- “UC Tech is not just a conference; it’s a community,” Williams said. “And when we think about that community, it’s a community of people that are not just IT professionals; it’s a community of people that are embedded within business units because increasingly, technology has gone well outside of the IT department. It’s also a community of people that are outside of even professional employees. It’s students, it’s folks that have aspirations to become technologists. … This is one of the most amazing places in the world, and we want UC Tech to be the home to allow our amazing employees to really realize their dreams and be a big part of helping them to move on to their next steps in their career.”
- Collaboration, even through happenstance, is an important catalyst for technologists. “The UC health CIOs and CTOs and application directors get together quite frequently over the course of the year,” Bengfort said, “and we just see that (collaboration) happening over and over.” He also noted the broader perspective that the conference brings to those working on different campuses and in different sectors: “I’ve gone to this (conference) for several years in a row, and every year I just get this sense of gratitude for the community I’m a part of that is just bigger than … I mean, UC SF is a big deal and there’s a lot of great things that happened, but when you open the aperture and you start to see everything that’s happening in the different parts of the institution, it really reinforces a sense of purpose for me. And so it reminds (me) why I’m banging my head against the wall on all these problems every day. It really helps to just inspire me. … Certainly at UC Tech, you get exposed to people working on similar problems, even in different parts of the mission, that you can leverage. Last year … there was a lot going on with megapixel and analytics on websites and all of that business. And not only did I get information from other campuses and how they were approaching it, we were doing a lot that I could share.”
- Snowden put the theme of this year’s conference — “Resilient, Rising & Reinspired” — in the context of how UC’s technologists, educators and students handled the emergence from the COVID-19 pandemic and the changes it wrought on education: “This year’s theme for UC Tech is going to allow us to sit back and think about everything that we’ve been through, the resilience and the fact that we’ve come through that. And some of us didn’t make it, but the people that did, we’ve come through that and now we’re starting to rise, use the strength that we gained during those hard times to rise, and also be inspired or reinspired or whatever we want to call it, to even reaching new heights. There’s no telling what we can do now.”
- Snowden added: “On a macro level, I feel that’s what our higher education institutions did. We had virtual classrooms, virtual remote work, and all this technology up and running to support this new world in a metaphorical weekend. So that’s what I feel — that this theme allows us to reflect on that and to also honor our own strength and where we’ve been, and to even go further.”
The conference will be presented from 8 a.m. to 5:15 p.m. all three days in person at UC Berkeley, and virtually. Registration and other details can be found online. A transcript of the podcast is also available online.
