IT Staff celebrate and reflect on 2023

It’s the season to be jolly, and IT staff had several reasons to be joyful and merry this year! The IT holiday celebration on December 12 featured food, music, fun, and raffle prizes, with proceeds benefiting the United Way of Greater New Haven. Heidi and Handsome Dan delighted the staff with a special appearance, while the IT group entertained with live music, and the DJ kept everyone grooving to the beat. The photo booth was a big hit, creating unforgettable memories for staff.

Taking a break from their work routine to enjoy time with colleagues, IT team members reflected on their accomplishments and joyful moments throughout the year. Here’s some of what we heard:

What accomplishments are you most proud of?

Devon Biancarelli-Milano, Foundational Technology Services, ITS: After graduating college in late 2021, joining the Network Engineering team one month after graduating was intimidating and caused me a lot of anxiety. After almost two years here, I'm happy to say I've never felt more comfortable in this working environment. The Yale team has allowed me to excel and learn in areas I never thought possible. I'm proud that having the opportunity to work here has given me the utmost confidence in my abilities to provide Yale with designing, maintaining, implementing, and troubleshooting the university’s network and its end-users.

Hadar Call, Enterprise Platforms, ITS: I am continuously grateful for the amazing, creative, and brilliant people I work with daily.  I am also grateful for the kindness and warmth I have seen extended between people on our teams, whether they are welcoming someone new to the team, teaching a new skill, or helping a team member solve a problem.  Thank you to everyone who has been so generous with their time and expertise to help me and others learn and grow!

Shawn Clark, Foundational Technologies Services, ITS: The NGN team celebrated these key accomplishments this year. We migrated the last building on the Medical Campus in June and are on target for West Campus this month; achieved our highest record of 15 building transitions in a single month; migrated 100 buildings by August, bringing our total to 135 buildings to date and upgraded 1,186 access points and 123 closets since July.

Vincent Guerrero, School of Architecture - Academic Programs, IT: I continue to be proud of our efficient and dedicated architecture team for delivering on many diverse projects while maintaining a high level of service for our community. Our team is small but found a way to introduce new technologies, such as leveraging AI, new specialized fabrication equipment, and significant changes to our infrastructure, without missing a beat with our day-to-day support operation.

Heather Gywnn, FAS-SEAS, IT: I’m proud of the work I have been doing on campus to bring “light” to the fact that lighting is lacking in our AV and event spaces. I’ve done multiple projects without guidance, and I am finally getting management to recognize that our lack of lighting is a long-standing disservice to the Yale community. I am proud to be the squeaky wheel. Hopefully, I will get the grease- sooner than later.

Neetu Jain, Yale Health, IT: I led the upgrade of MicroStrategy to fruition and 100% success, built interactive dossiers, and mentored my team.

Robert Kaczowka, Yale Health, IT: Yale Health experienced tremendous growth post-COVID. As a result, the user population quickly outgrew Yale Health IT’s virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), resulting in poor performance, low storage space, and constant VDI system crashes for our end users. My team scrambled to remediate the situation by collaborating with ITS Network Engineering, ITS Data Center Infrastructure, Dell, and Yale Health leadership to purchase, design, and implement a solution that, in only a matter of several weeks, resulted in a VDI that is now performing optimally and is more stable and faster than ever!

Chris Lago, IT Support Services, ITS: I am proud of the Customer Experience teams who worked together this year to improve customer and service owner experiences. Major accomplishments include the implementation and use of the Field Service Management module to improve field technician and student support workflows, automated outage notifications for improved communications to customers and partners, server-to-application mapping to improve impact awareness, new service request catalog to improve customer experience, requesting IT Services and Incident re-categorization, improving data-driven reporting. Additionally, we opened a new walk-in support center at Marx Library for faculty and students, and the Student Technology Collaborative had its highest-ever student recruits.

Bryan Little, Yale Health, IT: Our ophthalmology department has several years of patient studies and images saved securely on a NAS at YHC. These were visible to clinicians at 55 Lock Street but not in Epic or to clinicians at other YNHH locations. Working collaboratively with YNHH, I was able to reconfigure three diagnostic devices to send all new studies to Epic and a VNA (Vendor Neutral Archive). I developed a layered process to export the legacy studies to the same destinations. This greatly enhances patient care by allowing these earlier studies performed at YHC to be visible in the patient record in Epic.

Frank Mathew, Office of the CIO, ITS: This year, I am grateful for the collaborative work we have done that has generated success… for example, implementing the law school registration progress that involved central and Law School teams, the resounding success with LUX that has been internationally recognized, and the work we are doing on the Balanced Scorecard items in collaboration with the IT Leadership Council.

Joanne Santiago, IT Support Services, ITS: I want to thank my team for demonstrating patience, resilience, commitment to delivery excellence, and continued improvement in the client experience. Central IT Support has worked diligently - individually and collectively – and it's nice to see our clients and staff realizing the fruits of this intentionality.

Lisa Sawin, Operation Portfolio Management Office, ITS: This year, we’ve worked on maturing the OPMO as a team. We have three new leaders in the OPMO who bring great energy and ideas. Together, we’ve built an architecture that helps the OPMO deliver at a high level. I’m proud of the goals we’ve set for ourselves and our attention to team-building.

Ryan Schlagheck, IT Support Services, ITS: I could not be more proud of the what the customer experience, endpoint experience, and central IT support teams have already accomplished in just the first half of FY24. Every team member has put their time, energy and passion for service into ensuring the community continues to receive exceptional support services across the university.

Jay Scott, Yale Health, IT: When the IDX system was implemented, various Yale Health departments external to IT took responsibility, via user interfaces, for setting up department-specific system rules and parameters that supported departmental functions. The ‘analyst’ part of my ‘programmer/analyst’ job title often consumes as much of my time as the ‘programmer’ part. I have developed considerable expertise in financial analysis and benefits interpretation. Documenting IT projects related to programming or analysis has been essential for maintaining continuity.

Chuck Thompson, FAS-SEAS, IT: We officially formed FAS-SEAS IT on July 1. It has been a true pleasure getting to know each member of the new organization and working with such a great group.

Louis Tiseo, Foundational Technologies, ITS: I'm grateful for my exceptional teams, whose hard work and dedication this past year have been instrumental in our success in delivering outstanding service quality for IT foundational platforms and infrastructure. Their commitment, resilience, and collaborative spirit have made a positive impact. Thank you for consistently going above and beyond.

Melissa Wallace, Yale Health, IT: I was able to work on a few mini IT projects, for example, setting up Right Fax with a few departments.  In addition, I assisted in the software testing upgrade to Centricity Business 7.3 and then to Indigo for the departments of claims, billing, referrals, and member services. I gained in-depth knowledge about the referral workflow and supported the enhancement of referrals. I know that the team I work with is supportive and helpful to each other.

Leonard Welch, IT Support Services, ITS: The Endpoint Engineering team progressed towards provisioning methods for over 15,000 managed computing devices on campus by developing the next-generation managed workstation. The Flexible Computing at Yale roadmap will improve service consumption through purpose-built hardware and software. Our team moved towards modern monitoring software platforms like Intune for support across multiple device types. With the addition of Adam Zonis as Associate Director, the AV team achieved numerous accomplishments during the year, including enhancing lecture capture and assistive listening technologies in 60 classrooms, creating and hiring a new Service, Installation, and Repair team, and establishing collaboration and standards across other university teams such as Network and Facilities, FAS-SEAS, and Med teams. After spending considerable time ensuring that our services maintain reliable operations, the Telecommunication team is hard at work on the next step of our strategy to provide modern telecommunications services and meet customers' needs. We migrated to a new cloud-based telecommunications service, deployed Microsoft Teams Telephone Service, installed 25 new cellular-based blue phones, and planned for a new cloud-based contact center platform. We accomplished this while continuing to audit our expenditures and provide financially responsible services to the university.

Jim Zarro, Yale Health, IT:  This year, the IT staff with a hybrid work schedule moved from a single office space to a shared workspace. The move went well, and the team adapted to the changes in our workspace. Despite all the competing priorities, IT always finds a way to balance all the projects and meet deadlines.

What brought you joy this year while working in IT?

Nicholas Garofolo, Foundational Technological Services, ITS: The Linux Systems team had heavy lifts this year regarding operating and maintaining a stable and secure infrastructure foundation, including rewriting our existing code. We were able to migrate our entire configuration management solution in the background of our daily tasks without any service interruption. Despite growing staff turnover pains, our systems team has continued demonstrating stellar customer support and expertise in major incident resolution. I am proud to be a part of this team and our infrastructure support work.

Vincent Guerrero, School of Architecture - Academic Programs, IT: I am encouraged by the progress the IT community has made towards a stronger One IT at Yale. As a distributed staff member, I feel a greater connection to my peers and colleagues across the university. Engaging with the community on initiatives that seem to resonate with many people, like IT mentoring, fostering a culture of innovation, the integrated plan review, and sharing ideas and best practices around artificial intelligence, has been insightful and fulfilling. I am grateful to have the opportunity to contribute to some of the work, and I look forward to seeing what we achieve together in the coming year.

Ryan Murphy, IT Systems & Network Engineering, Yale Health: I am happy that I was hired as a full-time employee with Yale Health when my contract ended! I am happy that I was able to research a suitable replacement for our P25 units in the form of 10Zig, and the pilot testing seems to be performing well so far.

Wies Rafi, Office of the CIO, ITS: I’m thankful for the support and encouragement from Yale IT colleagues and leadership, who have been instrumental in helping me acclimatize to a new city, a new work culture, and new perspectives from a variety of people of different backgrounds. It brings me joy to know I can meaningfully contribute to the overall success of Health Sciences and advance the goals of several new leaders in this space.

Amy Rodriguez, IT Support Services, ITS: I am finishing my last Early Career Development Program rotation at the end of December. I am proud of all the work I have done within each team, the skills I have learned, and the people I have met within my one-and-a-half years at Yale. I am also proud to say I have accepted an IT Associate role and will start this new role in January.

Due to the abundance of positive reflections, this article can't list them all! To view more comments from your colleagues, visit the IT Conversations channel on Microsoft Teams.

IT Leadership thanks the planning committee and everyone who joined the event! It was the perfect way to close out 2023, and they look forward to seeing everyone at the next IT event in March.

Stay tuned for more holiday photos on IT at Yale's Teams site and in IT Conversations!