Tag Archives: UTexas

Reclaiming Time and Elevating Our Work

AI, Digital Dexterity, Thoughts, , ,

Over the past six months, we’ve been working closely with colleagues across the university to better understand how Microsoft Copilot is shaping our day-to-day operations. While much of the attention around these technologies focuses on novelty or experimentation, what we are seeing and hearing is something more practical and powerful, it is creating time.

Using our workforce data as a baseline, we know the median annual salary at UT Austin is and what that equates to as an hourly wage. From there, it’s not hard to observe the potential for measuring impact. If each of our active 2,296 Copilot license holders, nearly all of whom are in administrative roles, saves just two hours a week, that represents $8.5 million in regained value annually. At three hours, it rises to $12.8 million. Four hours brings the total past $17.1 million. What our community of users is telling us is that they are using these tools to recapture no less than two hours of time back each week.

Those are big numbers, and they get your attention. But what excites me isn’t just the financial story, it’s the operational one. Every reclaimed hour represents capacity. That’s time that can be redirected away from repetitive tasks and toward higher-value work. It means more space to think critically, connect meaningfully with our students, colleagues, and the community focusing on advancing the mission of the university.

Graph showing dollar amount of savings based on time saved with Copilot.
Screenshot

Before I get a ton of hate mail for conflating actual savings for reclaimed time, I will admit that these types of calculations don’t tell much of a real story. But if you dig right below the skepticism and start to think about how nearly all of our time is divided across dozens of micro-tasks each day, finding low level opportunities to recapture some it can mean quite a bit. Today it is happening here and there with a tough email that we need to write or respond to, or in summarizing a new piece of legislature, to do a quick review of a contract, or any of the other things we all do each day in support of the university. Now think of all of that in the aggregate and you can begin to see how much time can actually be saved. And in my world, where I am trying to fit more work into every single moment, this matters.

We often talk about innovation in terms of new tools, but the real innovation here may be how we choose to use the time we’re getting back. AI can’t simply be about doing things faster, it must also be about creating the breathing room we need to elevate our work and to think differently about what’s possible. What I am looking for are stories that come from the community where our AI tools are saving you time, opening new thinking, or impacting current practice in ways that allows you more space to breathe, think, and engage more broadly.

Exposing the Missing Pieces in Our Content

AI, Thoughts, ,

Part of our campus AI journey is to design and deploy AI agents that can utilize key information from exisiting websites across campus. These agents may replace the sites, reducing technical bloat and information drift. While doing so, an unexpected benefit has emerged, one that speaks volumes about the evolving relationship between technology and content strategy on a highly decentralized campus.

When we first set out to build these agents, we did what most teams do, we pointed them at our sites or their underlying data, ingested the knowledge, tested retrieval, and began crafting conversations. But something interesting happened when we put these agents to work. People have started asking for things we couldn’t give them.

In short, the agents began surfacing questions we hadn’t anticipated; questions students, faculty, staff, and prospective Longhorns are likely asking every day. And, just as importantly, they showed us where our data and content fell short.

They have become mirrors, reflecting the structure, and the fragmentation, of our institutional knowledge. The things they cannot answer point directly to gaps in the content architecture: outdated FAQs, scattered documentation, siloed policy pages, and even buried gems of information lost in PDF archives or legacy web systems. It’s not that the information doesn’t exist. It’s that it’s too hard to find, inconsistently written, or lacks the context necessary to form a coherent response. We are sure the agent isn’t making mistakes per say, it tells us what it can’t say, and that’s been incredibly valuable.

One of the more revealing moments for me came when we began evaluating how the agent performed with the A–Z directory. This is a resource that has long served as the backbone for finding services and offices across the university. But once we put the agent to work with this data, the limitations of that system became painfully clear. What we had assumed was structured, complete, and reliable turned out to be limited, outdated, and in some cases, misleading.

UT Spark AI interface showing the A-Z agent.

This has been a bit of a wake-up call. It is so tempting to take a “lift and shift” approach, move what we have on the web into the AI agent and assume it will just work. But that does not hold up. The agent exposes what the web often hides. It forces precision. It requires context. And it absolutely demands trust in the data that fuels it.

We are now integrating these insights into a more systematic approach. Each time a query breaks down, we want to trace it back. What we need to be asking centers on: Should this information exist? If so, where should it live? Can we make it easier to find, easier to understand, and easier for the agent to serve up confidently?

This work is not just about making our AI better. It’s about making our websites more accessible, our documentation more useful, and our services more responsive. Every gap we close improves the experience not just for the agent, but for the human trying to find their way. I didn’t expect this kind of feedback loop to emerge so quickly, but I’m glad it has. It reminds us to slow down, look closely, and be intentional, not just with how we build agents, but how we steward the information we share across this institution.

February 2025 Updates from the Office of the CIO

Updates, UTET, ,
Enterprise Technology Logo Header

Successful closure of the Department of Justice web audit at the University
of Texas at Austin 

Enterprise Technology Learning 

As part of our ongoing effort to enhance the accessibility of our online landscape, we are pleased to announce the successful closure of the Department of Justice (DOJ) web audit at the University of Texas at Austin. This achievement was made possible through a cross-disciplinary approach, with the Digital Accessibility Center (DAC) coordinating efforts across various departments. The DOJ commended UT for its commitment to accessibility, stating, “In light of UT’s demonstrated commitment to accessibility and its robust response.” This positive feedback underscores our dedication to providing a learning and working environment in which all users can meaningfully participate. Key insights from the DOJ report, combined with ongoing collaborations with committees, working groups, and policy creation facilitated by the DAC, will help unify digital accessibility knowledge and resources across the UT community. These efforts will ensure that our digital platforms remain accessible, user-friendly, and compliant with the latest accessibility standards. 

School of Information Migration to Microsoft365 

Enterprise Technology Learning 

As part of our ongoing effort to enhance collaboration and productivity within the iSchool, a project has begun to migrate many of their existing data and systems to Microsoft 365. This migration will significantly improve efficiency and collaboration for the iSchool team, while also optimizing resource management and reducing operational costs. This transformation began with a series of initial lunch and learn sessions aimed at familiarizing team members with the Microsoft365 tools and functionalities. After the success of the lunch and learns, the iSchool staff were very interested in moving forward with a strategic migration. The project began with hiring 4 student workers to migrate the iSchool’s comprehensive wiki, with a focus on utilizing the more visual user-friendly SharePoint page designs. 

The Enterprise Technology Infrastructure team is working hard at upgrading outdoor Wi-Fi on campus

Infrastructure 

So far, the team has replaced 95 of the 250 (38%) outdoor wireless access points on campus. The entire lifecycle upgrade is planned to be completed before the start of the fall semester. The new wireless access points support newer encryption technologies, offer improved performance and support more user devices. The outdoor wireless access points on campus are reaching end of life and need to be replaced. In addition to mitigating the risk of these aging devices failing, the new access points offer greatly improved performance. 

Living the Digital Transformation We Preach

AI, Digital Dexterity, SLT, Thoughts, UTET, , ,

As the IT leaders at UT Austin, we spend a lot of time talking about digital transformation. We encourage campus to embrace modern tools, work smarter, and take advantage of the technology investments we’ve made. But here’s the real question, are we practicing what we preach? If we want to lead the university into a more digital, connected, and efficient future, we need to start with ourselves. We need to live in the environment we’re asking others to adopt, not dismiss it, not just support it, but fully commit to it.

Right now, we’re operating in a fragmented digital world. Some teams use Slack, others use Teams. Files are scattered across OneDrive, SharePoint, Box, Wikis, and more. Some meetings are on Zoom, others on Teams. We are juggling platforms when we could be harnessing the power of our enterprise-supported ecosystem and putting Copilot to work for us.

When groups on campus reach out for help improving their digital workflows, we should be the experts they turn to. But how can we do that if we aren’t fully invested ourselves? If we don’t know Teams inside and out, how can we teach others to maximize it? If we’re not using OneDrive and SharePoint to store our work, how can we expect others to move away from Box? This isn’t just about efficiency, it’s about leadership. The best way to drive change across campus is to lean into the change. And imagine the stories we can share with the community as we do!

Here’s our challenge, we need to standardize our own workflows before we can credibly push others to do the same.

  • Teams over Slack. All our internal communications should happen on Teams—chats, channels, file sharing, and collaboration. We can’t ask campus to make the switch if we haven’t fully embraced it.
  • OneDrive & SharePoint over Box. Moving documents to a single, integrated storage platform makes collaboration easier and security more resilient. I am not talking about engineering new workflows that support campus operations, I am primarily concerned with our internal workflows.
  • Teams Meetings over Zoom. We already have a robust, enterprise-supported meeting platform in Teams. It integrates with our calendars, our files, and our workflows. Let’s stop defaulting to Zoom when Teams can do the job. I completely understand that incoming meetings are often up to the organizer, but once we can start to show value in the automation that Copilot in Teams meetings provide, we have a reason for other groups on campus to make the change.
  • Microsoft Forms over Qualtrics. I am honestly tired of responding to basic questions using our most powerful enterprise survey tool. MS Forms should be used for all lightweight data collection.
  • AI & Automation with Copilot. Microsoft Copilot is already here, and it should be changing the way we work. But we won’t understand its full impact unless we actively use it. How can AI streamline our daily tasks? What reports, emails, and meetings can we automate? The only way to know is to test, learn, and apply. The SLT has decided that we are providing M365 Copilot to the entire organization.

I want to be clear, every time we use tools outside our enterprise systems, we create more work, more risk, and more fragmentation. We make it harder to secure data, harder to collaborate, and harder to support the very systems we advocate for. If we want campus to streamline their tech stack, we have to start with our own teams. That means cutting out redundant tools and fully investing in M365, not just because we’re told to, but because it makes our work more effective.

Digital transformation isn’t just about technology, it’s a cultural shift. It’s about building habits that make work easier, faster, and more connected. But culture change starts with us. I am asking us to set the example.

I want us to create a comprehensive plan for making this the new normal within Enterprise Technology. I know who some of the people are who can help lead this, but I am actively looking for people who can help and will take some responsibility in leading this.

OpenAI generated image showing people working together in a UT themed room.

Image created by OpenAI.