Thank you to everyone for such an exciting inaugural symposium. The energy, excitement, conversations, sessions, and attendance were a testament to how connected our community is and how excited we are to see what the future holds. If you missed it, here are a few highlights from the State of OIT presentation.

Last year, we changed our name to the Office of Innovative Technologies to emphasize our focus on innovation across the campus and system. Moving forward, we are shifting our efforts to using and supporting a specialized group of enterprise solutions. One example is the transition to Microsoft as the standard. As we build new solutions for the Knoxville campus, we will do so in a way that allows them to be used across the system.

The three strategic enterprise priorities announced in the State of OIT address are:

1. Emphasis on Security. We are creating a Security Operations Center to monitor events 24/7/365 and will look at ways to use AI to work for us and help fight the bad guys. We are also implementing Microsoft Intune to manage endpoint devices across the Knoxville campus.
2. Identity and Access Management. We are reviewing our process for assigning identities and questioning current practices. We are working with all of the UT campuses to implement modern identity and access management solutions that work with the enterprise resource planning systems to create identities and our applications and systems to manage access.
3. Data and Analytics. We need to maximize the possibilities for managing and reporting. In the short term, we are looking at solutions to collect data for evaluation for the Security Operations Center and provide a repository for archived IRIS Business Warehouse information. As we look to the future, we will standardize on PowerBI as the reporting platform. Reports in PowerBI can be shared with our partners across the state. We will also work with Huron to standardize the data definitions related to students and provide better reporting across the system.