Kudos & Congratulations
Congratulations to David Kosanke and Tim Urban from Common Infrastructure Services whose names were drawn from the last Node 4 kudos! David won a U of U hoodie, and Tim won a U of U shirt.
UIT staff recognized for their excellent work
One of my employees, Ray Lacanienta, deserves to be so nominated. We recently had a software upgrade from Oracle where the software is on the cloud and we have little control over the upgrade. We encountered many issues trying to connect and test the new version of the software, but Ray jumped in and worked on getting us connected. This all took place while he was on vacation with his family in The Grand Canyon, so he worked early morning and late evening each of those days (as well as during the weekends for three weekends in a row), and on one evening even had a webinar conference call with an Oracle support person at 2 AM to try and figure things out. We eventually were able to get all the program changes needed inside PeopleSoft to be able to talk to the new version of Oracle’s Unifier product, and ever since we have not had any problems with the new product and interfaces.
~ Val Olds, University Support Services
We recently wrapped up a crucial step in developing the University’s Information Security Program. Kiston Finney has worked on the new Information Security Policy and Rules almost daily for the past 10 months! She trained the ISO team and played a large role in gaining buy-in and socializing the new Policy and Rules among various University and Health Care leadership and governance groups. Great job Kiston!
~ Dan Bowden, Information Security Office
Emily Rushton (Strategic Communication) was recently appointed as a Vice President for the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC) Utah Chapter. As a Board of Directors member, she plays an important state-wide leadership role in IABC strategy, events, and communications. Congratulations Emily!
~ Cassandra Van Buren, UIT Strategic Communication
Congratulations to the network operations team in Common Infrastructure Services on the progress they've made moving a number of buildings over to the new campus backbone. It has been a tremendous amount of work and effort, and I'm thankful to the team for improving the reliability and capacity of this vital service. Great job!
~ Steve Hess, Chief Information Officer
USA Housing’s network speed upgrades are complete, thanks to a huge effort led by a number of teams on campus as well as external partners/vendors. We’d like to thank Tom Warnick for helping to manage our vendor relationship when we ran into some critical problems during the first phase of the project. He stayed calm and methodically troubleshooted and isolated the problem. His ownership of the whole project has been phenomenal. Tom and the telephone technicians, Corey Hayes, Jason Lawes, Patrick Limacher, & Fernando Javier Ferrer Anato, assisted with getting voice services issues resolved. Tom, along with students from the network operations team (David Bowman, Matthew DeCarlo, Danial Ebling, Nicholas Lloyd, Tyler Sauer, Brian Sorensen, and Jeff Souza), unboxed, configured, and re-boxed over 700 modems in a miraculous period of time.
Additionally, we'd like to thank the Campus Help Desk for getting the correct information out during a downtime that took place at the same time (but not as a result of) this upgrade project. We'd also like to thank the network operations team and USA Housing for their hard work and support.
~ Anita Sjoblom, Common Infrastructure Services
Want to nominate someone?
Anyone can submit an item for Kudos & Congrats. Email praise for your UIT colleagues to emily.rushton@utah.edu. The people you recognize will be put into a drawing to win gift cards, event tickets, merchandise and more. Those who submit entries will also be put in a separate drawing for more prizes. (Directors and associate/assistant directors not eligible for prizes.) A special thank you to some exceptional campus organizations that donated tickets, merchandise, and gift cards to help recognize UIT employees: Athletics, Auxiliary Services, Dining Services, Kingsbury Hall, Pioneer Theatre Company, Red Butte Garden, UIT Leadership, and Utah Museum of Fine Art.