The UC Tech Awards 2024 will take place this Monday, October 28, 2024. The CIO Council looks forward to celebrating the innovations across numerous domains, from IT Security to Design and values, from Operational Excellence to Collaboration.
Among the prestigious awards is the Sustained Impact Award. The award is given to an individual who, over time, has contributed significant expertise, passion, and commitment to the university as evidenced by a portfolio of work supporting the technology arena.
Last year, Bruce Miller, senior enterprise architect at UC Santa Barbara, won the UC Tech Sustained Impact Award. This recognition acknowledges his exceptional leadership in a multitude of technical initiatives at the UC Santa Barbara campus over four decades. Learn more about Miller’s contributions based on this excerpt from his UC Tech 2023 Awards Program application.
Summary
For over four transformational decades, Miller has guided some of the most complex, revolutionary, and impactful technical initiatives on the UC Santa Barbara campus. His expertise, dedication, and passion are evidenced by both his large and broad portfolio of projects and his long history of working to build teams and collaborations.
Project Description
In 1980, while studying Computer Science at UC Santa Barbara, Miller began working in the campus Computer Center, an organization that already had a rich history, having hosted the third node on the ARPANET, the forerunner of the Internet. Starting as a computer operator working with a behemoth System/370 mainframe, in 1981 he moved into user support, providing help desk services, consulting, programming, and teaching short courses to users. One of his early large projects was leading the migration of applications from the aging IBM MVT operating system to MVS, developing innovative approaches to automate the conversion.
After graduating in 1984, Miller moved into the burgeoning “office automation” area and helped introduce the then-new concept of “electronic mail” to the campus. With the introduction of PCs, he became involved in the first deployments of PCs and Local Area Networks. He managed and enhanced PROFS, the largest email and calendaring system on the campus. During this time, he developed the first online scheduling system for the UC Santa Barbara Health and Counseling Centers to provide over 1000 peak appointment transactions per day for over 90 practitioners and groups. In 1988, Miller developed the UC Santa Barbara PROFS-Internet email gateway allowing campus administrative email users to correspond with Internet email sites for the first time. This resulted in Miller being granted a 1989 UC Santa Barbara Citation of Excellence award.
Between 1989-1991, Miller implemented and managed the UC Santa Barbara Library’s first integrated Bibliographic and Circulation system, NOTIS/Pegasus. This included engineering work for the first campus fiber-optic connection from the Computer Center to the Library. From 1991-1994, he was the manager of the campus mainframe systems supporting critical administrative, instructional, library, and research activities. In 1994, Miller also helped construct the first campus “Data Warehouse” platform for reporting.
Moving to UC Santa Barbara’s Telecommunications department in 1994 as the department’s systems manager, Miller was responsible for technical operations of the campus telephone and networking technologies. He was a key participant in the design and implementation of UC Santa Barbara’s first campus-wide high-speed backbone network and also developed the design for UC Santa Barbara’s first student residential network. In addition, Miller implemented and managed the department’s operations and financial management platform. Further, he provided critical planning and software support during two campus telephone switch cutovers. He believes, though, that his largest contribution during this period was building a high-quality and customer-focused technology staff who were instrumental in propelling the campus into the 21st century of Internet technology.
In 2013, Miller joined UC Santa Barbara’s Program Management Office as its Associate Director of Technology. In this role, he was the technical lead for the move from UC Santa Barbara’s legacy mainframe financial system to the PeopleSoft Financial System and was responsible for the design and development of several of the systems’ major integrations and processes. Again, as part of this work, he built a highly effective team with a strong sense of commitment and camaraderie.
In 2016, Miller moved into UC Santa Barbara’s Office of the CIO as the Senior Enterprise Architect and Enterprise Project Technical Lead for PMO projects. During this time, the campus was moving from the UC’s legacy PPS Payroll System to UCPath, and he designed several critical integrations and processes between UC Santa Barbara’s PeopleSoft system and UCPath. Due to his role with financial systems and as part of his commitment to better serving his customers, in 2017 Miller completed a Certificate in Professional Accounting through the UC Santa Barbara Extension program. Combining his experience in complex reporting development with his business knowledge, Miller developed UC Santa Barbara’s first financial “dashboard” application for executive management. And in 2022, Miller orchestrated the final act of the last remaining campus mainframe, performing the decommissioning.
As a strong advocate for collaboration, Miller has participated in numerous campus committees to help guide the adoption of a new generation of technologies for the campus. He was a member of two generations of Backbone Network Engineering groups, Campus Wiring Standards, IT Infrastructure Funding, Campus Calendaring, Identity, and Data Governance. He chaired UC Santa Barbara’s IT Planning Group and served as the staff representative to the Campus Planning Committee. Appreciating the value of personal connections between IT staff, Miller initiated, and for many years organized, a campus-wide IT holiday celebration.
For the last 3 years, Miller has played a foundational role in initiating UC Santa Barbara’s adoption of the UC’s Common Chart of Accounts (CCOA) and the campus migration onto the Oracle Cloud Financial and Enterprise Planning & Budgeting platforms. This campus-wide initiative includes a significant amount of business transformation and will be one of the most technically challenging projects ever undertaken by UC Santa Barbara. Leveraging over 40 years of highly technical experience and business understanding, Miller is continuing to guide complex technology designs and decisions while working very closely with senior campus business leaders and stakeholders to usher in a modernized financial management platform for UC Santa Barbara.
Miller has shared that he feels his three core work values are “creating, solving problems, and helping people” and observed that there is always a need for these three things. He believes strongly in the mission of the University, appreciates its sense of purpose, and enjoys working with so many dedicated individuals in such a diverse and vibrant community. He feels incredibly fortunate to have found a career in the intersection of work that he enjoys and that contributes to such a noble institution. Having participated in the campus introduction of so many revolutionary technologies and large projects, he enjoys sharing the knowledge and wisdom he has gained in his many years at UC Santa Barbara. These are the reasons he gives for what drives him to contribute so much of himself to the University of California and for why he has remained so highly committed to it since 1980.
Contact
Bruce Miller
Senior Enterprise Architect
University of California Santa Barbara
Author
Suzy Danko
IT Project Manager, Program Management Office
UC Santa Barbara
[Cover image altext: Bruce Miller (center right), accepting the UC Tech Award for Sustained Impact in 2023 from the CIO’s, Van Williams, Gabriel Gonzalez (left) and Joe Bengfort (right).]