Here are some of the great ideas from the OIT Accelerating Innovation Program that received awards:
Year 5
2022-2023
Trailblazer Awards – Chris Price
Synchronized Server Secrets
Chris Price developed a solution to improve how applications can retrieve secrets used for authentication by leveraging OIT’s privileged access management solution, SecretServer. Since many OIT teams already store their secrets in SecretServer, his solution utilizes SecretServer’s Application Programming Interface to allow applications to access those secrets directly and requires no local storage and copying or deployments of secrets.
His solution promotes a more agile approach to secrets management that would also enable streamlining password rotations without code changes or application deployments.
Prevent Confluence Wiki Page Shifting
OIT Confluence is a third-party developed wiki application that is used by OIT and other departments within UCI. Upon migration of the wiki to a cloud based hosting solution last year, some usability issues were introduced. An example of this is that the page shifts vertically as it is loading, causing misclicks and general decreased productivity. As the vendor had no plans to address the problem, Chris developed and published a Firefox and Chrome extension to disable the wiki page shifting while it is loading.
Lamplighter Award – Jyoti Razdan, Robert Nenne
Locate an Employee
Jyoti Razdan and Robert Nenne developed a idea to address the problem of locating where a fellow colleague works. Their proposed solution is an application where you can search for an employee and it indicates which building, floor, and room number where that employee is currently working. The application can even provide a floor map of the building location.
Innovator Awards
Innovator Awards are merited to all individuals who submit innovative ideas to the Accelerating Innovation program
Locate an Employee – Jyoti Razdan, Robert Nenne
Network Protection For Non-Campus Connected Managed Clients – Aakash Shah
MS Teams – Shared Channels – Aakash Shah, Heinz Yu, Jerry Reuter
Year 4
2021-2022
Lamplighter Award – Christa Chen, Clint Maruki, Matthew Lorenzo, Jerry Paxton
TRS Research Time Clock Device Alternatives
There are currently 35 vendor time clocks located throughout campus that serve about 1000 employees and are integrated with UCI’s Time Reporting System (TRS). These time clocks use legacy technology and the repair and replacement process is rather difficult.
Christa Chen, Clint Maruki, Matthew Lorenzo, and Jerry Paxton explored a software-based alternative to these time clocks that could easily integrate with TRS. They evaluated various brands of tablets and NFC readers and identified a replacement solution that could scale for broader use throughout campus.
Innovator Awards
Innovator Awards are merited to all individuals who submit innovative ideas to the Accelerating Innovation program
Door Key Issuance Forms Online Workflow – Markus Quon
Create a space for OIT students to connect – Alissa Powers
Work-Life Balance: No Meetings on Fridays. Ever. – Heinz Yu
Universal Pronoun Fields – Meredith Ehrenberg
Synchronized Server Secrets – Christopher Price
Year 3
2020-2021
Foundation Award – Jyoti Razdan, Bob Nenne, Michael Luong, Victor Tam
Space Reservations for Return to Work
On returning to work after the initial COVID 19 pandemic response, many UCI departments adopted a hybrid remote work schedule that enabled staff to rotate when they would work on-site and introduced the concept of hoteling spaces or shared private offices to be used by staff when they are working on-site. This new hybrid work model established the need for a space reservation tool to help staff to easily find and reserve shared work spaces throughout the campus when they need to come on-site for work.
Jyoti, Bob, Michael, and Victor fully expanded their early proof of concept and developed the new UCI Room Reservations service to aid OIT as well as other units around campus in managing their hoteling and shared spaces.
Foundation Award – Aakash Shah, Heinz Yu, Meredith Ehrenberg
Change Default Meeting Times To Be Shorter To Provide Breaks Between Meetings
With the move to virtual meetings during the pandemic, the prior norm had continued where meetings would be scheduled until the very end of the hour with little break in between if someone had back to back meetings.
Aakash, Heinz, and Meredith leveraged features built into Microsoft Office 365 to establish a shortened default meeting time duration that would allow sufficient breaks between meetings.
Trailblazer Award – Chris Price, Dana Watanabe
Firewall Rule Visualizer
UCI OIT has an application that enables IT staff to view departmental firewall rules in order to create and maintain access to and from various hosts. Due to the difficult nature of parsing and understanding the firewall rules, Chris and Dana developed a Proof of Concept to simplify lookup, parsing, and inspection of firewall rules.
Innovator Awards
Innovator Awards are merited to all individuals who submit innovative ideas to the Accelerating Innovation program
ZOTCamp – Dana Watanabe
Use of AI to Alleviate Pressure From Help Desk with AI Assistant – Jyoti Razdan, Michael Luong, Robert Nenne, Victor Tam
Student Billing System UI Upgrade – Julian Burton
Workflow for Top-Level Subdomain Requests – Meredith Ehrenberg, Katie Chappel
Honorable Mentions
Honorable Mentions go to members of the Accelerating Innovation Coordination Team who submit ideas, but aren’t eligible for cash awards
Bake Innovation Right into Projects – James Chou
Year 2
2019-2020
David Severance, Josh Jackson, Derek Shirk – Spearhead Award
Distribute SPOP information via Google Drive
Students newly admitted to UCI were unable to physically attend the Student and Parent Orientation Program (SPOP) due to the COVID-19 campus closure. The pre-COVID-19 SPOP experience included in-person interactions with campus academic advisors and paper documents.
In order to adapt the SPOP to remote online sessions, the Registrar department needed a method to distribute reports to students in a secure, online fashion.
Josh Jackson, Derek Shirk, and David Severance worked together to create a process that generates PDF reports for students attending SPOP and places the documents in the students’ personal Google Drive storage spaces. This process was successfully used in all the Summer 2020 SPOP sessions.
George Rodriguez, Andrew Lawrence, Mikel Exteberria – Spearhead Award
Zero-Touch Apple Device Management
The Athletics IT team desired a better mobile device experience for their coaches and staff. Mikel, George, and Andrew worked together to develop a new “Zero Touch” deployment method.
After about a year of research, development, and implementation, Athletics IT no longer needs to manually configure mobile devices. The Business Office purchases a mobile device, Athletics IT adds the device “serial number” to the appropriate Airwatch management bucket. Then, coaches and staff simply turn on the new device, follow on-screen prompts, and the device is ready to use.
Michael Millis – Lamplighter Award
Private Composer Repository – To Share and Collaborate PHP code between UCI
Sharing code makes us all work faster, and package managers like Composer let us bring shared code into our work even easier. Most of the time you want to pull in packages that are publicly available… but sometimes you want to share your own packages privately.
Michael is already sharing code between his own projects, but he wants everyone to be able to join in the fun. But one step farther: an internal Composer repository would allow OIT’s various PHP teams to share with each other, helping us standardize practices and avoid reinventing the wheel.
Chris Price – Lamplighter Award
Sprint Operations Lead
Chris learned of a great Operations Support practice known as the Sprint Operations Lead, where an “Ops Lead” is designated on a weekly or bi-weekly rotation within an Agile Dev Team (This also works within Waterfall Dev Teams). The “Ops Lead” is tasked with all Ops-related work, including Resolving Incidents, Release Management, and Production Fixes, while the rest of the team can focus on the current Sprint work.
Although this is a practice used by many Dev Teams on Campus, Chris successfully implemented this idea within his own OR Dev Team, and it has increased efficiency with Ops Support and meeting Sprint Deadlines.
Joe Schiffman, Kaz Okayasu – Lamplighter Award
Project Strike Team
The Project Strike Team is a group of “volunteer firefighters” with expertise across key areas of OIT who get activated when an emergency situation arises and follow a standard process to triage, assess, plan and act to address the situation. The initial team will be especially focused on Windows-infrastructure related emergencies where there’s no existing OIT team who knows/manages it, and will include reps from the PMO, Desktop Support, Windows Services Group, Security, and Data Center Infrastructure teams.
Joe and Kaz developed an initial charter for the team as well as an initial protocol to be followed. The pilot proposal was presented and approved by OIT senior leadership and the initial team was ready to be assembled when the campus had to respond to Covid-19. The Project Strike Team pilot will be pursued in 20-21.
Jyoti Razdan, Michael Luong, Bob Nenne, Victor Tam – Lamplighter Award
Space Reservations for Return to Work
The Space Reservations for Return to Work idea seeks to create a solution for viewing and reserving hotel spaces and private offices during the OIT Workspace Pilot program being conducted in the Science Library. The system would allow employees to easily search and view unreserved spaces and make recurring reservations through both web and mobile clients.
Currently, a POC is being developed to determine feasibility of the program during the pilot program.
Innovator Awards
Pilot Innovator Awards are merited to individuals who have submitted innovative ideas to the Innovation team.
Move from Traditional Department File Servers To Microsoft Teams and OneDrive For File Collaboration and Storage – Aakash Shah
Rethink Trusted Source IP/Computer And Improve Connectivity For Mobile Workforce – Aakash Shah
Building and Maintaining a Skills Database – Scott Cosel
Quick and balanced Service-Now ticket assignments – Patrick Lemon
OIT Learning Camp – Songmei Han
Use LDAP or campus Active Directory to aggregate funds for campus-wide software licensing – Bob Hudack
Temporary ZotAlert Subscription option for visitors and guests of UC Irvine – David Pritikin
Asset Inventory Tool for all of OIT – Hillary Chansavang
Team Cross-training Coding Challenges – Alissa Powers
Integration of Exchange/Google calendar items with ServiceNow – Kaz Okayasu
On-prem universal fileshare – Kaz Okayasu
CCI – The Concept Creators Initiative – Chris Price
outlook.uci.edu – Andrew Lawrence
Community Outreach – Careers in IT – Jyoti Razdan
Integration of Account provisioning with KSAMS and LDAP as a Service for hosts – David Severance
Pilot Year
2018-2019
Pilot Innovator Award – Alissa Powers
Using theater and improv techniques to improve presentation skills for members of OIT
Alissa built upon her drama background and degree. She worked with her AI Coach to refine her idea and create a proof of concept model. She has reached out to interested members of OIT for feedback and UCI drama faculty for consultation to finalize her approach and pilot sessions. She’s targeting October 2019 for her first pilot session workshop.
Pilot Innovator Award – Jyoti Razdan
Adding mobile device responsiveness and location awareness to the Tririga platform
Jyoti combined two separate innovative ideas “mobile/responsive self-service FM user tickets in Tririga” and “location awareness in Tririga via integration with UCI’s ArcGIS service and official campus maps”. Jyoti developed a comprehensive proof of concept in Tririga, demonstrated that to FM management, and got approval for production refinements and release. These capabilities were deployed to production in Spring 2019 and FM has been coordinating a soft launch using the responsive ticketing and location awareness with FM staff and building managers.
Pilot Innovator Award – Aakash Shah
Pushing for a future where we don’t have to juggle passwords
Aakash refined the his initial idea for using password-less authentication technology via FIDO2 smartkey technology into a 200 hour proposal for a proof of concept. After further work, he streamlined the proposal to a 75 hour POC project. The POC uses a secure test segment of the UCI Windows Active Directory environment to test Windows-based logins and would provide a test bed where the UCI Security Team could conduct further security assessments. The POC proposal has been escalated to management. Given the high-demand for Aakash’s time, but also recognizing his innovative drive, they’re working to schedule time for the POC implementation during 2019-2020.