That Escalated Quickly

As I reach the end of my first year here at the University of Texas, I am filled with gratitude and pride for the incredible progress we’ve made together. When I first stepped into this role, I was immediately struck by the talent, dedication, and innovative spirit that defines our university community. It has been a privilege to work alongside so many of you who are committed to supporting UT’s mission of excellence in education, research, and service.

Over the course of the past year, I have had the pleasure of meeting people from all over the 40 acres. I came here with that as a goal, to better understand the people I am in service to and the context I am doing that in. We collectively have so much going on and deal with new things each day. This year has seen leadership changes, strategic alignment, great conversations, progress on key initiatives, and a whole lot of really hard work. It has truly escalated quickly.

I arrived with what appeared to be a simple set of priorities. I never expected it to be easy; UT is way too big and complicated for anything to be done quickly and easily. However, the things that have been hard are also the things that seem to matter the most — focusing on our finances, focusing on our organizational alignment, focusing on our services, and focusing on our customers — all required some degree of change and adjustment on lots of peoples’ part. Did I accomplish everything I hoped I would in the first year? No.

Should I be disappointed in that? I am going to also answer that with a no. I am not one to set goals and fail, but the work we have done in the foundational areas of our organization are the ones that ultimately really matter going forward. In my organizational roadmap, I wanted to establish a new leadership team, ensure the financial health of the organization, launch a new digital presence, review our service portfolio, and finalize a new organizational structure that brings the three new units together into a single portfolio under the office of the CIO. We did amazing work in getting nearly all of that done in the last year. Wow.

I also wanted to raise awareness of our overall IT modernization needs campus-wide. I expressed pathways to do that over five distinct areas — student experience, infrastructure and systems, enterprise platforms, customer experience, and teaching and learning. We’ve invested new effort in each of these areas, with many of them paying dividends. We created the Student Experience Council that brings together business leaders across the student experience to identify what are the best-in-class digital approaches we should be using to delight students. We’ve continued to enhance our network and modernize portions of it in a systematic and impactful way. We are assisting Dell Medical in the implementation of Workday Finance and Epic, with plans forming to invest in new ERP capabilities for campus as well. We have launched an AI program that will directly impact customer experience, efficiency, teaching, learning, and research. We even hosted the SEC CIO group to help get a sense of where we stand relative to peers. All while making sure the core services campus relies on are resilient and robust.

The place where I need to focus more energy on is in the advancement of several common good services that support the whole community. We have done a lot of planning with various units and the ITLC. This coming year, we will leverage our investment in our own foundation to help make an even bigger impact across campus and in the larger IT community.

We have so much planned for the next few years and it is exciting as ever to be a Longhorn. I am thrilled to be here and to have made so many good friends along the way. Friends that I know are also committed to the long-term success of this great university. Thank you all for making my first year better than I hoped.

February 2025 Updates from the Office of the CIO

Enterprise Technology Logo Header

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. 


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. 


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

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.

Enterprise Technology Organizational Update January 2025

I’d like to share several updates from the Enterprise Technology Leadership Team, including how we’re evolving and continuing to create greater alignment across our teams, improve efficiency, and better position us to serve the university’s needs.

It has been a long haul to get to this point, but we are ready to make the necessary organizational changes that I have previously discussed with our team. Yesterday we announced changes to our org chart, new leadership team, and our new website. These changes are effective immediately. We prepared an informational “placemat” that describes our SLT roles and functions along with some FAQs. Please take a look.

Let’s take a look at the top level changes:

  • John Lovelace will be promoted to Associate Vice President of Infrastructure. John and I will work alongside one another to create the strategic long-term plans for the NextGen Network which will help transform the university into a more modern, digital university and enhance teaching, learning, research, and administration. Mike Martell will be promoted to Executive Director and his team will move under the leadership of John Lovelace. He will continue to lead the Data Center operations, Electronic Physical Security, and some aspects of our infrastrcuture.
  • Heather Hanna will be promoted to Associate Vice President of Engagement and Experience for Enterprise Technology. In this role Heather will oversee a critical and complex portfolio designed to bring all aspects of institution-wide IT customer experience, project management office, and IT business relationship management together to advance the mission of the University and provide a seamless experience to the campus community.  
  • Graham Chapman will be promoted to Associate Vice President of Enterprise Platforms. In this role, Graham will be responsible for managing and optimizing the university’s business applications, ERP systems, and academic information systems. Graham will ensure that these critical systems are integrated, efficient, and support the university’s mission of research, teaching, and community engagement.
  • Dave Moss will be promoted to Executive Director of ET Campus Solutions overseeing the management and optimization of enterprise environments such as document management, collaboration tools, web services, and identity management.
  • Mario Guerra previously led Longhorn Experience team which will now be known as Enterprise Learning Technology team. In his role as director, Mario will lead the efforts for digital accessibility and learning management. 

Finally, I’m delighted to announce the launch of the Enterprise Technology website. Thank you to Amanda Walker and Jana Tate for their assistance with getting this off the ground.

Enterprise Technology SLT Org Chart.