OneIT: Summer 2018 Update: Speaker Series and Coffee with the CIO

On behalf of the OneIT organizing committee we would like to share information about a couple of upcoming program activities.

1) Speaker Series

We will be starting a monthly speaker series in July. These are opportunities for guests (external or internal) to give a moderately in-depth presentation (~45-75 minutes) on a topic of broad interest to the IT community.

We are planning these events at the GLC on the first Thursday of every month from 1-4pm. Based in part on feedback from the April OneIT Symposium, we wanted to include enough time for the invited speaker to present, for q-and-a, and for professional networking time with colleagues (and also the very popular afternoon ice cream break 😉

Important note: Because of the July 4 holiday, the first speaker series date will deviate a bit — it will be held on Thursday July 12. Also: We are also including in the speaker series an additional event on July 18, “AWS Immersion Day” — details below. But in general the “first Thursday” scheduling is the plan.

The first four speaker series events will be:

-Thursday July 12, 1-4pm, GLC — ServiceNow representatives will present an overview of the ServiceNow platform, which is playing an increasingly important role at GT. Emphasis is a general introduction to the platform and its several capabilities, including request management, incident management, HR service delivery, knowledge management, and more.

-Monday July 16 or Wednesday July 18, 8:30-4:30pm (date not yet finalized, location not yet finalized) — Brian Beach of Amazon will present an AWS “Immersion Day” — this will include presentation and hands-on experience with various aspects of AWS and EC2 (introduction, networking, storage, security, identity, etc).

-Thursday August 2, 1-4pm, GLC — Kimberly Friedman, Microsoft — “How Collaboration Happens at Microsoft” — her description: “We have a very large matrixed company so while some organizations have challenges with silos to break down, our challenge revolves around mastering our ability to collaborate effectively in a highly matrixed environment.”

-Thursday September 6, 1-4pm, GLC — Sanjay Agravat, Machine Learning Specialist for Google Cloud Platform [ https://cloud.google.com/ml-engine/ ] — Sanjay will provide an overview of Google Cloud platform with emphasis on its machine learning tools.

Future potential topics include GT/OIT/GTRI alum Trey Palmer on aspects of Mailchimp’s IT operations; IBM Watson; and SEO.

If you’d like to suggest topics or speakers, we’d love to hear: oneit@gatech.edu

We will be in touch with more info and reminders about these as the dates approach, but we wanted the community to be aware of what’s planned.

2) Coffee with the CIO

We will be organizing informal meetings for members of the GT IT community to chat over coffee with GT CIO Mark Hoeting. Starting in July we will send invitations to gather a group of 10-15 members of the IT community for informal chat, listening, and feedback.