Estimated reading time: 3 minutes
September 2, 2020
By Ken Klingenstein
While we all treasure the personal interactions we have in the meetings, halls, and bars of TechEx, there are a few virtues to being virtual, and this year is an opportunity to explore them.
In particular, traditional TechEx isn’t a draw for the registrars, librarians, facilities management leaders, vice-presidents for research, or many of the other key campus constituencies that we interact with. But in a virtual world, the chance for us and our colleagues is readily available to drop in on a session, share a cup of coffee, and maybe some success stories, with like-minded peers who have partnered with IT at their institutions. We’d like to invite your 2020 CAMP proposals for sessions that explore, from both partners perspectives, the relationships that IT builds with key service constituencies on campus.
- Do you have a registrar who has worked with you on innovative self-service applications for students? Or one who understands the issues around attribute release and GDPR and FERPA?
- Do you have a librarian who understands the federated identity versus proxy tradeoffs? Or one that needs to? A librarian who is following Seamless Access?
- Do you have a facilities management department that has an IT architect you work with? A department that wants to leverage institutional identity management to help manage the growing IoT base? A campus with ad hoc access control issues as the number of devices far exceeds users on the network? A campus that needs its building access systems to now integrate with contact tracing?
- Is your institutional CISO distinct from central IT? If so, how do partnerships across those reporting lines work? What’s key to success?
- Do you have a VP of research who “gets it”? Who knows that research needs integrated collaborative community environments in addition to computing and storage? Who provides appropriate incentives to help distributed researchers to use and further develop central IT?
But wait. There’s more. You might have a thriving partnership with a registrar unit on campus, and maybe know of a similarly blessed colleague at another institution. But you are unsure how to fill out a panel of that can really explore a variety of campus approaches and why mileages may vary. The program committee and Internet2 staff are willing to help expand those ideas and broker contacts to grow a session idea into a rich and diverse panel. So offer up that half-baked idea and let us help you bake it. Email Dean Woodbeck (woodbeck@internet2.edu) to start the process.
This is a unique opportunity to examine how to strengthen IT partnerships on campus. To explore how different cultures learn the language and issues of each other. To discuss how to align priorities and build teams across domains. To leverage an increasingly sophisticated IAM infrastructure to support other institutional needs.
Let’s take advantage of the fact that we can bring our critical campus colleagues to a CAMP session without leaving campus.