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. voices shaping technology across UC.
What is Your Name?
Henry Jenkins
What is Your Title? UC Location?
Executive Director, Enterprise Infrastructure and Operations for the Office of Information Technology at the University of California, Irvine.
What are Your Top IT/Security Priorities in 2026?
We are focused on four key themes:
1) Building a Secure & Resilient Digital Enterprise by reducing cyber risk and strengthening resilience across cloud, identity, and endpoints.
2) Mission-Critical Platform Modernization by moving legacy business-critical systems to modern ones.
3) AI for Campus Impact through leveraging the UCI-branded ZotGPT portfolio as the digital front door to enable tangible productivity, service quality and access-to-information gains for faculty, students & staff.
4) Operational Excellence & Financial Sustainability by improving service reliability and cost discipline through our cloud transformation initiative.
What Emerging Tech Excites You for Higher Ed?
Generative AI. OIT has developed three software products under the ZotGPT brand so far (https://zotgpt.uci.edu/zotgpt/) and we’re already seeing benefits in the classroom, improved productivity and equity of access to information while protecting the privacy and security of our campus community.
What Emerging Tech Worries You?
There are worries now and worries for the future. Near-term worries include AI-driven cybercrime, AI agentic automation without humans in the loop, and the impact of quantum computing on today’s encryption methods. In the future, it’s artificial superintelligence – just because you can doesn’t mean you should.
How Do You Balance Innovation with Security?
For an institution like UCI, the right balance between security and innovation is not a tradeoff; it’s an operating model. Our goal is to enable innovation safely by design, rather than constrain it after the fact. Practically, this means understanding our risk appetite by domain and ensuring that our innovation velocity is proportional to risk exposure.
What Principles/Values Shape Your Leadership?
My leadership is grounded in OIT’s core values (https://www.culture.oit.uci.edu/values/), which shape how we serve the campus and how we lead our department. Building on that foundation, I emphasize mission-first decision-making, honoring commitments, empowering leaders at the right level, and maintaining a bias toward action over maintaining a bias toward action over perfection.
What Books are You Currently Reading?
The Broken Earth Series by N.K. Jemisin and The End is Always Near by Dan Carlin.
What’s Your Favorite Thing to Do Outside of Work?
Measured by the time spent, it would be working on my home’s California native landscape. Measured by intensity, it would be traveling abroad on vacation.
Anything else to add?
Later this month I will mark eight years at UCI. I’m grateful for the colleagues and partners across campus who have made this journey both meaningful and impactful, as well as the opportunity to be part of the ongoing transformation for how we serve our campus community.
Thank you for the conversation, Henry!
Henry Jenkins
Executive Director, Enterprise Infrastructure and Operations for the Office of Information Technology
Office of Information Technology at the University of California, Irvine
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.
