Interview: Jennifer Burns, Associate Vice-President, Information Technology & Chief Information Officer

What is the operational role of your unit on campus?

I lead the Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO) and UBC Information Technology (UBC IT), which is the enterprise service delivery unit. I am responsible for both strategy and service delivery across all campuses, and in all units, regardless of where that unit reports. The OCIO and its leadership team is responsible for ensuring a coherent set of policies and practices in areas that span the entire institution. For example, enterprise data governance, cybersecurity, IT governance, investment planning, and enterprise architecture. UBC IT staff provide enterprise services across UBC, such as the IT Service Centre, email, desktop services, network, WiFi, audio visual classroom support, telephones, among others. We also provide innovative services that can be found in the Emerging Media Lab and UBC Studios. A full list of UBC IT’s services can be found at it.ubc.ca.

In the CIO’s portfolio we engage with the community on a continued basis to understand what is needed to support the community. There is significant change across the University and our role is to support faculty, staff, and researchers in finding technology supports and services. We are working with individual faculty and staff as well as units to help them find solutions for their projects and initiatives.

We are also in the process of establishing the ability to undertake proofs of concept and other pre-production capabilities to support innovative projects.
 

What are your most urgent and pressing challenges?

The current circumstances are challenging as it has accelerated the technology needs of the institution and required many new tools and technologies on very short timelines. This means we need to be able to engage in rapid planning and delivery cycles. This type of delivery is very complementary to the Campus as a Living Lab (CLL) initiative. The idea of using the university campus as a sandbox to explore opportunities and test new ideas in our local context, with the permission to learn from our successes and failures means that we can move more quickly to find ideas and solutions that make a difference.

While the CLL initiative started with sustainability, it’s a great opportunity to extend these ideas and capabilities into other areas. As an IT function, ensuring that our colleagues across the University have access to the tools and capabilities that they need will always be a pressing concern. There is a great deal of innovation happening in all areas of the University that we need to constantly engage to understand how we might support our stakeholders goals. One area that presents a lot of opportunity and challenges will be supporting smart campus efforts. This is an area that will drive new tools and technologies to improve energy efficiency and reduce waste, and will require IT to deploy and support new technologies. It holds a lot of promise to support sustainability initiatives and I am looking forward to finding ways to partner with these initiatives.

From a technology perspective, defending and protecting the UBC community from cyber threats continues to be a significant challenge. It’s not something the IT department or Chief Information Security Office can do on its own; it requires a community response. All of our individual actions contribute to the safety and security of UBC’s data. When planning research initiatives or other IT projects, cybersecurity must be at the forefront to ensure we are protecting UBC from current and future threats. UBC IT can help ensure that new initiatives receive appropriate assessments and approvals.
 

What potential research opportunities excite you the most with regard to your unit’s function?

UBC has the opportunity to support research initiatives that can be applied to UBC operations to make a difference to how the University operates. Advances in technology present tremendous opportunities for researchers to improve communities in many ways. UBC offers a unique environment to explore some of the opportunities that we can immediately connect with such as smart-cities, digital twinning, 5G, automation, and sustainability research. Supporting research across the entire institution is not always an easy undertaking, but opportunities to bring some of these novel ideas and technologies into practice at our institution and sharing in the enjoyment of the benefits they bring to everyone at UBC is particularly rewarding.
 

What are your operational constraints in incubating on-the-ground research?

To support the world-class research undertaken by UBC researchers, there is a need to have continuity in IT services from the most basic and essential services such as telephony, networks, and email to some of the more unique or complex services such as high-performance computing or quantum computing. Along the way, consideration needs to be given to research data management. Often the needs of a researcher extend well beyond the services offered by any one particular group.

Some of the challenges we encounter is the specialized needs of research domains that don’t immediately match with enterprise services, requiring greater effort to find the right skills or tools. With sufficient lead time and collaborative effort, these challenges can be overcome.

IT works closely with the VPRI, the Advanced Research Computing team (ARC) and the UBC Library, as well as local IT groups to provide researchers support for tools and technologies. Ensuring that there is a comprehensive understanding of all the services available to researchers and making that information readily available is a difficult task. However, through close collaborations with the OCIO, VPRI, the Library and others, we are bridging that gap to deliver on researcher needs and to improve their ability to discover available services.

What are past research collaborations?

UBC IT is proud of its many research collaborations. Some recent examples include the Rogers 5G Smart Campus initiative, and working with Energy & Water services on WiFi Building Controls based on UBC research. Our Emerging Media Lab has also worked with many researchers on collaboration in the AR/VR space