Author: carverc

The TechBirmingham board for 2018 has been named and I am fortunate to serve with this body in 2018. The Birmingham Journal article on the board  announcement details the other superb members of the board.

The Enterpriser’s Project published a new article on crowd sourcing from the perspective of 2 years into the project. Interesting read.

The Birmingham Business Journel ran a great story on our extension of the fastest university the state to the largest business incubator in the Southwest. It is a great story on creating business value.

I am remiss but in August 2017, CIO Review magazine ran an article on empowering greatness in others. It is a quick read and has been well received in terms of the number of re-posts and references.

The Redhat OpenSource project published an article on crowdsourcing as a means to a more flexible strategic plan that I authored at opensource.com. This is a topic that continues to garnish a great deal of attention as organizations strive to be more agile and nimble in their operations.

UAB hosted an unveiling of our new high performance computer with coverage by the local press. The Birmingham Business Journal, Alabama News Center, and Medical Health News covered the event as well as a plethora of regional TV stations. We also released a new video capturing the progress made in high performance computer.

One of the better security videos we have released is on two factor authentication. Pithy, short, and in language a normal human being can understand are characteristics of this video.

While I have always railed against silly security rules that waste everyone’s time, password expiration has particularly irked me. It is mathematically indefensible and just complicates everyone’s life if you have a long password. As we roll out  two-factor authentication, we will make user passwords never expire.

To highlight the emotional impact this has, two things happened when I announced this at executive cabinet:

1. The President immediately blurted out “…and this is why you invest in information security!” and,
2. Several of my colleagues teared up as changing passwords is one of the things they most dreaded about work.

Combining the two initiatives will accelerate adoption of 2-factor authentication.

I lead an organization that has a somewhat unique role in higher education – we provide IT support to an athletic department that competes at the highest level of NCAA competition. Here is a short video we released today highlighting our support for the football team.

One of the surprising, at least to me, results is the Athletics department selected me to be one of three honorary coaches for the season opener on 2 September. This doesn’t normally happen to IT leaders and perhaps indicates the amazing employees we have on our IT team.

This is probably the best video we have produced to date and details the issues we encountered with our network, the fixes we put in, and our plan for the future.

This is a webinar I participated in for CTN Network with Samuel Sudhakar back in March.  It was a great conversation although the moderator sometimes reached for conflict when none existed.