IT Community Message - 2/24/2020

Hope everyone had a good start to their week.

Just a quick note out to our community with a few updates, a few reminders and encouragement

  1. Encouraging everyone to participate in the Campus Climate Survey. This is the last week to take the survey. The survey is sponsored by the Chancellor's Cabinet in conjunction with the Office for Inclusive Excellence. Inclusiveness, Diversity and Equity are all core to our mission here at the university, and this survey is just one of the many ways in which we attempt to ensure this topic is at the front of our brains. The survey also provides a way to measure where we are in this important but also challenging journey. Please do your part to participate. We thank you.
  2. Many of you know in my previous role, I advocated strongly for more communication and collaboration across our different campuses and medical centers under the umbrella of the university. Through those efforts and countless of hours from dedicated professionals at our locations, we expanded the UC-IT annual conference, now called UCTech, to be a much larger and more comprehensive event. This year's event is at UCLA and promises to be the best UCTech yet. There are many ways to participate, and I encourage everyone from our community to seek out ways that they can get involved, and more importantly, share the good work you are doing with others throughout our community. Here are three different ways to participate.
  3. I made the announcement last month that we have started the search to permanently fill the campus CIO position vacated by Dana Roode. A search committee has been formed and will be having their first meeting in the coming weeks. We have already seen strong interest in the posting.
  4. I continue to hold meet & greet coffee morning for members of the school IT units. The first one was on the coldest morning I've experienced in SoCal. Can't control the weather. Once we finish this series, I'll likely to reorganize to some type of open sessions for anyone from UCI-IT monthly. Always appreciate people's suggestions on how we can make these useful for people and how to maximize people's opportunity to attend.
  5. This week we will be completing a year-long effort at UCI on the "Health Informatics Platform." The initiative has multiple components, but an important one that I would want everyone to be aware of is the blueprint for a "data platform" to support research, innovation & collaboration in the health & basic sciences domains. While this effort is specific around health data, I call it a blueprint because the intention is to use this work in a broader context to define platform approaches to managing & using data in other domains. Several academic leaders and faculty strongly supported this concept. This will be a topic of discussion I will be having with our IT leaders across UCI.
  6. The Program team is getting ready to formally close down UCPATH program here at UCI. The conversion & transition went incredibly smoothly compared to other UC locations I have seen. Kudos out to the many, many people across the campus & med center who had a role in prep, execution & stabilization to make this a relative non-event for us. Hope I didn't jinx us.

It's all good. We're in budget season, so good luck to everyone. Let me know if we need to chat

Here for all of us

Tom