Happy Holidays from all of us in the Office of Information Technology!
As we look back upon this year, while we all have had many challenges, we would like to take a moment and acknowledge some of our accomplishments this year.
If you missed the annual SMU Staff Celebration & Convocation, a few members of our team were recognized at this year’s event. Stephen Snider was inducted in to the Twenty-Five Year Club. Our Executive Director of Data and Application Services, Curt Herridge, received the President’s Award 2020 for Outstanding Leadership. Also, Rachel Mulry, the Executive Director of Customer Service, was awarded the Loretta O’Reilly Hawkins Award for 2020.
As we have had to pivot this year to telecommuting, remote teaching, and SMUFlex, many members in OIT have help to onboard and assist our campus with these new challenges. Between our Technical Readiness for Continued Instruction training over Spring Break, the Remote Learning: from Survival to Exceptional event, the Advancements in EdTech conference, plus the SMUFlex Panels, we have provided thousands of hours of professional development hours for the University.
We also completed a few major milestones this year. We were able to bring Duo to several more systems, including the Canvas LMS, allowing us to add protection to those systems. After years in the making, we wrapped up Phase I of SMU’s Phone Replacement Project. Fueled by the popular Microsoft Office Specialist certification’s success, OIT is now offering the Adobe Certified Associate (ACA) certification. We also completed our fifth year of producing the OIT Quarterly Security Updates. Of course, this is not all, and we encourage you to review our latest OIT Progress Report or the OIT Technology News archive for more.
We are all looking forward to the holidays and to whatever 2021 has in store for us.
