I&R Employee Newsletter - November 2024

Dear Infrastructure and Resilience team,

Chancellor Schwartz has been at ̽����Ƶ for four months and his enthusiasm for change is admirable. The way we operate hasn’t changed and we continue to infuse sustainability into everything we do.

During our I&R leadership retreat earlier this month, we talked about our strategic goals for the division. The preliminary goals we intend to prioritize are:

1. Embedding student success into everything we do
2. Focusing on our people
3. Supporting the implementation of our 2030 climate action goals
4. Evaluating opportunities for continuous improvement and operational excellence across the division
5. A renewed focus on space optimization strategies for the campus as we transition further out of the pandemic

While these concepts are not new for our division, they are what we will focus on in the near future.

I also want to note that our new workwear has been distributed and it looks great! The distribution of over 3000 garments was no small undertaking, and I am grateful to the workwear committee for quickly getting the items to our 600+ staff members.

Finally, we are heading into winter and the holiday season. For many of us, the holidays and the start of winter are exciting times of year. However, it can also be stressful. I urge all of you to think about your own health and make it a priority, and act with compassion towards colleagues.

With gratitude,
Chris Ewing, vice chancellor for infrastructure and resilience

How long have you been working at CU? I have been working for CU for over 5 years.

What is your favorite thing to do outside of work? I enjoy kayaking, camping, and gaming when I’m outside of work.

Tell us something that might surprise us about you. I lived in Germany when the Berlin wall came down.

What do you love about ̽����Ƶ? I enjoy the diverse and friendly people I assist and work with.

What is your favorite type of music? My favorite type of music has to be rock, whether it’s classic or modern, it doesn’t matter.

With the recent advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and AI-powered tools, there are many possible applications to our work within Infrastructure and Resilience. As with any new technology, we need to ensure we are using these tools in a way that does not put our data at risk. Some key factors to keep in mind when using AI tools are:

• Use only vetted and approved AI tools.
• When using one of the approved tools, be sure you are logged in to your CU account. This ensures that our contract terms are applied to your interactions with the AI tool.
• Only share data with the AI tool at the approved level. As of the writing of this article, the AI tools are approved only for public data. If you would like to use them with documents that contain private data, you will need to remove all private data from the documents prior to sharing them with the AI tool. A good test to decide if something is public data is to ask yourself if it is something that could be posted on the public website.

Be sure you check AI responses for accuracy. AI tends to sound very confident in its answers, but it takes a human to validate that the responses are accurate.     

As the field continues to develop and new tools are available for use, we will send additional updates. Please reach out to I&R IT if you have questions.

With the recent renaming of our division to Infrastructure and Resilience, the members of the Infrastructure and Sustainability Inclusive Excellence Committee (ISIEC) find it the optimal time to rethink our name and reevaluate our current mission, vision and objectives and how they relate to I&R's goals for diversity, equity and inclusion.  On Nov 8, we are hosting a short retreat aimed at laying the groundwork for the future of ISIEC. During this gathering, we will engage with leadership to:

• Define our mission and values,
• Learn about Shared Equity Leadership
• Rename and rebrand the team and It'S Friday events
• And more…

Let us know if you want to get involved by emailing isiec@colorado.edu

New Hires

• Jangchup Dorjee, CBS, Custodian
• Aracely Diaz, Transportation Services, Campus Bus Driver

Promotions/Transfers

• Adam Sitzman, Outdoor Services, Main Campus Grounds Maint. & Weed Mgmt. Lead Worker (formerly Grounds & Nursery)
• Mike Roth, Distribution Services, Material Handler II (formerly Material Handler)
• Robert Allen, Facilities Maintenance Operations, Building Ops Coordinator in Leeds - Budget & Administration (formerly Structural Trades II)
• Zachary "Zac"  Cameron, Outdoor Services, Manager of Outdoor Services (formerly Main Campus Turf & Landscape Manager)
• Tomas Terrazas Hernandez, Facilities Maintenance Operations, Structural Trades II (formerly Structural Trades)

Moving On

• Brian Raj, CBS, Custodian