Schedule 2023

This is the Annual Meeting of the SUNY Council of CIO’s.

Bringing SUNY Technology Professionals Together. The Computing Officer’s Association (COA) is comprised of technology professionals within the State University of New York. The representative areas include those who implement, support, and manage the technology systems on the 64 campuses as well as administrative and support organizations throughout SUNY.

COA’s purpose is to promote professional development and collaboration of all members. COA does this by facilitating the sharing of information between its members. COA also coordinates statewide as well as regional conferences and forums that provide information and training to the membership.

The Digital Learning Environment is more than a year into its two year implementation plan. This session will reflect on the technology behind some of the major components including Brightspace, SIS Integration, Global ID, and Authentication. Some current and potential future developments will be discussed while saving time for questions.

Many IT shops go through planning exercises and publish a strategic plan. While this helps bring awareness to the direction that the College needs, often we forget to feed and care for the plan. Plans that do not mature in sync with the institution become stale. Like stale bread, they become unpalatable.

Strategic planning is a living, breathing process that can provide not only direction, but assure alignment with the institutional vision, mission and goals. Higher education is continually evolving, and IT must be a leader in making that transformation happen.

Simply look at the massive changes that IT had to support as the world went virtual during COVID. Were you ready? Did anyone ever think that such a thing could happen? This is an extreme example, but points to essential questions we must ask and answer in advance of realities:

• Are you in sync with the needs of your students as they change?
• Do you adapt to meet changing academics and student services?
• Are you ready for a hack?
• What do you do when budgets are challenged?
• Do you have contingency plans?
• Are you doing succession planning?

The reality is reactive organizations may succeed but have greater weaknesses and failures than those who get ahead of the curve and are prepared.

Make your IT organization so solid, your President and cabinet come to you for advice, for counsel, for excellence. Be great.

An update on the Teams Calling initiatives on many SUNY campuses and the SUNY U-wide service behind it. Also an update on the other activities related to Zoom U-wide pricing and call center services.

The “HyFlex” or hybrid flexible course model combines elements of a hybrid learning course with a more flexible structure. This new instructional format gives students the option to attend class meetings in person, online, or a combination of both.

Jefferson Community College would like to share what we have developed as a HyFlex classroom.

• What equipment used
• How the equipment is used
• Faculties perspective
• Students perspective

Do you often find yourself speaking before giving thought to what you were going to say, and then wondering why you continue to do that? Does the “big picture” excite you, but often lead to a feeling of being trapped by the details you overlooked? Are you a person who would be glad to get everybody organized, if only they’d let you?

If you have ever had any of these thoughts or other observations about your own idiosyncrasies and those of the people with whom you work, then the understanding of personality styles through the Myers Briggs Type Indication (MBTI) session is for you!

The MBTI identifies differing styles of perception, judgment, energy direction and lifestyle. This indicator simply identifies different kinds of people who like different things, are good at different things, and who often find it difficult to understand one another.

To make the most out of the session, participants will be asked to take this quick online assessment located here: https://www.humanmetrics.com/personality prior to the session. They can either print off a copy or save a copy as we will use the results for some fun exploration about the value of you and those around you.

ITEC has been dedicated to building great teams for many years.

Building great teams involves several key elements. Firstly, clear communication and expectations are essential to ensure everyone is on the same page. Next, fostering a sense of trust and collaboration within the team is crucial to create a positive working environment. It’s also important to have a diverse range of skills and perspectives represented within the team. Additionally, providing opportunities for personal and professional development can help team members grow and feel valued. Finally, recognizing and celebrating successes, as well as learning from failures, can help keep the team motivated and focused on continuous improvement. With these elements in place, great teams can achieve amazing results.

We are always looking at continual improvement in all aspects of our organization. Come to this session where we will share our approach in building our teams. We will share our Team journey ad well as share how all the recent changes in the world have, are and will be affecting ITEC services. IT is ever evolving. In this session we will present what ITEC has been doing, is doing and will be doing to be best positioned to assist your campus in their IT journey. We will also be sharing thoughts on how we can “Do IT Better Together” while sharing some of ITEC’s inner most secrets…

In this session, the SUNY CPD staff and instructors will examine the existing model of training and development to meet the demand of our SUNY Workforce.

Retaining agile and technically capable IT staff is dependent upon consistently promoting learning opportunities to “upskill” their knowledge, skills, and abilities. As one such opportunity, this session will update the participants on the SUNY CPD Technical Training Program and partnerships. We will also use a focus-group model to gather input on technical training and professional development for SUNY IT staff. In this session, we will talk about creating a professional development strategy and culture of organizational learning.

This will be a panel discussion where people can talk about their school’s experiences with penetration tests, and share what was learned, and what changed in response.

This includes:

• What surprising things did you learn from it that you can share with others?
• What systemic changes have you made to address these issues?
• How are you monitoring for compliance with these changes, so that you don’t have the same issues found (by criminals or in future penetration tests).
• What challenges, if any, did you have in resolving some of the findings?

The University at Albany is exploring migrating from Confluence to SharePoint Online sites for our intranet Service Offering. This is a “birds of a feather” session for campuses in similar situations to share our approaches, best practices, and lessons learned.

Discussion Topics:

• Why we’re looking to move
• Use-cases
• Migration process and experiences
• Migration Tools
• Templates
• Gotchas

SUNY Empire was part of SUNY’s pilot program implementing the SUNY/Toshiba managed print services contract. We replaced our entire Xerox fleet, which was mostly well past EOL. This is our experience through the project with Toshiba and Pharos and with Toshiba after the project.

Many of us have been a part of a dysfunctional team at some point in our careers. This session will look at the aspects of dysfunctional teams and explore methods for overcoming them.

TDX Birds of a Feather: Breakout Topics Questionnaire

This session will be a forum for current and future TDX users to discuss challenges they are facing using or implementing TDX. We hope attendees will not only be able to receive advice but provide advice and connect with their colleagues.

The presentation will feature break out tables for specific TDX topics. For example: Ticketing, Service Catalog/Knowledge Base, iPaaS, and Project Management.

To help get the discussions started – attendees will be provided with a few suggested discussion prompts. Presenters will help facilitate discussions and connect attendees with each other.

The overarching goal of the SUNY Data Strategy is to make better use of SUNY data to operate more efficiently, meet the needs of society, community and industry, and act with strategic agility to differentiate ourselves from our competitors.

There are many different aspects to this work, including, but not limited to, data governance, access, literacy, reporting, and analytics, with various stakeholders and perspectives.

In this presentation I’ll share some of the details of how we are proceeding to implement a data strategy incrementally at SUNY System Administration, focusing on specific areas of opportunity, while advocating for resources and prioritization of data as a strategic asset.

This will be followed by an open discussion of the challenges and opportunities for the strategic use of data within and across SUNY.

Join your SUNY peers in a panel and birds of a feather discussion of how ITSM and ITIL help IT organizations step up their game in customer service. The session will feature a panel of peers who have implemented ITSM platforms such as TeamDynamix, Service Now and other systems to facilitate this important function. Each member will give a brief presentation on the why and how their campus moved forward, noting where things went well, and lessons learned. The majority of the time will be devoted to open Q&A with the panel and discussion among those in the room.

This session is open to all SUNY colleagues at the event, regardless of membership in COA, EdTOA, TOA or CCIO.

Facebook in the forest takes some creativity. Come hear our true confessions of how we got Internet and phones to our remote ADK campuses, as well how we manage our main campus. Not for the weak of network heart.

CHARTED Meeting – Birds of a Feather Flock Together.

This is an inside look at how the monthly CHARTED Meetings run. CHARTED stands for Coffee Hour A Round Table EdTOA Discussion. It means this is a free flowing conversation, just like you would have around the coffee maker (water cooler). In June we run this as an in person gathering at STC. Typically this meeting happens on zoom at tinyurl.com/sunyedtoa , at 12:00pm on the 2nd Thursday of every month (except June).

We will discuss CHARTED and any other topic that is going on at this time, or in the near future on your campus. So bring your drink of choice, and tell us something good that is happening on your campus. Ask any questions to see how others are dealing with certain situations on their campuses. You will see and hear that many of us are going through the same issues on our campuses, so birds of a feather really do flock together.

Overview of current System-wide contracts and initiatives from the Office of System-wide Procurement, Academic Technology Information Services (ATIS), Center for Professional Development, Information Technology Exchange Center (ITEC), and Student Information and Campus Administrative Systems (SICAS).

Join us in person for the STC Edition of our M365 Collaboration Group where we talk all things M365 and MS Azure.

As technology shifts from analog to IP, on premise to cloud, there may still be legacy communications technology throughout our campuses. This is an open forum for all campuses to talk about legacy technology (e.g. analog phones, faxes, etc.) and learn what they’ve transitioned to, talk about where their new paths will lead and the benefits that may result.

Are you doing it?
Are the requests increasing for In Person Events? Virtual Events?
Do you have an ‘event support’ office at your campus?
Who’s it report under? Is it busy?
Is there dedicated support staff?
What are we doing right?
What could be done better?

Use RACI not just for project management but also duty seperation with in a small department or for outlining duties with campus wide software.

Provide an update of the internal and Banner related security initiatives for ITEC, as well as the external ITEC Security Services that can help prevent or detect a cyber incident. ITEC and several campuses are using CrowdStrike as a Managed endpoint Detection & Response (MDR) solution to meet the NYS, SUNY and cyber-insurance requirements. ITEC is also moving to Cloudflare for provisioning Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) for ITEC staff and Banner administrative access.

As part of the ITEC security update we will share more information on our security services to be layered on top of what the SUNY SOC offers and provide some real world examples of recent engagements.

Update on the SUNY cybersecurity landscape from the SUNY CISO Office. Topics to include the New York State cybersecurity 8 controls, cyber compliance around research, campus affiliate controls, and the overarching plans from SUNY leadership around strengthening SUNY’s Cybersecurity posture.

Interactive slideshow of woman-identifying innovators and leaders from legendary heroes to people currently active in the IT field. The speakers will highlight the presence and contributions of women, including some SUNY leaders past and present. This session will also include graphs and statistics showing how the IT woman-identifying workforce has shifted over the years. After the presentation portion, participants will be invited to discuss these leaders and bring up others that we should know and include in future showcases of talent. This session is advancing the vision of the SUNY Women in Technology program, SUNY WIT (https://www.suny.edu/diversity/wit/).
Vendors are welcome.

This presentation will give an overview of how a culture of project management was formed and maintained in the Information Systems and Security department at SUNY Cortland. We will talk about the various tools and methodologies we have pulled from to not just develop our project management but continuously improve. This presentation will cover how to get started with project management and, more importantly, how to keep going. Other discussion topics will include psychological safety when working on projects, how projects interact with your service catalog and change management procedures, and how to begin building your project program(s) and portfolio(s). We will share what our planned next steps for development are and how we plan to achieve them.

This session is for individuals:

• Who are looking to build a project management culture within their department
• Who are struggling getting their department to get on the same page in terms of project management
• Who aren’t sure where to get started with project management implementation

This presentation will take a quick look at the challenges and decisions related to rolling out TeamDynamix to multiple groups within IT and other departments. We will look at the different levels of product usage and pros and cons of each feature. We will review questions such as:

• Will they need a separate ticket instance or just need their own forms and groups on IT’s instance?
• Will they require their own section in the Service Catalog, a separate homepage, or even their own portal?
• Who will manage their “stuff” (forms, licence assignments, reports, desktops, groups, templates…)?
• Who will initially train them and will they assume that role for all new users?

Finally, we review the steps involved with getting a department moved onto TeamDynamix, from analyzing their process and procedures to going live.

This presentation will include a brief SUNY Online update as well as presentation about supporting the DLE and Brightspace.

The main question, what does it take to support SUNY’s transition from Blackboard to Brightspace? The short answer, a lot.

During this session we will go over the support strategy that the SUNY Online Support Services Help Desk and Application Services (DLE Admins) are using to support the efforts in transition and from Blackboard and other Learning Management Systems to Brightspace, as well as continued support going into the future.

Would you like to better understand who ITEC is?, why we exist?, who we support?, what types of services we offer?, or what we’ve been working on over the last few years to consolidate and reduce infrastructure, gain cost and resource efficiencies, and increase SUNY’s security posture? Come to this session for a brief review of our history, insight into recent areas of growth and maturity, as well as short-term and longer-term roadmap direction.

ITSM (IT Service Management) is ever changing. With more features and integrations, implementation of new ITSM products takes month. As an educational institution, it is hard to take months to implement productions when there is a need for it now. In the case of SUNY Cobleskill, the current ITSM has reached end of life at the closing of the fall semester. With only a month break, ITS had to have a working product quickly. This presentation will cover how ITS implemented the Team Dynamix (TDX) ITSM product within this timeframe. It will also cover how TDX is serving the campus now, and where ITS plans to take this product in the future.

This session will be an open forum to discuss how schools have implemented Project and/or Portfolio Management Offices, project governance processes, and other related activities.

The intent is to share information on what has worked and not worked within campuses across the system so that these ideas can be leveraged by other institutions.

Eileen will share the process Monroe is using to achieve compliance with the Safeguards Rule of the GLBA (Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act), including the recent amendment which is effective this month (June 2023).

SICAS has been transforming our team and how we work since September 2022. We are working at breaking down silos and building a more collaborative team that is more efficient and effective. The goal is to increase productivity as well as job satisfaction.

During this session we will talk about where we were, were we are and were we hope to be. We will also talk about our approach to this process.

An update on SUNY Cyber risk assessment practices and how they align to help SUNY come in compliance with the New York State 8 Control families. Discussion to include campus compliance planning, 3rd party & affiliate assessments, and potential support from the Digital Transformation initiative.