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In the late 1988, ATS and AIS recognized that there was a need for local support to interface
between the central computing group,
and therefore joined forces to develop the Computing Support Coordinators, or the CSCs.
Three members here at UCLA,
Dawn Canfield from Psychology, Mike Lee from Social Sciences Computing,
and Stacey Rosborough from the Office of Residential Life,
met and they wanted a place where they wanted to promote IT collaborations here at UCLA.
They came up with Help Desk Consortium.
The Brown Bags were not originally part of the HDC, but came about in the second year
as a way, kind of a forum, for staff to come together and talk about, you know, sharing
ideas, strategies, current issues, complaints. And activities included guest speakers, vendor
presentations, tool demonstrations, and just a place where you can get out of your office
and hang out with your peers.
Some of the things that the Friday Five does
as a form of outreach to the BruinTech community is that it informs us of tech news, campus
events, software central updates and deadlines, staff achievements, training opportunities,
as well as insightful perspectives. There are also Lynda.com lesson highlights included
in the Friday Five so that we can all keep on learning as a community.
One of the founding principles of the HDC was to align with the University's mission
and vision. One of the major initiatives listed was to Develop Digital Citizens, and the HDC
has been integral in supporting the programs such as First Fridays, FacTech Speed-dating,
and the SuperFriends IT Mentorship Program, all of which were developed to further the
Digital Citizenship Initiative.
The HDC offers professional development, trainings,
scholarships for professional course, and it also sponsors LearnIT with Lynda.com and
Microsoft Academy.
The various needs of the campus have, IT over
the campus, has been a key focus for the HDC and over the years we've created various subcommittees
and strike forces to address the campus knowledgebase, the IT SuperFriends, the ITHR, and other things
such as the Lab Manager's Group.
As IT professionals we sometimes are overwhelmed
with the daily task of putting out fires at the help desk, server room, and data closets
that we forget to keep abreast of the changing technology. To help alleviate this, the HDC
has conducted projects such as the What's Your Problem poll and the Top 5 digital newsletter.
As time and technology evolved, help desks and the people who work for the help desk
started to move forward and their skillsets started to expand. The services and the expertise
that we offer began to blur, and we realized that very few of us still had the traditional
help desk role. And at that moment, BruinTech was born.