UC IT Presents… It’s A Portal!

By Tom Andriola, Matt Hall, and Gabe Youtsey.  Remember when you were new to UC and didn’t know what was where, or who was what? How did you find the resources, tips, and tricks to do your job?

Often by fluke. Six months could pass and someone would casually mention a great resource. For example, the UCCSC listserv, which for a long time was the only way to communicate across locations to a broad group of IT personnel.

To tackle this perennial problem, we created a new website for the UC IT community and unveiled it at the UC Computing Services Conference this week. Called the UC IT Portal, the site brings together in one place systemwide resources and communications vehicles for UC IT.

Your campus IT leaders have been working for several years now to build community across IT – creating ways to share our stories, communicate, collaborate, and innovate. But everything exists on different platforms. Through this portal, we are trying to stitch together the major activities so you can find it all in one place.

Imagine now, if you’re new to UC IT, and your boss sends you the link to the portal (and we hope they will), you’ll find out right away about the UCTech Slack team, the blog, the LinkedIn group.

You will find events and links to programs for growing your career. You will learn there are systemwide resources for security, accessibility, and privacy. You’ll learn about initiatives underway in IT.

We strongly believe that we can do more and be more innovative, if we work together and tap our shared expertise, creativity, and person power. Even though we work in different departments, we work for one university, our mission is the same, and we have the ability to collaborate and share across a very large organization with a lot of talent.

Now we have two requests: One serious, one fun.

First the serious. To keep the portal fresh and useful, we need input from you. If you’re having an event that people from other campuses can join, let us know via the submission form. If you want to suggest resources or initiatives to add to the site, or have an idea for how to improve IT – send them in via the form.

Now for fun. We all know a picture is worth a thousand words, and so we have a new UC IT Instagram account. Message your pictures – your concepts of UC IT – to @UCalifornia_IT. Your imagination should be your guide. We’ll use them to refresh the photos on the portal. The first three selected by August 16 will get a prize!

Tom Andriola is University of California chief information officer; Matt Hall is chief information officer for UC Santa Barbara; and Gabe Youtsey is chief innovation officer for UC Agriculture and Natural Resources.

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