UC Tech News is excited to launch the UC Tech Leaders Q&A Series in 2026—a series designed to spotlight the voices shaping technology across UC.
What is Your Name?
Crystal Harris
What is Your Title? UC Location?
IT Architect – UC San Diego
What are Your Top IT/Security Priorities in 2026?
Identity and Access Management
What Emerging Tech Excites You for Higher Ed?
Tier 0 support using agents. Chatbots and AI Agents have the power to transform troubleshooting and inquiry by augmenting tier 1 and tier 2 support personnel with bots. This can lead to faster resolution for the user with less time waiting for support ticket handling.
What Emerging Tech Worries You?
Tier 0 support using agents. Much like the challenges that everyone has had at self check-out at the grocery store with missing SKUs, products that don’t scan, and products mis-priced, self service IT troubleshooting can create frustrating loops with errors, misunderstanding, and wrong answers. And furthermore, agents might encourage a user to overshare information, creating security vulnerabilities.
How Do You Balance Innovation with Security?
Unlike Security professionals, I try to prioritize the most access possible given security requirements and constraints rather than the inverse.
What Principles/Values Shape Your Leadership?
As I covered in my UC Tech 2026 presentation, investing in system and service resilience can increase operational capacity. Too often, IT Operations professionals spend all of their time “fire fighting.” Always working in triage more leaves little time for continuous improvement, let alone for innovation. It is my experience that front-loading the effort to make your operational environment resilient, redundant, and legible pays dividends. You have fewer outages, easier training of new staff and less interruption with working on transformative projects. Instead of “fighting fires,” we should spend more time “installing sprinklers.”
What Books are You Currently Reading?
The Murderbot Diaries
What’s Your Favorite Thing to Do Outside of Work?
Read
Thank you for the conversation, Crystal!
Crystal Harris
IT Architect
UC San Diego
Tech Leader Spotlights
UC Tech News is excited to launch the UC Tech Leaders Q&A Series in 2026—designed to spotlight the voices shaping technology across UC. The UC tech community values hearing directly from its leaders, and this series aims to be both inspiring and informative.
Are you a tech leader at UC? We’d love to hear from you! To participate, please complete the short Q&A form and please include a photo.
