Ten projects at seven locations won the University of California’s 2014 Larry L. Sautter Award for using information technology to make university operations more effective and efficient to better serve faculty, staff, students and patients.

Chief Information Officer Tom Andriola from UCOP announced the winners today (Aug. 5, 2014) at the UC Computing Services Conference in San Francisco.

The annual award, which is sponsored by the UC Information Technology Leadership Council, recognizes innovations in IT that advance the university’s missions of teaching, research, public service and patient care, or that improve the effectiveness of university processes. The award encourages sharing these solutions across the UC system.

The 2014 award winners and honorable mentions are:

Golden Awards

  • Building a Service-Oriented Culture (UC Davis) is a multi-pronged initiative aimed at improving customer service and increasing efficiency through a virtual support service desk, self-service tools, standardized information and user-friendly resources. Among its many features, customers need to remember just one email address to get IT help (compared to the previous 70 email addresses available), and they can track the status of their request online.
  • Connected Central Coast (UC Santa Cruz): UC Santa Cruz partnered with private industry to win a $10.6 million state grant to build a 91-mile fiber optic network that enables high quality network connectivity on campus and along the Central Coast. By providing good broadband services in unserved and underserved areas, the project team hopes to help promote economic growth, job creation and other benefits.
  • New MyUCLA (UCLA) is an integrated student services portal with an improved user-friendly interface that allows students to more easily search for classes, enroll, track financial aid, access their calendars and perform other tasks, without having to open multiple browser windows.

Silver Awards

  • Business Intelligence Competency Center (UC San Diego) gives departments a powerful tool to create dashboards and reports that better inform and improve their decision-making, and encourages campus cross-functional collaboration in sharing tools, tips and techniques.
  • Environmental Health and Safety Enterprise Risk Management Technology (UC Davis) is a suite of six projects aimed at ensuring a safe research environment. These tools, for example, help facilitate the proper handling of chemicals, identify potential hazards, screen employees and coordinate safety inspections.

Honorable Mentions

  • Virtual Advising System (UC San Diego) securely stores student records so academic counselors can easily find all the student information they need to deliver accurate, holistic academic counseling. In addition, students can use the system to get general advising information, ask a counselor a question, see their academic notices and review notes from an advising session.
  • Careweb Messenger (UCSF) carries, transmits, records and makes searchable through a secure web portal the thousands of electronic messages that UCSF Medical Center staff sends and receives, ultimately improving coordination of patient care.
  • Nursing Performance Improvement Business Intelligence Solution (UCSF) enables digital collection of patient care data (replacing the previous paper method for collecting data, then manually entering the data into an Excel spreadsheet to generate reports and graphs) and safely stores information from multiple sources so that it can be easily accessed when needed.
  • Graduate Enrolled Student System (UC Riverside) is a repository of records that delivers a comprehensive view of graduate students’ financial support. This enables more efficient management and processing of graduate students’ awards.
  • Practice Improvement Using Virtual Online Training – PIVOT (UCSF and UC Berkeley) is an interactive computer-based simulation game that allows students, fellows, physicians and other health care experts to assess and manage virtual patients with lupus.

To read the full nomination applications, visit the Sautter Award Program website.

To be eligible, projects must be active and operational at a campus.

Established in 2000, the award is named after Larry L. Sautter, a UC Riverside associate vice chancellor for computing and communications who died in 1999. Under his leadership, a modern data network, client server computing, and improved technical support services were developed and implemented at Riverside.