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Anchalee Phataralaoha: Welcome to our Technology Conversations podcast, where we discuss technology related topics from how to find resources for your technology needs to how technology can impact our lives. My name is Anchalee Phataralaoha, and I will be your host.

With us today is Joe Gasper. He is a system administrator with UF IFAS or Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences. Hi Joe, how are you today?

Joe Gasper: I'm doing great. Thank you for having me today. I'm excited to be here and chat with you.

Anchalee Phataralaoha: And thank you for being here. Now to get started, share with us your background and what leads you to where you are today.

Joe Gasper: I grew up in Michigan, just outside of Flint, a little rural neighborhood outside a place called Goodrich. And I found myself at Purdue University for engineering degree, where I got my Masters in aeronautical and astronautical engineering. And from there, straight to the university, straight here. I had a very influential aunt in my life, who was a professor here in Botany, and I came down after my degree and looked for a job, got one at the university. Wasn't initially actually in computers what I do here. So actually my very first year was with wildlife ecology and conservation, or what would become Wildlife Ecology and Conservation at the time. They knew they needed an IT person. So again, this is 1993. And I was their first IT person, but I started off as a biological scientist. So first year I was doing some GIS work. I was going out into the field helping professors with Kestrel research until that position got flipped over officially to what we called back then computer coordinators. And that's where I got my feel for working with faculty, working with students, the academic side of my career here.

From that, I joined about five years later, joined Finance and Accounting. And I was also their first IT person. That's probably where I found a lot of my growth in my career around learning the business side of the university. Looking at all the business processes across, now it's called Procurement, from tax services to reporting. That was early days of being involved with the early ERP implementations from the finance and accounting side.

Anchalee Phataralaoha: What is ERP?

Joe Gasper: Enterprise Resource Planning, our PeopleSoft implementation. And that was a great place to start connecting with others across the University too. There was a small unit called Operations Analysis, OA, commonly. Small team that was also helping all the departments in business affairs at the time. And I worked closely with them. And we slowly built up a group of IT people that now is called TSS.

Anchalee Phataralaoha: And that stands for?

Joe Gasper: That is a very good question. Technical Support Services, maybe, and that team kind of carries on a lot more than what we were doing with OA across just the business services areas. So that was, again, really early years building up IT support across campus. From there I joined..12 years later, I think, joined UFIT on the Windows team. There's a few more different kind of teams there now. There was really just kind of one Windows team and we were doing everything that was Microsoft related, you could say. Lots of fun over there. Building out some of our secure enclave implementation, a number of services that are still in use, and that's where I got a chance to really start using the cloud, start using the Microsoft 365 services.

About six years over there, and I took a position, where I'm at now, in IFAS. There was an opportunity to get back to something that I had really enjoyed with finance and accounting, which was really close with the users, working really close with the users, having that opportunity that I had missed. So taking what I'd learned from all the smart people in UFIT, I could go use that over in IFAS, and that's where I'm at now. So I'm on a central IT team at the University of Florida, IFAS - Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences, and so it's a college of ag that is also the cooperative extension arm of the university. We're a land grant university, so along with our sister school, FAMU, the other extension university for the state of Florida. That cooperative extension has been a really, I don't know how to say, it's really deep in my heart assisting our agents. That part of my job, I really love. That has definitely enabled me to get really close and work with our users.

My engineering degree really taught me around problem solving and helping people, and that is kind of the culture I build around myself here is striving to do that.

Anchalee Phataralaoha: So since you've been around technology for so long, spanning three decades to say the least, you have seen a lot of changes in technology, right? And I would like to hear your perspective on how best can people use technology that we have available for of course to maximize efficiency, productivity and all that with so many options they have these days and things evolve so fast.

Joe Gasper: That you know I think is the challenging part of I think an IT person's position today is, first of all, staying, staying ahead, staying on top of all the things that are changing. I would say probably one of the more challenging parts of my job is staying, staying ahead, staying on top. So I spend a lot of time on podcasts and following Microsoft MVP, spending time on some good social media, following blogs, doing reading, I'm always reading, reading something, couple books, maybe one that's sci-fi related, and then something that's related to IT or adjacent in some way. I like to read a lot about leadership.

So I have to be prepared to stay up to date first if I'm going to help someone and talk to them. I treat my job and I teach the people, I say I mentor. Your role can be a consultant. You might live inside of a ticket system, but there's a difference between someone who's having a problem with their printer, and someone who's struggling to use some type of tool, and a lot of our tools, like you said, are now, they're moving quick, they're in the cloud.

Anchalee Phataralaoha: It's like a moving target.

Joe Gasper: Yes. And those tools change, and there's a ton of functionality in them, and how to help them bring out and use those best. You have to stay in front of those people as much as you can and keep them informed. Like I said I like to treat things as a consultant. So someone will bring me a problem I'm usually not immediately just gonna go solve it and do it. I'm gonna talk to that person. That's a part of why I like to be where I'm at as I get a chance to talk to users, interfacing with them directly and learn about their, what are they trying to solve? What is their problem? And not just give them a solution, say one and done, 'cause there's always some other things behind the scenes going on. And taking that little bit of interest in that person and their role in their job, that's what I find powerful for me is empowering that user, give them enough information that they can think beyond getting this fixed and how can they do that themselves in the future or how can they take this tool they have access to and use it in another way or take it to the next level. And that's where I spent a lot of my time in, I used to say community work. So there is a community that I have been, me and a fellow teammate a while ago, now a colleague outside the university. We've been running six years now, a monthly training online program.

Anchalee Phataralaoha: What is it called?

Joe Gasper: It's got a great name. The common name is Jurassic County. So someone's heard Jurassic County. That is a little learning community; it's based in Microsoft Teams, and that's initially where it got its launch. There's a monthly Teams Tuesday, we call it that we run. We've done that monthly. We took our first break of six years just last month, but we'll start back up again in July. That six years ago, 2018 that got started primarily because of our extension folks. So our cooperative extension agents part of IFAS are throughout the state. There's 67 counties. We have cooperative extension, UF employees throughout the state. We have a footprint in every state, you know, in every county. We have I think it's 12 other research and education centers. So we have, we have a lot of branch offices. In IFAS, we have to think at scale and remote. Everything we do, we have to, that's how we have to think about solving people's problems. But we were in a hardware refresh at that time.

Anchalee Phataralaoha: What does it mean..hardware refresh?

Joe Gasper: We have equipment in every county. So we had servers in every county and all these research and education centers that we're responsible for. My colleague and I looked at was there an opportunity to take other tools that had become available, or were becoming very available very soon. And one of those was Microsoft Teams.

Our county extension agents are often--we joke-- they're outstanding in their field. There's two ways. They are outstanding. We have one of the top extension programs in the state, but they also are often standing in a field, where they got to talk to a farmer, they've got to talk to a grower, and they need access to their data. If that's sitting in a server, sitting in a room in a county extension office, it's very hard to get to. So that's where these tools, like Microsoft Teams, we just started training them on that tool. And we could replace the hardware with simpler hardware that didn't need to be a big huge server. Their files are in the cloud. They can access it from anywhere. And that has gone over really well. My colleague and I, Dewayne Hyatt, we drove about 5,600 miles, over about a year going out and meeting people where they are training them on these tools, explaining, that's the kind of work I think that's important. These services are really powerful.

Anchalee Phataralaoha: So you've got good feedback as they use these tools.

Joe Gasper: Yes, definitely. There's adjacent tools to Teams. There're other tools that integrate that, they take advantage of. So there's been kind of one suite that they could move to change some of their business processes, change how they work, certainly ease of access to their files and information.

Anchalee Phataralaoha: So do you need to train them before they use it? Or kind of intuitive, they can just jump and use it right away?

Joe Gasper: So I think Teams at this point, It's best if you can get some basic training. I think if you perhaps join a team that's well established and kind of see how it works, you're going to pick it up. But if you can, I know that there's training on campus occasionally for Microsoft Teams. I would definitely recommend taking those courses. Or you can join Jurassic County.

Anchalee Phataralaoha: How do people join?

Joe Gasper: We have like 6 years of videos you can watch. You can join Jurassic County..well you can contact me and I can add you, but typically people who have been added to that team I think we have over 1,200 members of that team now. It's not very chatty. So if you join it, it's not too bad if you've got a lot of Teams already. There's a join code that you can use, that's E -C -G -M -1 -R -1. And that'll let you jump in and join. There're a few channels in there. We don't send you a lot of messages, maybe twice a month, to remind you and set, put something on your calendar for the next Teams Tuesday, which is 10 am first Tuesdays of the month.

Anchalee Phataralaoha: So you mentioned Microsoft Teams, that is very beneficial. Let's say if you have to pick the other two top two tools, what would you recommend?

Joe Gasper: You're not going to get away from Zoom. So you're going to want to make sure you understand how to use Zoom. When I say understand how to use it, I think it's important to get some training on there, especially if you're someone who's leading and running meetings; it’s understanding of meetings, settings around that, taking advantage of that. I would say the other thing that you want to know and look at--that is I would put someone into LinkedIn. And give them an idea of what is sitting there. I think it's an excellent resource. It's wonderful the university has continued to maintain that service. I think we are one of the largest users of LinkedIn Learning for universities. I think that's really, really helpful. That is something that you can access inside of Microsoft Teams.

Anchalee Phataralaoha: There we go coming in full circle. So I'm gonna ask about..we're gonna move beyond present now,  gonna move into the future. So let's say 3 years, 5 years, 10 years from now what other trends that you see coming or might be going into that direction?

Joe Gasper: It's hard not to say put AI in that phrase somewhere in the future. I think there's a lot of other experts at this university who could talk on the future of AI. But that to me adds probably significant, significant unknown now. It really has, I think, thrown, you know, a lot of things up in the air. And I'm talking, you know, I'm a systems administrator, so in my world, developers, also thinking about what that's going to do. I can see that there are the ability right now to make tools with AI that a user can do themselves. So I think coming up with end user generated, that is becoming easier and easier to do and teaching folks on how to do that.

Anchalee Phataralaoha: Like customized tools.

Joe Gasper: Customized tools around this. So that is I think that is going to have some you know significant capabilities to help our users around a lot of the effort they do; there are you know there's the goal with I think AI is to find the things that just make you sigh like the mundane things that you're required to do. Can we come up with a way to make those faster, simpler, better with AI? Those are some goals. And then spend more time doing what's your primary work. So our extension agents, if they can be in front of a grower or a farmer or something like that and helping them, that is like one of the primary goals, teaching and training. Taking this corpus of all this research a university does, that's the purpose. A goal of a cooperative extension agent is making that in a way that the citizens of this state of Florida can understand it and take advantage of it and use it. So making them more effective will just accelerate, you know, multi-fold different ways in which they can do other work that's more valuable to the citizens. So some of those words I think are like Agents we might talk about some of those automation capabilities.

Anchalee Phataralaoha: Alright, we're gonna come into the, any final thoughts.

Joe Gasper: I would leave the folks that are still listening here. Thank you for doing that. I have a few things that I like to talk about..anybody can lead is something I say often here. And what I mean by that is if you have a passion, if you have an interest, if you have primarily you know you have the knowledge in something, share it. And that is really kind of a culture I build around myself here is share what you know. And that can help unlock the potential in others. Just think like a consultant I like to say. And that can apply not just in IT, but anyone in a business decision role, things like that. Those are things that have led me to where I'm at today. If you want to talk about any of this, or you're interested in some of the tools we've talked about, I'm really easy to reach. I have pretty much an open door.

Anchalee Phataralaoha: How to reach you?

Joe Gasper: You can reach out to me at a little URL, it goes to Microsoft Bookings. So if you go to aka.my/bookjo, B -O -O -K -J -O -E, feel free to grab 30 minutes or an hour. I'm happy to help and have a chat with you.

Anchalee Phataralaoha: All right. Thank you very much, Joe. I learned a few things. I learned several things, not just a few things here.

Joe Gasper: Thank you for having me. Appreciate it. 

Anchalee Phataralaoha: All right, and that's it, everyone. And we will see you next time for a topic of interest in IT.