel presentation and discussion on the subject of mental health in the workplace.

Everyone has their own personal struggles; many of us have diagnosed mental health issues; and still too many have genuine health issues that remain undiagnosed. Prior to the pandemic, open conversation around mental health issues seemed to be on the increase; during the pandemic, millions of people around the world experienced or recognized their own mental health issues for the first time; and in the endemic times, we see a definite increase in the awareness and acknowledgement of the need to address mental health issues. It’s still not enough, but there’s momentum which we should keep building on. We still have some ways to go before we fully normalize discussions of mental health, and provide fully supportive working environments.

Our hope is, once again, to present a summary of some numbers around mental health in the workplace and then for a small panel of fellow SIGUCCS members to talk about their own situations, whether in term of their own experiences or what we’ve seen change (for better or for worse) as the world continues in this new norm. We we’ll also offer a few tips on how everyone can work to provide a more supportive environment in general.

Please join in what we hope to be a safe environment for an important conversation.

Drake University’s Information Technology Services department began a project several years ago to automate and streamline the process of onboarding new ITS staff members. We mapped out the accounts and access needed by ITS staff, the types of devices they use, training and documentation needs, and determined responsible parties for each element. Then, The Pandemic(tm) hit and the project derailed. 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 presentation 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!

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.

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? Building upon 2019’s Improving Leadership Through Improv paper, this session will further illustrate how learning improv skills can help to develop quick thinking, flexibility and collaboration.

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.

As technology changes, so do learners’ needs for training. Over the years at Indiana University, IT Training’s offerings have evolved from three hour long, instructor-led in person workshops to self-study online courses and short webinars focusing on popular topics and supporting technology initiatives. This poster presentation will focus on the changes in technology training at Indiana University, including scheduled sessions offered by IT Training and sessions requested by faculty for specific courses. Changes in modality (in-person vs. online, live sessions vs. asynchronous courses) will be discussed, as well as the impact the pandemic had on technology training offerings and requests.

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 a 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.

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 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 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[1].

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.

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 would 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.

Development of gadgets, which are an easy input system in the health survey and a simple carbon dioxide (CO2) alarm, for preventing infection of COVID-19 in a university’s campus is discussed. Cluster infection did not occur in the rooms where a gadget of them was installed, until summer of 2022.

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 monetary costs. For a reasonable price, 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.

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 Identify 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.

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 flexible 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.

The majority of network connections on campus is 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, but 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.

SUNY recently created an affinity program for Women in Technology (WIT). WIT is an organization designed to attract, empower, support, and retain a more gender-diverse IT-related workforce and student population, connecting women-identifying students and employees with their allies across technology-oriented SUNY offices while highlighting the breadth of professional opportunities within the IT industry. WIT chapters have been formed on several campuses. This poster will share resources of creating a Women in Technology chapter on your campus.

For several years prior to the pandemic, my role within ITS had changed (temporarily) to focus more on project work, specifically construction and renovation projects on campus. This work disconnected me from the daily operations at the Helpdesk, a lot more than I realized at the time. When this project work was complete, and I began reintegrating myself back into the Helpdesk, the pandemic hit and my responsibilities changed once again. As one of few fully on-site staff, I was boots on the ground for various other areas, particularly hardware asset management.

As we settle into the new, post-pandemic norm, I discussed returning to “my regular job” with our new team director (one of four new colleagues on our team), and we realized that neither of us really knew what that was any more.

This two-pass approach at reintegration with the Helpdesk team has proved challenging. I was out of touch with internal procedural changes; new dynamics had developed around the work that I had yielded to others; and I was something of an unknown to a number of our student staff. I felt like I was outside looking in, and didn’t care for that much. I thought it might be interesting to talk about this realization that, while I had never left the team, resuming my previous role in earnest was not straightforward. It was necessary to get a fresh sense of the landscape, interpersonal dynamics, and what responsibilities could be resumed without potentially stepping on toes. There was also the mental game, the sense of returning after a long break, but without a break. It’s been an interesting dance to dance, and may be of interest to others.

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.

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 during virtual meetings. Significant votes occurred during the 2 years in which the meetings did not take place in a face to face setting. These contentious issues led to interesting considerations about the application of technology which also lead to evolution of the tools we used over the two years. This talk will address how the community trust technology at the same time as requesting anonymous voting, compare faculty trust of people relative to technology, the technologies used to meet the varying needs of the community. Digitally verifying, virtually, who is eligible to vote along with a summary of the 2022-2023 academic year state of the faculty meeting will conclude the presentation.

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, it is often difficult to participate in many of the personal discussions that our “straight” co-workers regularly engage in; finding ways to still converse without giving away our secret. It is those tough conversations that are so very important not only to our own psyche, but also to those around us. In this facilitated discussion, we will open the floor to 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 whether you are part of the LGBTQ+ spectrum or not!

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.

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 a number of service benefits and takeaways relevant to managers, technical staff, operators, and support professionals with regard to thoroughly documenting and supporting a new application in a mature environment with high expectations of service

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 a traditional lecture, seminar, or even newer active learning formats while they coordinate their activities around digital presentations. Unfortunately, the very success of the wireless revolution regularly contributes to chronic problems as so many people and activities rely upon this convenient mode to connect. 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, the multiple protocols in use, and the number of users operating in the same space. 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 what’s going on, let alone contribute towards sustainable solutions for making it more reliable. This paper surveys low-cost devices along with PC and smartphone software applications in the hands of academic technology support staff can help them identify and track down connectivity problems in the ever-more complicated wireless environments on campus.