Spotlight on 2021 IT Summit

The 2021 US:IT Virtual Summit was held June 14-18. Kudos to Carol Sobczak, Technical Training and Outreach Coordinator, for making this year’s event a huge success! Our Summit schedule was packed full of interesting topic sessions, project updates, awards and longevity recognition.

Congratulations to Miki Yanagi, Data Visualization Analyst, this year’s recipient of the CIO Award. Miki “has made the COVID-19 pandemic reporting possible for both campus incident command teams as well as the general public.” She has also been responsible for “a large portion of the work to keep UMS reporting up and running, including student census and IPEDS reporting processes.”

Matt Jacobson, Support Services Manager, was awarded this year’s Extra Mile Award. When the UMF students wanted an on-campus commencement event, Matt was “instrumental in making this happen.” He coordinated with the UMF Facilities Management team to “safely COVID choreograph the event.”  He “designed and built a portable production unit to record the proceedings”, tracked down “bagpipe music for the processional, created graphics, and even went in and corrected the closed captions.”

The Team Impact Award went to our Database Administrators. They transitioned to “an entirely new paradigm with their database hosting”, and were able to complete the work on “nearly every major Oracle system while still providing normal support to their teams that rely upon them, as well as maintaining normal patch cycles for Peoplesoft systems.”

Congratulations to all of our award nominees and to this year’s longevity recipients! A special shout out to Kerry Anderson, Systems Software Analyst, with 45 years of service, Lauren Dubois, UMA Campus IT Officer & Executive Director Classroom Technology, with 40 years of service, and Robin Pepin, Accounting Support Specialist CL3, with 40 years of service!!

New Staff Members

Please join us in welcoming the following new staff members to US:IT!