Over 200 IT Professionals attended the UW IT Professionals Conference at the Wisconsin School of Business on May 31st to network, make connections among campus IT colleagues, and learn what others are doing on campus.
In its second year, the event brought UW-Madison IT colleagues to learn and discuss with their peers who presented in a variety of formats—five-minute speed rounds to 30-minute presentations to panel discussions—to have open dialogue on IT-related processes and deliverables that have worked, what can be improved and what issues we need to address in higher education IT.
Some notable event highlights include:

• Keynote, Wallace Chase, executive director for networking and telecommunications at Clemson University, challenged us to broaden our idea of what we consider unique contributions to IT.
• UW IT Professionals steering team led an interactive session of the audience breaking up into small groups to brainstorm actionable items for the Guidelines, Best Practices and Advice for IT Professionals that was originally created in November 2016.
• Industry guru on all things IT virtualization and system design and fellow DoITer, Bob Plankers, made a compelling case for making small improvements in our IT systems, despite our innate need for complexity.
• DoIT team of Jess Jones, Maria Dahman, and Jim Helwig gave great tips on how to get qualitative data via interviews to really improve the user experience of products and services

Many campus IT Professionals spoke at this year’s event. See their full presentations here.
This event was sponsored and organized by UW-Madison IT professionals for the campus IT community. The UW IT Professionals Conference provides opportunities to talk shop and brainstorm solutions that affect the daily IT experience of higher education pros and ultimately, their stakeholders.
Contact itproconf@wisc.edu to get involved.