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I just am really, really pleased to be here today to kick this off.
This is the first session of "Welcome to IT @ UCLA"
so welcome to the welcome session.
One of the reasons I wanted to be here
is I consider this to be enormously important
and I'm really pleased to be working with Jackie and Michelle
putting this together.
I wanted to give you a little bit of broader context
about why this is important and
and you'll see that this is actually a natural progression for
a number of things that have been going on this
actually, this past year.
From my perspective, it's actually returned to
something we tried to do back in about 2001
it's only taken us nine years to get here.
But essentially the premise of
if you go back to look at the IT Plan
and I encourage everyone to read it
and actually, let me ask,
how many people have read the IT2020 Plan?
The front row.
I really encourage people to read it,
the first couple pages is a good read
the rest you can dig into it.
It actually was approved by the campus in 2009.
It didn't make sense to call it the Vision 2019 Plan,
so we changed it to Vision 2020, just to kind of round it up.
But in there, there is a concept called the "Digital Citizen."
This is something that came out of the planning activity
across the campus.
What "Digital Citizen" is basically about is
our campus will benefit if we can
one, put technology in the hands of
each faculty, staff, and student individually
so they can do whatever their work they're trying to do
in the best possible way.
But what's key is it also said
we also recognize and we want to make them know
that they have responsibilities to the campus
as a part of our campus community.
And this has a number of different things
ethics, it has security, it has behaviors of green
but it also has to do with sharing, collaboration
and the benefits of bringing data, information, and so forth
back out to the community as you learn things.
So, one of the things we did was we kicked this thing off
and actually Jackie has been leading this
over the past year, about a year and a half, two years at this point.
But if you look at it fundamentally, it's basically saying that
IT is about technology, right,
but it's fundamentally about people.
So we're asking the question:
How do you put the people back into the technology?
And then the next thing we say is
well IT is fundamentally about people,
but it's also, it draws its strength from communities of people
so how do we take advantage of the communities of people?
And if we're going to do this from a campus standpoint
then we recognize that the IT community is
an important community in its own right.
So what this session is about is the IT community,
and we want to build it straight from that because
you, we
are actually critical to taking all this forward.
So one of the things we did is
and actually, Jackie, Michelle, and all of you
have to take the credit, not me,
I just stayed out of the way,
is that when this "Digital Citizenship" concept got launched
about a year ago,
you as IT folks came together, and
IT folks from all over the campus came together,
and a number of really important ideas came out of this.
And there's a whole list of them,
you're going to hear about them today,
but they have to do with security,
they have to do with green,
they have to do with helping our emeriti staff,
they have to do with faculty technology,
and a whole variety of things.
And these have been enormously important and successful
going forward to the campus,
as we take these forward to the campus,
and again, this is all dependent upon the IT people
coming together as a community.
Oh, by the way, one of the things that came out of this is
as we started talking to you, and to your supervisors,
one of the things that came out is
this has been really good
to be working as a community on these kinds of things.
The second thing is a lot of you who have participated,
I know some of you haven't,
but there's very few people who are new to UCLA in this room.
I recognize a lot of faces.
But those of you who have participated came back and said,
"You know, listen, this has been great!
I have a network of people all across the campus,
it's helped my career development,
I've been able to get access to a lot of opportunities,
it's helped me personally."
But we also talked to your supervisors,
and they came back and said,
"You know, listen, this time is well worth it.
Rather than hunkering down and being isolated,
what's coming back into the unit is a lot of information
that's helping us collaborate and participate on the campus."
So we put all three of these together,
there's actually a lot of benefit to all of us,
from an IT community standpoint,
to be a community,
and then it also helps the campus.
So I'm just seeing this as a tremendously important way of
bringing us together and taking the campus forward
and this is what this is all about.
One of the things I think you'll hear from Jackie
as we go through the day is that
at this point, there's probably a good
hundred or so people in the IT community
that are working on these things in a direct way
so this front row is covering some of this.
But it will benefit from more,
you will benefit from participating,
and there's actually,
we need to create that way of how do you maintain,
sustain, and build this pipeline of IT people as they come in.
And so this is all about,
this event is all about
when new people come into the IT community on campus,
how do we bring them in and get involved.
So I hope you come away with this session with
this sort of broader view about how you can participate in,
gain from, and then help the campus community
all the way around.
And I hope you pass the word to all of your colleagues,
and that we certainly want to take this forward to the
new people coming in.
For those of you,
I know most of you are not new the campus,
help us get this right.
You know what the campus is like,
help us organize this the right way,
but it is an extremely important
activity from my standpoint,
that's why I wanted to be here.
So it actually is really quite appropriate
that we're starting off with the IT2020 Plan,
which was formerly named the IT2019 Plan,
but it sounds better this way.
But again, I thank you,
help us get this right,
really appreciate you being here,
and I hope this is the first of many sessions
as we go forward and reach out to the IT staff
and work with you to do so.
Or in other words, all of us doing that together.
So thanks very much,
I'm very, very pleased to kick this off.
So, I guess you're next.