2017 Michigan IT Symposium Presentations

The following Michigan IT Symposium presentations take place Tuesday, November 21 at the Michigan League.

Opening Remarks • 9–9:30 a.m.

Mendelssohn Theatre

Kelli Trosvig
Vice President for Information Technology and Chief Information Officer

Andrew Rosenberg, MD
Chief Information Officer, Michigan Medicine

Keynote Address • 9:30–10:30 a.m.

Mendelssohn Theatre

Kim S. Cameron
William Russell Kelly Chair of Management and Organizations; Professor of Higher Education, Co-founder, Center for Positive Organizations, University of Michigan

Birds of a Feather • 11:30 a.m.–12:30 p.m.

Birds of a Feather conversations are opportunities for IT people with similar roles and interests to talk in a more informal environment. These facilitated conversations will take place during the lunch period of the symposium.

Containers

Development with Containers
Moderator: Jeffery Sica; Michigan Room, Floor 2

Orchestration and Management with Containers
Moderator: Bob Killen; Koessler Room, Floor 3

The Container has revolutionized how many industries and enterprises develop and deploy software and services. While the promise of containers to improve reliability, reproducibility and sharing application is helping to drive this adoption, there are still questions and concerns that are holding back broader adoption. In this BOF we will provide an opportunity for the Michigan IT community to engage with the local leaders in this area that are developing solutions and promoting the container model in their units

This BoF has been broken into two high-level topics: Development with Containers that is geared toward developers working with and implementing containerized applications, and Orchestration and Management with Containers that is geared toward sysadmins that are hosting and maintaining production-level containers. There will be an overview followed by an interactive period where the audience can ask questions of our experts and share their experiences with others. A key goal of these sessions is to understand and develop an agenda for solving questions and concerns that are holding back broader adoption.

Michigan Customer Relationship Management (MCRM) Community of Practice: Being a Part of the CRM Ecosystem on Campus

Moderator: Haley Gould • Ballroom, Floor 2

Moving from Coincidental to Strategic Collaborations and Partnerships

Moderator: Kinnothan Nelson • Kalamazoo Room, Floor 2

The School of Nursing and the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts recently collaborated to develop a pilot for Respondus Lockdown Browser. Lockdown Browser is a browser application designed to prohibit students from running other processes while it is in use

In this Birds of a Feather session, we will describe the collaboration process from the perspectives of both Schools, as well as our lessons learned, to set the context for our main discourse. Our goal is to engage the U-M community in a discussion around how we can be more thoughtful, intentional, and strategic in our IT collaborations.

Accessibility in IT Service Delivery and Design

Moderator: Brandon Werner • Henderson Room, Floor 3

Topics discussed will include:

  • Mobile accessibility on both Android and iPhone with demonstrations based mostly around the iPhone.
  • The importance of ensuring new cloud apps are accessible.
  • Current status of the accessibility of some of the cloud apps used on campus.

Breakout Session 1 • 12:30–1:20 p.m.

Making the Most of Faculty Review Data

Presenter: Brian Greminger • Room D, Floor 3

In this session, we will detail and demonstrate the tools the Ross School developed in-house to capture faculty data for their annual review process, and then repurposes that data in different ways to further the mission of the School.

When “The Cloud” Fit and When It Didn’t: An Enterprise Identity and Access Management Journey

Moderator: Jen Swaney; Panelists: Chris Hable, Gail Lift, Michael Kijewski • Mendelssohn Theatre

The Enterprise Identity and Access Management (EIAM) Program team is tasked with analyzing and finding solutions to address gaps in identity and access management across all four U-M campuses, including Michigan Medicine. Hear from a panel of technical leads and project managers from ITS and HITS who discuss their approach to analyzing cloud vendors contending to meet the needs of several EIAM Program efforts. They’ll address:

  • Cloud vendor evaluation methods
  • Cloud vendor selection criteria
  • Special considerations for academic, research, and patient care use
  • Compare and contrast use cases for cloud-based Role and Access Management technologies
  • Cloud-based service implementation approaches
  • Making the decision: when “The Cloud” fits and when it doesn’t

Ultimately, you’ll hear how the program and project teams came to final decisions regarding use of cloud vendors for IAM-related solutions on the academic campuses and at Michigan Medicine.

In 200 years will U-M be able to write a history of this period in American education if digital data is not historically archived? (Panel Discussion)

Moderator: Joe Bauer; Panelists: Elizabeth Sears, Lance Stuchell, Sean DeMonner • Ballroom, Floor 2

We are racing to digitize more and more University functions and processes but few IT projects include plans or budget for the historical archiving of their data. We are able to celebrate the bicentennial today, and know about the early history of the University because the people of past preserved documentation in a manner that endures the challenges of centuries. In 100 years, or even 50, will U-M be able to reconstruct a history of the present period in American education, or is too much data being lost as we upgrade, migrate, and retire systems?

This panel, containing IT professionals, faculty, and a digital archivist, will lead discussion with attendees that explores the challenges of preserving digital data for history, while calling on the IT community for engagement. We will discuss the role of IT, the language we use, and whether we can make a difference.

Digital Repository as a Service (RaaS) by ICPSR

Presenters: Harsha Ummerpillai, Thomas Murphy • Kalamazoo Room, Floor 2

ICPSR is an international consortium of more than 750 academic institutions and research organizations. ICPSR provides leadership and training in data access, curation, and methods of analysis for the social science research community. ICPSR maintains a data archive of more than 250,000 files of research in the social and behavioral sciences and hosts 21 specialized collections of data in education, aging, criminal justice, substance abuse, terrorism, and other fields.

Over the past decades, ICPSR has established as a leader in building digital archives and enabling secondary research using these resources. ICPSR's new technology platform "Archonnex" aims to extend this expertise and digital technology capabilities as a service to larger U-M community, we call it RaaS - Repository As A Service. This presentation will showcase the software capabilities of the new platform and step-by-step instructions involved in integrating and leveraging this Repository Software platform. Archonnex uses the paradigm of D2D, developer to developer integration, where a small snippet of code embedded within host web applications allows for the seamless integration with new software services.

Demo will include some of the national archives that we host at ICPSR and free self publication software products implemented on the Archonnex platform.

Hands-On Training: Shifting Applications to the Cloud

Presenter: Chris Kretler • Koessler Room, Floor 3

Attendees will need a laptop and access to a Git account with the ability to make public repos.

Creating production applications in the cloud requires new skills for both development and operations teams. With a number of viable cloud providers, the total number of required competencies can seem daunting. One way to streamline this learning curve is to adopt a common application platform. Docker is a containerization platform for creating and deploying applications. Docker has become popular with development teams for its efficiency and portability, as well as its isolation of application dependencies. One of the more popular Docker platforms—Red Hat's OpenShift—is in use on campus.

The OpenShift platform is used by campus groups to run applications both on-premise and in AWS. OpenShift simplifies the setup of continuous integration pipelines and provides an automated way to perform common operational functions like applying security patches.

In this hands-on session, attendees will learn the basics of OpenShift and how to quickly create environments and applications. Members of ITS and CAEN will discuss their experience with the platform. Some prior knowledge of Docker will be helpful but not essential. Users should have access to a Git account with the ability to make public repos.

Hands-On Training: CI/CD Workflow

Presenter: Jeffrey Sica • Michigan Room, Floor 2

When developing custom applications the cloud gives developers tools for better testing and automated upgrades. This environment lends itself to the benefits of a Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipeline. By building tests and deployment scripts up front, rather than an afterthought, we can greatly minimize IT effort when making code changes.

This tutorial aims to provide foundational knowledge on the CI/CD mindset and give practical experience using one solution (Gitlab CI). The concepts and experience provided will be applicable to other build systems such as Jenkins or TravisCI.

Growing Digital Education Tools in the Digital Innovation Greenhouse

Presenter: Amy Homkes-Hayes • Henderson Room, Floor 3

The Digital Innovation Greenhouse (DIG) in the Office of Academic Innovation is an educational technology accelerator working to scale “homegrown” digital pedagogy here at the University of Michigan. Our group of software developers, user experience designers, and behavioral scientists work with faculty to iterate on and spread use of innovative digital edtech within U-M’s campuses. Join us as we discuss how DIG was born and our current suite of eight digital tools. These span from a tailored communication system for students in large courses, ECoach, to Policymaker, a platform that provides digital infrastructure for simulation pedagogy.

Learn more about our process for selecting and building digital edtech while gaining insight into the challenges we grapple with onboarding new faculty and staff users without sacrificing the pedagogy on which our tools rely. Gain an understanding of how the diverse tools in our suite work, and the R&D we do with them to improve the educational experiences of our students.

Breakout Session 2 • 1:30–2:20 p.m.

The Learning Analytics Architecture (LARC) Project: Normalizing Student Data for Institutional Research

Presenters: Steve Lonn, Jeffrey Jenkins, Ruby Nugent • Ballroom, Floor 2

This session will details a collaborative project at U-M to transform administrative reporting data into a centralized dataset for institutional research and learning analytics. The LARC project brings together admissions, registrar, and other institutional data in a flat and ready-to-analyze format designed for modern statistical analysis software. The rationale, process, reasoning, and development processes completed over 18 months will be discussed. Session attendees will learn why and how this type of collaboration can be a catalyst for enabling new research questions, insights, and future partnerships across the institution.

Evolution of Computer Networking at University of Michigan

Presenters: Eric Boyd, Daniel Eklund • Mendelssohn Theatre

Over the past 15 years, university data usage has grown exponentially. With an estimated annual growth rate in network traffic of 31% inbound/22% outbound, the requirement for network capacity is currently doubling every 3 years. We anticipate this growth rate will continue as high performance computing, data intensive science, video streaming, and the shift of campus information technology infrastructure, systems, and data to public cloud providers moves forward.

The University of Michigan is at a crossroads: We must either make incremental improvements to the existing campus network architecture or embrace transformational changes to enable the next generation of advanced networking. ITS is planning to transform the campus network capacity by an order of magnitude by implementing a next generation network design. Specifically, by centralizing the campus backbone into a redundant star topology coupled with a significant investment in re-architecting the campus fiber infrastructure, the university will be positioned for significant additional growth in campus networking capacity to the internet and to individual units across campus.

This initiative will position the university to meet the ever-growing teaching, learning, research, and clinical network bandwidth needs of the researchers, faculty, staff, and students. The implementation will provide high availability, high bandwidth, redundant connections on campus, across campuses, and to other universities, federal labs, and cloud providers. It will ensure that the university has the network it needs to remain a leader in data intensive science in order to attract the best faculty, students, and staff and enable the next generation of research.

Closed Captioning for Live Streamed Events on a Production Shoestring

Presenters: Andy Rosenzweig, Nate Dorman • Room 4, Floor 1

When you're planning to stream an event, it should be a priority to provide closed captions so all audiences can enjoy the program. But where to begin? This presentation will discuss how ITS and Michigan Media developed the means to integrate captions into webcasts of live events from anywhere on campus. We'll cover some of the basics of online closed-captioning, the technologies involved, and how video and captions come together as a viewable program. We'll discuss how we identified the right technologies and providers for encoding software, cloud-based streaming platforms, video players, audio transmission, and live captioning; and how we put all the pieces together for a reliable service. We'll talk about a few remaining complications and display some real-life examples.

TeleHealth the Future of Patient Care

Presenters: Cassandra Callaghan, Dr. Mark Fitzgerald • Room D, Floor 3

Cloud technologies provide unique opportunities for Patient Care. At the School of Dentistry, we are implementing a cloud based Electronic Health Record (EHR) system. This new system has a secure, HIPAA compliant TeleHealth module. The integration of TeleHealth will enable our faculty to provide consulting services, and interactions with students within the school, with other health care schools/units on campus, within the U-M Medical complex, with our community based sites and in the future other practices. Major objectives of this initiative are improved outcomes of care, improved outcomes of education and reduced costs of care. These opportunities are well aligned for future promotion and expansion of Interprofessional Education (IPE) and Interprofessional Collaborative Care (IPC).

This presentation will describe what TeleHealth is, what it can mean to the University of Michigan and how the School of Dentistry can leverage in the next year and beyond.

How to Transform an IT Department

Presenter: Brian Greminger • Henderson Room, Floor 3

Two years ago, Ross IT started a process to transform how we do business. Join us as each Director presents our individual and collective experiences and stories that occurred involving, culture, people, and outcomes, all of which went into creating our strategy. We will also share our successes, lessons learned, and how we intend to sustain our transformation going forward.

After the main presentation, participants will break into smaller groups for discussion on how these ideas and concepts apply to their organizations, and then report out to share their thoughts with the larger group.

The intended audience of this session is anyone in a manager or director role.

Hands-On Training: Microsoft Azure - Getting started with Azure VMs

Presenter: Azure Representative • Kalamazoo Room, Floor 2

Attendees will need a laptop For those interested in exploring Azure virtual machines for hosting applications or dev/test environment, learn how to setup and monitor Windows- and Linux-based VMs in the U-M Microsoft Azure environment. This hands-on lab will explain the core building blocks for VMs and Websites including resource groups, virtual networks, storage, and compute. Both browser and command-line examples (PowerShell and Azure CLI) will be demonstrated.

Hands-On Training: Amazon Web Services (AWS) Beginner Session

Presenter: Amazon Representative • Michigan Room, Floor 2

Attendees will need a laptop.

In this hands-on lab targeted to beginners new to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform, topics covered will include:

  • Introduction to AWS
  • How AWS builds out regions
  • The Shared Responsibility Model
  • Introduction to EC2 lab

Hands-On Training: Google Cloud Platform - Building Scalable and Resilient Applications

Presenter: Google Representative • Koessler Room, Floor 3

Attendees will need a laptop.

This session will introduce participants to important concepts and terminology for working with Google Cloud Platform and showcase how to build scalable and resilient applications. We will show how to use Google Cloud Platform’s Load Balancing and Autoscaling capabilities to easily scale your applications across regions and handle heavy traffic. If you work with researchers and stay up worrying about your data centers, this session is for you.

Breakout Session 3 • 2:30–3:20 p.m.

Tackling Phish with Michigan Medicine

Presenter: Gracie Trinidad • Ballroom, Floor 2

From 2015 to 2016, healthcare systems experienced a 500% increase in security breaches due to phishing. Underlying this increase in breaches is an even larger increase in the number and sophistication of healthcare attacks. The Michigan Medicine Anti-Phishing Pilot is an educational effort intended to provide Michigan Medicine faculty and staff with the awareness and skills necessary to protect themselves and the organization from phishing attempts that go so far as to mimic U-M email and cloud resources.

The Michigan Medicine summer 2017 pilot is being conducted with assistance from Information Assurance, the Michigan Medicine Service Desk and PhishMe, a lightweight, cloud-based education platform equipped with the educational content and metrics necessary to help reduce this threat to our health system. The first anti-phishing pilot campaign, completed early August 2017 with two pilot departments, has yielded preliminary data on phishing click-though and phishing reporting rates, 11.82% and 10.9% respectively. This preliminary data will be used to inform the rollout of the Anti-Phishing effort across Michigan Medicine as well as inform anti-phishing efforts in other U-M units.

Informatica: An Intelligent Data Management Platform

Presenter: Rodney Nelson • Henderson Room, Floor 3

Business thrives on data—it drives everything from customer support to business strategy. The good news is that today, your business is flooded with an unprecedented number of data sources and types: legacy systems, sensors, log files, mobile devices—all of these sources generate data that can provide your business with a competitive advantage.

Informatica's product is a portfolio focused on data integration: extract, transform, load, information lifecycle management, business-to-business data exchange, cloud computing integration, complex event processing, data masking, data quality, data replication, data virtualization, master data management, and ultra-messaging.

The Michigan Medicine HITS Data, Reporting, and Analytics teams have identified several opportunities within the organization that can leverage features of the Informatica platform.

A few key opportunities we are working on:

  • An efficient cost effective way to deliver data and insights to our clinical/research/education partners
  • Set up a metadata manager to collect and store metadata from databases, ETL, and reporting tools for data lineage and impact analysis across Michigan Medicine
  • Leverage and expand the use of existing Informatica infrastructure and platform services across Michigan Medicine

PrivaScope: Protect Privacy while Enabling Data Analytics

Presenters: Eric Boyd, Pascal VanHentenryck, Ferdinando Fioretto • Room D, Floor 3

PrivaScope, a collaborative of Infrastructure, IA, EAS, ARC-TS, and the Industrial and Operations Engineering RITMO project, aims to ensure comprehensive protection of the individual privacy while enabling the advancement of scientific discovery through research access to operational data. Initially, PrivaScope is supporting the analysis of U-M students, faculty, and staff mobility patterns. This is being achieved by providing U-M researchers with a secure enclave environment and the tools to use to analyze extensive collection of mobile, people, space and particular domain data without having a direct access to and view of the data itself. The intent is also to build a reusable environment and software components that would position researchers to achieve quicker and more relevant results.

PrivaScope infrastructure will help realize many practical outcomes:

  • Effective and efficient transportation for all community members
  • Community safety: identification of treacherous locations or less safe times of the day, or providing individual data for first responders
  • Individual effectiveness either through quick access to study space by providing study area heat maps, or through finding correlation of the extracurricular activities and academic achievement
  • Protection of the individual privacy in every area of research by implementing state-of-the-art technology: advanced differential privacy for data analysis.

The end goal of this initiative is to disseminate acquired knowledge and deployed digital tools by open-sourcing data transformation software, and as appropriate, privacy protection and data analysis algorithms.

Bringing History to Life: Building a Newspaper Archive for Now and the Future

Presenters: Nabeela Jaffer, Chris Powell • Room 4, Floor 1

Creating an online archive of the Michigan Daily, a student newspaper published at the University of Michigan since 1890, has been under discussion for over a decade. In 2014, the University of Michigan Library Information Technology division, the Michigan Daily, and the Bentley Historical Library began collaborating in earnest and funding was secured to launch the archive to coincide with the university's 2017 bicentennial. Simply digitizing the bound volumes and depositing them in HathiTrust was insufficient; while it met the project's preservation needs, it could not provide the navigation and user experience expected from online newspapers.

After examining the available commercial solutions, Library IT elected to build our own application, combining portions of our existing DLXS infrastructure and the METS packages created for HathiTrust with the National Digital Newspaper Project (NDNP) schema and tools widely used in the library community—Blacklight, Solr, and IIIF—into an application we called fishrappr. This allowed us to move fast to meet our immediate goals and deadline, but positioned us to go farther with newspapers in the future. Having successfully launched the archive, immediate next steps can include expanding the application to other titles, finding ways for checking and improving metadata for newspaper issues, integrating the enhanced metadata into HathiTrust, and abstracting the work to make it reusable for others in the community. We will touch on user-centered design and usability testing, our experience using Agile methodology for the first time, and lessons learned.

Change Management for IT Initiatives

Presenters: Jenny Jalet, Amy Peters • Mendelssohn Theatre

Interested in increasing your chances for implementing an IT change on time and on budget? Understanding these change management principles will help! Research conducted by Prosci tells us that an effective change management program has a direct impact on the likelihood of a project meeting its goals and objectives. This session will identify key activities to lead and support people through an IT change and different roles and responsibilities. We will identify risks of ineffective change efforts. Participants will also learn about U-M communities and resources where they expand their change management knowledge.

Hands-On Training: Microsoft Azure - Moving Websites and Databases to Azure

Presenter: Microsoft Representative • Kalamazoo Room, Floor 2

Attendees will need a laptop.

Learn how on-premises SQL databases and applications can be moved into Azure including learning how Microsoft enables Dev/Ops for Web applications. This hands-on lab will demo tools available to move on-site SQL databases and Web applications to Azure.

Hands-On Training: Amazon Web Services (AWS) Advanced Session

Presenter: Amazon Representative • Michigan Room, Floor 2

Attendees will need a laptop.

In this hands-on lab targeted to those with some knowledge of the the Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform, topics covered will include:

  • Identity and Access Management
  • S3 and CloudFront for content distribution
  • Relational Database Service
  • Automating AWS with CloudFormation
  • Introduction to Lambda
  • Building clusters with Alces Flight
  • Elastic MapReduce

Hands-On Training: Google Cloud Platform: Enabling Research (Machine Learning, Big Data)

Presenter: Google Representative • Koessler Room, Floor 3

Attendees will need a laptop.

This session will introduce participants to the Big Data and Machine Learning capabilities of Google Cloud Platform (GCP). We will provide a quick overview of the Google Cloud Platform and a deeper dive of the data processing capabilities. If you work with researchers and want to know the latest technologies in processing data and adding intelligence to your data this session is for you.

Closing Remarks • 3:30–4 p.m.

Ballroom