Engage, UTO’s third annual all-UTO gathering was September 23 & 24, 2020!

Each day from 9:00 a.m. - 11:00 a.m.

UTO’s annual internal gathering, Engage, will follow up on the momentum of the ideas constructed by the ASU IT community at Empower 2020. This is an exciting opportunity for the UTO family to lend its voice and share its passions. Like last year, we will host an “idea hackathon” where we collaboratively plan for future strategic efforts...but with a twist!

Engage 2020 will be all about mashups. What is a mashup? It’s the blending of two creative products...just like Danzig and Donna Summer.

But what will we be mashing up? Culture and innovation, of course. They may sound like they go hand-in-hand already, and they do, but across two days, the UTO family will focus on how to combine authentic human connection with the technology - the High Tech and High Touch mashup. On day one, attendees will collaborate to hack some of these mashup ideas. 

And in the spirit of mashing things up, even more, day 2 will provide participants the opportunity to switch over to a different working session, bringing fresh perspectives on the work from day 1. Ideas are not the only things being combined; combine forces with your UTO peers to get new a new outlook on both culture and innovation!

The kitchen can get crowded, cluttered, and loud sometimes, so let’s put some roles in place to ensure that the hackathon is as positive, productive, and fun as possible!  Working together to innovate while creating a thriving culture is what we do every day, and Engage is no different! Each idea team will include the following five roles: 

Masher The Masher is the head chef of the group! The Masher sets the team up for success by preparing before heading into the Engage kitchen and leading the team to produce a thoughtful, innovative mashup recipe. An excellent communicator who is respectful, helpful and creative, the Masher motivates the team as they consider the ingredients, leads the recipe brainstorming, encourages the flavors to simmer and develop, and finally presents the masterpiece to the UTO Family.		Recipe Writer What good is a top recipe if you can’t remember the steps you took to make it or the ingredients that are in it to share with others? Need tips? Check HERE for more information.   The Recipe Maker keeps notes during the hackathon and shares action items with the team to ensure everyone is on the same (cookbook) page. Don’t just say what happened...tell the story.
Sous Chef Beside every brilliant Masher is an amazing Sous Chef to help the chef lead. Good under pressure and encouraging to all, the Sous Chef moves the topics/recipe building along when it gets quiet and helps ease the recipe writing process.		Timer With just two hours during Engage to boil, braise, and barbecue ideas, a Timer is needed to keep track of the clock. The Timer is thoughtfully assertive to ensure the team is kept on track.
Chef At Engage you can’t have too many chefs in the kitchen!  As a chef, you will roll up your sleeves and work with your fellow chefs to create actionable outputs for the workstreams. Besides coming to Engage with an open mind, rest easy knowing the rest of your kitchen team, as described above, will help facilitate and report out your workstream’s findings. These final results will be part of the Engage Cookbook.

An internal UTO IT Professional Development Event

September 23, 2020

9:00 a.m. - 9:30 a.m.	Welcome and opening remarks from UTO Leadership
9:30 a.m. - 10:00 a.m.	Culture + Innovation Mashup Workstream Pitches
10:00 a.m.  and beyond	Break into working sessions (your choice!) Zoom links can be found on the Culture + Innovation Mashup Workstream Tab

September 24, 2020 

9:00 a.m. - 10:00 a.m.	Break into idea hackathon working sessions (your choice!) Zoom links can be found on the Culture + Innovation Mashup Workstream Tab
10:00 a.m. - 11:00 a.m.	Culture + Innovation Mashup Workstream final readout and Closing

Engage 2020 will be all about mashups. What is a mashup? It’s the blending of two creative products...just like Danzig and Donna Summer.

But what will we be mashing up? Culture and innovation, of course. They may sound like they go hand-in-hand already, and they do, but across two days, the UTO family will focus on how to combine authentic human connection with the technology - the High Tech and High Touch mashup. Attendees will collaborate in focused workstreams in Zoom rooms to hack these mashup ideas:

Accessible Dashboard of Dashboards

Masher: Elizabeth Reilley
Data has become a key vehicle for storytelling across ASU, and the more dashboards the greater transparency around our work and its impact. For example, how are we tracking all the XR work taking place across ASU? How can create more windows and doors into data at ASU that can benefit students, faculty and staff?

 #uto-engage-dashboards  Conference Hall 

Activating the Affirmative Pledge

Masher: Jean Squires & Fred Hernandez
In August 2020, UTO published our official affirmative pledge -- but it will require continual action to bring those words to life. In the vein of President Crow's announcement of 25 steps towards advancing social justice, this workstream will develop innovation plans of action for realizing our affirmative pledge.

#uto-engage-affimative-pledge   Classroom 2

ASU Sync-Up: Applying Remote/Hybrid Student Success Tactics to UTO 2.1 Staff Success

Mashers: Michelle Watt & Allison Hall
We've learned so much in the pandemic era about what it takes to support our learners in remote and hybrid modalities -- what lessons learned can we apply to supporting our staff and setting them up for success in the hybrid and fast-paced world of UTO 2.1?

#uto-engage-asu-sync-up   Lighthouse  DH 208

Authentic Artificial Intelligence

Masher: Kyle Bowen
Artificial Intelligence has been one of the most-featured headline grabbers due to its vast potential -- and controversy. There is no shortage of research on inherent racial bias, for example. How do we ensure our next-gen AI tools and frameworks more authentically accomodate and honor the diversity of humanity?

#uto-engage-authentic-ai   Auditorium

Block-chain chain chain of tools (See: Aretha!)

Masher: Ryan Hendrix
Blockchain has become a foundational element when we think about trust, but it is one consideration of many for empowering learners to record and showcase the breadth of their learning experiences. What other tools and approaches are we missing from the equation? What does trust look like in 5, 10, 20 years?

#uto-engage-blockchain   Maroon Theatre

Emotionally Smart Cities

Mashers: Christine Whitney Sanchez & Chris Richardson
Over the past few years, UTO and ASU have been leading the way for smart campus, city and region advancements, leveraging technology partnerships and the latest tools. But a smart city is more than a tech-enabled city -- it's an emotionally connected one. How can we activate authentic connections in our tech-enhanced interactions?

#uto-engage-emotionally-smart-cities   Soccer Field

Help Me Help You: Innovative Boundary-Winning Approaches

Mashers: Samantha Becker & Jess Evans
At ASU, we have a wonderful way of finding creative ways of doing more with less. Boundaries are something people take ownership of setting to ensure we are focused on authentic priorities. But as boundaries in an increasingly boundary-less remote/hybrid world become blurry, how can we empower each other?

#uto-engage-boundary-winning   Gold Theatre

Next-Gen Z Networks

Masher: Kelly Mukherjee & Dawnyce Schutz
Next-Gen Z has entered our college campuses and will be disrupting the workforce in no time. Are our networks ready to handle the activities they'll be leading? What kind of architecture and thinking is needed, and how do we involve new generations in this architecture?

#uto-engage-next-gen   Classroom 1

Zooming out of the Meeting Grind: UTO 2.1 and Conscious Collaboration

Masher: Chris Deaton
We spend so much of our time together in meetings, so how we can make them more constructive, productive and engaging?

#uto-engage-meeting-grind   Beach

“Collaboration” was among the watchwords during Engage 2019, UTO’s Internal IT Professional Development Event. On Thursday, August 15, the UTO family gathered for a day of productivity and fun, strengthening partnerships and forming new ones while developing innovations together. Engage 2019, held at Dave & Buster’s, focused on opening new modes and channels of communication as we worked on 12 big ideas, submitted by UTO employees, for UTO’s first idea hackathon.

As CIO Lev Gonick put it, another watchword of the day was “celebratory.” UTO celebrated our impressive accomplishments and their connection to our annual goals. In fact, each of the 12 big ideas brought to the day represented at least one of those key goals, if not more. As part of their initial pitches to entice participants to work on their concepts, the idea originators and their co-facilitators passionately delivered reasons why their proposals could form into projects that fuel those goals and UTO’s vision for advancing the New American University.

Breaking Down Silos

Some key themes emerged from Engage. Many of the ideas involved breaking down silos, most notably the winning one for the day. Titled “Collaborative Work Space for IT Scripters, Code Ninjas and HTML Geeks,” the concept rested on the premise that a digital storage option is necessary for university-wide programmers to access. There’s no need for solutions to be redundantly created across ASU, and individuals and teams sharing their resources and work with everyone would make many processes and developments more efficient.

Idea originator and ServiceNow developer Chelsey Ingersoll proposed the collaborative work space. “When all you have is an idea, getting the attention of the right people to make it happen can feel insurmountable,” Chelsey said. “Engage gave this little idea the attention of nearly everyone within UTO. This idea now has the attention of an entire organization, and can leverage that mind share to deliver something awesome.” Since the idea was selected by the UTO community as the winner of the prize package, real resources and time will now be devoted to it.

As mentioned, the winning idea represented the key goal of breaking down silos. But in a larger sense, it represented a sense of open collaboration. Engage’s hackathon brought leadership figures into direct and equal contact across the 12 working groups, and UTO’s collective voice decided the direction of a new project. 

Another exciting aspect of a more open culture was that the 11 other big ideas not selected during the final prize pitches still will be in consideration for UTO going forward. New Slack channels were created to continue the conversations and work.

The “Generating Culture Ripples” idea, for example, was centered on elevating a conscious, collaborative culture for all ASU IT professionals. And the “Crowdsource/Work Priority” idea takes collaboration outside of UTO; this idea’s thesis was that the best and most transparent way to determine UTO’s priorities is through a crowdsourced approach, addressing the needs of students, faculty and staff.

Focusing more on internal growth, on the other hand, the layout and design aspirations of the next open space for UTO HQ in the University Services Building was also a big topic for “Co-Design the Next Working Space at USB” as we explore how best to collaborate and innovate.

Developing New Technology

Of course, in a tech-focused organization, several big ideas were more technical. “Design of a Realistic DevSecOps Model,” for example, picked up steam as a cross-disciplinary method of fusing culture, project management practices, and technical tools to establish more effective approaches. 

For the “Creating a Data Mindset Among All of UTO” idea, the collection, organization and storage of data in all that we do is crucial to creating a data mindset among all of UTO, another hot topic of discussion at Engage. 

Further, a “User-friendly AWS Cost Calculator” for customers across the university was almost fully designed in just a few short hours at the event.

Serving ASU...

Speaking of user-friendly, a couple other ideas were about making it easier for everyone to more effectively do their jobs and access ASU resources. One group developed an idea for a “Service Web Chart” that leverages various platforms to connect UTO employees that could be needed for assistance on a project, but aren’t necessarily known personally to those working on said project. And another, “Utilize a Cloud Identity Provider for Authentication on macOS Devices,” addressed the need for a single sign-on solution for macOS devices, as Windows users have been able to do.

...and Beyond

Some ideas also took UTO’s impact beyond ASU staff -- and even students. “Preparing ASU for the NextGen Network” has the potential to impact people within ten miles of an ASU campus. Additionally, UTO’s “Green Weavers” are trying to lessen the negative impact on our environment with creative solutions to e-waste. Finally, a “UTO Student Worker Digital Credential Pilot,” potentially in partnership with local, national, and global industries, could enrich and empower a new segment of the workforce.

Whether they invigorated UTO and ASU culture, developed future technologies, refined the tools we use every day, or broadened the scope of our work to impact the places and communities ASU touches, Engage’s big ideas demonstrated the creativity and drive of the UTO family. They represented our underlying beliefs, assumptions, and values, which were all...engaged (!) and challenged in interesting ways. We look forward to Engage 2020 and all future events where UTO and the ASU IT community work together to evolve the ASU experience.

 

[caption caption="We asked and you answered! Describe Engage in three words or less."] [/caption]