Michigan IT Symposium 2019 View Other Sessions

Anne and Joe will describe the collaboration efforts on campus for supporting Digital Scholarship and will outline the opportunities for IT partners across campus can get involved. 

Digital Scholarship is often described as being centered in the Humanities, but as being highly interdisciplinary. It commonly involves research that creates or interacts with digital archives. A common challenge with a digital scholarship project is balancing the needs for innovation with the needs for long term preservation.   

At U-M Library, Anne leads the Digital Scholarship team as Digital Scholarship Strategist. At LSA Technology Services, Joe leads a Digital Scholarship Working Group in coordinating, reimagining, and refactoring services to be more supportive of and more compatible with digital scholarship.

With Alteryx, Finance has been able to save hours of time gathering, cleaning and blending together data from various sources and formats. But not only has Alteryx significantly reduced the time-to-deliver data to our customers, Alteryx has enabled new capabilities not previously available. One use case we will present discovered over $200K in duplicate payments to suppliers in the first year of implementation. 

In this session, we will demonstrate the ease of building Alteryx workflows and a couple of the best use cases we have implemented in Finance.

With collaboration from Google representatives, U-M staff from ITS and the Precision Health Initiative created a secure environment modeled after the Google Solution/Architecture: “HIPAA-Aligned Cloud Healthcare” and “Setting up a HIPAA-Aligned Project.” The team provisioned and configured the vast majority of the architecture through Terraform, making sure that the code could be repurposed if any other event or project required a similar setup. The back-end projects are separated by function and IAM permissions are applied accordingly. The infrastructure utilizes Google products such as BigQuery, Google Cloud Storage, Stackdriver Logging, Monitoring, Alerting, and Organization Policies, while the datathon participants primarily utilize Google Datalab and Bigquery to analyze the data uploaded by U-M staff.

The presentation will give an overview of the infrastructure, including design choices and some lessons learned during the process.

Ansible is an open-source automation tool that is being used across the university and worldwide for configuration management and automated application deployment. Automation with Ansible saves time and minimizes errors, allowing our infrastructure to be declarative. We can know the exact state of our infrastructure, how an application was installed, and can rapidly scale resources with minimal direct interaction. 

We have been leveraging Ansible across LSA TS and HITS. In this session, we will share the ways Ansible has helped minimize the time and resources needed for post-build configuration and ongoing maintenance such as software patching. We will provide examples of common administrative tasks that can be simplified, and combined, using Ansible. 

In addition, we will take a deep dive into Molecule, the testing framework for Ansible, and show how it is being used to test configurations, deployments, and software lifecycle paths in local containers and/or virtual machines before impacting real-world systems. We will describe our techniques for debugging and testing using Molecule, while sharing the common challenges we faced along the way.

This session will demonstrate the UDOIT accessibility checker for digital course materials in Canvas, with emphasis on the informational and teaching features of the tool. Possible approaches for introducing faculty to use of the tool will be suggested, and workflows for using the "fix-it" features demonstrated.

This will be a hands-on session using the API directory, including how to create applications, subscribe to an API, and test the applications using UI and Postman.

Nearly eight years ago, a strategic working group was formed to define the Vision for Michigan IT. As the U-M environment changes, the Michigan IT community grows, and we celebrate our sixth annual Michigan IT Symposium, it’s time to evaluate the community’s needs to ensure we are focused on the right goals and objectives. Join your peers for table discussions and exploration of how our community and our programs should evolve to achieve our new U-M technology vision.