IT Rendezvous doubles down on shared knowledge

The second annual University of Utah IT Rendezvous, held September 15, 2026, at the S.J. Quinney College of Law, drew nearly 200 University of Utah, University of Utah Health, and Utah Education and Telehealth Network (UETN) IT staff — about half of them first-time attendees — for a day of keynotes, panels, and breakout sessions.

“We easily doubled what we experienced in 2025,” said Bryce Fox, enterprise IT architect for UIT’s Enterprise Architecture team and a member of the event’s organizing committee.

James Reynolds, senior systems administrator for the School of Biological Sciences and a fellow committee member, said the event has become a rare chance to connect with people he’d otherwise know only by name.

Kicking off the event, he pointed to how much has shifted at the university since the inaugural IT Rendezvous — a new interim chief information officer, the merger of three colleges into the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences whose IT staff now report to UIT, and the arrival of Redtail, the U’s new AI supercomputer — as reasons an event like this matters more, not less.

“I think we need to come together, and we need to build some trust and collaboration amongst each other, because life is not very fun without it,” he said.

The committee’s original goal was simply to get IT people in the same room.

“This event was intended for everyone to spend the day together, learning, chatting, and building community and expertise,” said Ian Ferguson, product manager for UIT Digital Learning Technologies and a committee member.

“As the new kid on the block — to IT at the U and IT in general,” Benjamin Holt, network administrator in the College of Science, said he “jumped at the opportunity to join the organizing committee.”

“What better way to really learn the ins and outs of the IT world and get to know the university’s IT community?” Holt said. “Even though I had very little experience, I wanted to offer what I could.”

For Fox, that community-building pays off with “a gathering of IT minds that commiserate and share [and] identify common services solutions to problems that we all face.”

Ferguson said where other U events that draw IT crowds tend to have a narrower focus on a single specialty, “this conference is meant for IT people of all kinds, whether it be system administrators, programmers, or technicians.”

Reynolds, who has been at the university for 26 years, said his pull toward the IT Rendezvous was built over decades of Mac Admin Meetings and IT Professionals Forums, along with Apple’s Worldwide Developers, SAINTCON, and OpenWest conferences.

OpenWest quietly disappeared, he said, along with U of U user groups and periodic all-day visits from Apple engineers. Some meetups for IT staff remain, like Penn State’s MacAdmins conference or Jamf’s Nation User Conference (JNUC), which are out of state, or the UEN Tech Summit, which is geared more toward K-12 than higher ed. The IT Rendezvous, however, is meant to recreate that lost energy closer to home.

“I just remember what it was like years ago where everyone came together, and it’s been a long time since we’ve done that,” Reynolds said. “I also wanted lunch.”

Ferguson said the committee balanced two questions when building the agenda — “What’s relevant to the industry right now, and what’s relevant to our attendees specifically?”

“Because of this, we’ve targeted both industrywide and universitywide trends but also tried to meet explicit requests put in by attendees before the conference,” he said.

Fox said the lineup grew organically.

“We accepted topics from any volunteer speaker and were able to identify some common tracks that seem to be top of mind for the IT crowd,” he said.

This volunteer-driven model means the agenda shifts year –to year around whatever the IT community is wrestling with. This year, that meant a heavy focus on artificial intelligence (AI) alongside more established topics like identity management and service management platforms.

Two keynote speakers anchored the day’s schedule.

Chief Technology Officer Jim Livingston opened with an address on change and modernization, drawing on 42 years across banking, healthcare, and higher education to argue that the university’s push toward stabilization, simplification, and automation — not “shiny objects” — is what will let the U and U of U Health keep pace with rising costs and cybersecurity threats.

“If you don’t get the foundation of the house right, it doesn’t matter what you build on top of it,” Livingston said.

Bill Miller, senior director for research computing and data at the at the university, where he holds a leadership appointment at the Scientific Computing and Imaging (SCI) Institute and directs the Center for High Performance Computing, joined remotely for a second keynote on Redtail and the statewide AI ecosystem being built around it. Miller described Redtail as “sovereign AI” — infrastructure the university owns and controls, distinct from the commercial cloud.

Miller’s keynote led into a panel on AI governance and IT security, featuring Bill Prisbrey, data scientist for University Analytics and Institutional Research; Caprice Post, director for AI Technology Services in UIT; David Hawkins, manager for AI Technology Services in Information Technology Services (ITS); Gabriel Sherman of the One-U Responsible AI Initiative; and Miller.

The conversation opened on the summer’s OpenAI incident, in which coordinating agents escaped containment and attacked the AI startup Hugging Face.

Prisbrey’s one-word assessment — “Terrifying.” Post pushed past the alarm to the mechanics, asking what incentives and reward systems shape how an AI agent behaves, and noted that zero-trust environments were designed for applications and humans, not the “nonhuman actors” AI introduces. Hawkins said the incident sharpened his focus on securing U of U Health’s IT environment through secure model pipelines, an isolated AI lab space, and a gateway to control access to it. Sherman said the incident exposed gaps in how AI labs manage their agents but cautioned that calls to slow agentic development shouldn’t slow medical innovation or the kind of work Redtail supports.

Asked why the university’s message on AI seems to fall somewhere between “hurry and use it for everything” and “we need governance,” Post said the university’s Office of Artificial Intelligence meets weekly to review every tool request that comes in, checking logging controls, compliance reviews, and whether vendors will sign a business associate agreement — work she said hasn’t fully caught up with demand.

Her advice to attendees? “Push the boundaries. Use AI. Become familiar with AI. Don’t be afraid of AI. But when we talk about pushing the edge, what are called frontier models, and all the exciting things, that’s the place that governance is most critical,” she said.

With the second IT Rendezvous drawing nearly double the first year’s crowd, the committee is already thinking about what comes next. For Ferguson and Fox, the measure of success isn’t just attendance — it’s whether attendees leave with a few more names they recognize in the hallway.

Holt agreed.

“Something that continues to be a major theme of our conversations is the idea of creating an event that helps us all to feel a sense of connectedness and togetherness, especially given how siloed and isolating tech work can often be,” he said.

 

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