Gary Hauk teaches LITS about Woodruff and his Three Wise Men

By Wade Moricle | January 11, 2019

Gary Hauk presents at the InfoForum.

During this week’s InfoForum, Emory historian Gary Hauk treated LITS to a fascinating deep dive into the origin of the naming of the Woodruff Library’s central conference space, the Jones Room. His lecture, entitled “Mr. Woodruff and the Three Wise Men,” reintroduced the audience to a group of leaders whose history has been mostly forgotten over the decades.

“I was curious about the story behind Joseph W. Jones, for whom the Jones Room in the Library is named,” said InfoForum co-chairman Dawn Francis-Chewning. “The plaque at the base of his portrait notes that he was Chairman Emeritus of the Robert W. Woodruff Foundation, Vice President Emeritus of the Coca Cola Company, and ‘Cherished Friend of the University and the Library.'”

Bob Mizell, circa 1950.

Relying on the treasure trove of Emory historical documents found in the Rose Library, Hauk delved into the history of Robert W. Woodruff, the Coca-Cola Company president who, with brother George W. Woodruff, donated $230 million to Emory, and for whom the Woodruff Library is named.

In his research, Hauk found that the story of Joseph “Joe” W. Jones could not be told without also including the other two “wise men,” Robert “Bob” C. Mizell and Boisfeuillet “Bo” Jones. These three men “nurtured the vision that Woodruff had for his alma mater, Emory University.”

According to Hauk, Bob Mizell met Woodruff when they enrolled together at Emory in 1908, when Emory was still located in Oxford, GA. Mizell organized the first student government at Emory and served as the first student president. In 1935, Mizell returned to Emory as Secretary of the University, where he was the chief development officer of the university and where he cultivated the lifelong friendship with Woodruff.

Robert W. Woodruff (L) and Boisfeuillet Jones (R) share a light-hearted moment.

As his most trusted advisor at the time, Mizell secured Woodruff’s donation to build the Winship Cancer Center, the first in a long line of charitable contributions. Mizell succeeded Woodruff on the Emory Board of Trustees (the only administrator to ever serve simultaneously as a trustee), and over two decades fostered the belief that the southern US should have a great university and that that university should be Emory.

Bo Jones, as an Emory University vice president, created a business plan for Emory in 1952 that brought the hospital and various schools of medicine, nursing, and dentistry under the single umbrella of a major medical center. This plan also established the Emory Clinic. Woodruff donated $5 million toward this plan. Jones subsequently became president of the Woodruff Foundation, and enjoyed a strong relationship with Woodruff. Jones was president of the Emily and Ernest Woodruff Fund when George and Robert Woodruff gave their largest single donation to Emory, $105 million.

Joe Jones.

Joe Jones had begun working for the Coca-Cola Company as a secretary and later became Woodruff’s chief of staff, eventually rising to become senior vice president and director of the company. Woodruff called Jones his “most trusted business associate.” Joe Jones was also chair of the Woodruff Foundation and worked closely with Bo Jones to manage Woodruff’s charitable contributions. After Woodruff’s death in 1985, Joe Jones was the executor of the Woodruff estate.

When Joe Jones was presented with an honorary degree from Emory in 1985, the citation read, “Remarkable administrator, public-spirited citizen, devoted friend and counselor, you have brought to your calling a rare capacity to apprehend the whole of a worthy enterprise while yet attending to its every important detail.”

Hauk asked the audience to remember these three wise men for their contributions to Emory University.

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Penny King, Project Manager, PMO

By Wade Moricle | January 11, 2019

In her free time, Penny enjoys helping youth with job and career management.

Penny King recently joined the Project Management Office after spending the previous ten years in Emory’s Enrollment Services Division, where she was a senior financial aid advisor in the Financial Aid Office.

A native of Atlanta who attended Columbia High School, Penny has a bachelor’s degree in business administration from American Intercontinental University and a master’s degree in conflict management from Kennesaw State University. She is also certified in paralegal studies (Clayton State University) and carries her CAPM certification from the Project Management Institute.

Penny likes to write short stories and poems and hopes to publish them one day. She also loves exercise, including climbing Stone Mountain once a week, dancing, and doing Zumba classes at Emory. Penny loves zombie movies and TV shows, and once dressed as a professional zombie for The Walking Dead Experience. 

Penny likes to volunteer a lot! Currently she is working with a non-profit, where she is assisting them with grant research. In the past, a lot of her volunteer opportunities have been with helping youth with job and career management. She also started a mentoring program at her prior position.

“The support in the PMO has been overwhelming,” said Penny. “It feels like home already and the other PMs have given me very positive feedback. I am excited.”

You can reach her at psking [at] emory [dot] edu.

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Jason Peterson, FISMA, IT Risk and Compliance Analyst, Enterprise IT Security

By Wade Moricle | January 11, 2019

“My teammates have been very helpful at assisting my acclimation with my projects and the organizational structure.” – Jason Peterson

Jason Peterson has joined the Enterprise IT Security team as FISMA, IT risk and compliance analyst. Before arriving at Emory, he was an IT audit lead for five years at Lockheed Martin. He has also spent over 15 years in the information security field as an information security compliance lead and working with FISMA assessments and IT audit compliance.

Born and raised in Plainfield, NJ, Jason is married with one daughter. He and his wife enjoy spending the weekends going to dinner, watching football, playing tennis, and reading non-fiction books.

“I like my new role with Emory,” said Jason. “My teammates have been very helpful at assisting my acclimation with my projects and the organizational structure.”

You can reach him at jason [dot] peterson [at] emory [dot] edu.

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LITS recent headlines and upcoming events

By Wade Moricle | January 11, 2019

Headlines & Events graphic banner

Recent LITS headlines:

Upcoming LITS events:

(go HERE for more information for each event)

  • January 17 – Event: IT Briefing, 10:15 am – noon, 4th Floor Auditorium, NDB
  • January 21 – Martin Luther King Jr. Day
  • January 31 – Event: Evening with Educators, 6:00 pm – 8:30 pm, Carlos Museum, Rose Library, and the Schatten Gallery
  • February 6 – Event: “The Deer and the Pharaoh: A Century at the Carlos Museum”, 6:30 pm – 8:30 pm, Rose Library
  • February 13 – Event: InfoForum, 10:00 am – 11:00 am, Jones Room, Woodruff Library
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Cloud Infrastructure Migration Planning update – December 2018

By Paul Petersen | December 21, 2018

Welcome to the Cloud Infrastructure Migration Planning (CIMP) update, provided by the Cloud Advisory Group (CAG). The mission of the CAG is to facilitate the adoption of cloud computing across LITS for the purpose of migrating Emory’s on-premises data center infrastructure to Amazon Web Service (AWS).

The goal of this monthly article is to provide project teams, stakeholders, and interested community members with progress reports, updates on key discussion topics, and noteworthy events.

In This Update:

  • AWS re:Invent
  • Cloud Infrastructure Migration Planning (CIMP) Highlights
  • What is the Review Board?
  • Workshops

AWS re:Invent

AWS re:Invent is an annual learning conference hosted by Amazon Web Services for the global cloud computing community. The event features keynote announcements, training and certification opportunities, access to more than 2,000 technical sessions, a partner expo, after-hours events, and so much more. Emory sent several individuals to attend in Vegas this year, and here’s what they had to say: 

From Derek Cox:

“One of my favorite parts of the conference was the Hackathon for Charity. Since organizations typically develop solutions in silos, I wanted to see how people from different technology backgrounds (front-end developer, back-end developer, sys/ops engineer, and program manager) come together to build out a solution.

Although we did not win (we were short a front-end developer and our back-end developer was a .Net programmer and was not that skilled with server-less technology), the judges from Game Changer said that out of the designs, ours was the best. Next time we will have to fully evolve the code into the design.

The Hackathon design from Derek Cox’ team.

Overall, it was a great learning experience and I met my objective of how to see how a program comes together with the various IT Resources.”

From Rohith Mandala:

“My main focus attending this conference was to get some insight into AWS migration strategies and implementation for CI/CD, JMS, Containers, and ESB solutions. I met some good folks from different areas of IT and got to know their experiences working with AWS and the current trends in software development and operations on the cloud. The conference was well-organized in terms of the quality of content provided in the sessions, workshops and vendor booths. I highly recommend attending this conference, but plan well ahead to beat the crowd to get seats into the sessions and workshops that interest you.”

Cloud Infrastructure Migration Planning Project Highlights

As you may recall from Mark Kawasaki’s November 2018 article, the Emory Cloud Infrastructure Migration Planning (CIMP) project seeks to research and recommend strategies and options for the migration of Emory University IT assets to the cloud. The scope of services will include all LITS-managed IT assets residing in one of the existing data centers.

Last week, the CIMP project ended Sprint 9 with a 90-minute Sprint Review session. This extra-long review session was the result of missing the Sprint 8 Review due to the Thanksgiving holiday. Below is a list of a few of the accomplishments presented during the review session:

  • IAM Roles and Policies – In an easy-to-follow presentation, Zach Cox outlined three conceptual approaches for controlling access to our AWS accounts and resources.
    • The first approach was horizontal support roles that provide access to a set of resources across all applications. For example, the database team may have a role that would allow them to access the AWS database resources across all applications.
    • The second approach was vertical support roles that provide access to all resources for a particular application. In this model, there would be a role for each application and the database team would be added to the application roles that they support.
    • The final approach was a hybrid design that would use a combination of the horizontal and vertical access methods. With this approach, the Application support teams would be part of vertical roles while the infrastructure support teams, like the database team, would be part of a horizontal role.  The presentation was aided greatly by several diagrams Zach created that can be found here: https://wiki.service.emory.edu/display/EAWS/CIMP-205+-+Define+Emory+Roles+and+Conceptual+IAM+Policies
  • PeopleSoft ELM Migration – Raj Garrepally described his experience of successfully migrating a pilot instance of PeopleSoft ELM to AWS. Similar to the other test migrations, Raj used a modified “lift-and-shift” approach for the web and application servers and AWS RDS for the databases. He was also able to use an AWS load-balancer instead of the on-premises F5 load-balancer. Raj also reported that while no formal performance measurements had been taken, the application seemed to function in AWS like it does on campus. As a next step, Raj will be testing AWS auto-scaling.

  • Rohith Mandala (on right).

    Cloud Formation Pipeline Demonstration – Building on work done from the “AWS at Emory” project, Rohith Mandala was able to build an automated pipeline that deploys and tests the basic account CloudFormation template every time a change is made. This infrastructure will help to increase the speed of our CloudFormation template development efforts. Rohith used the native pipeline capabilities present in Bitbucket along with several utility programs written as part of the AWS at Emory project to accomplish this task.

Here is a link to the meeting recording of the Sprint Review session:

https://emory.app.box.com/file/364091297430 (download and play locally for best quality)

As we enter the holiday season, Emory’s winter recess comes at a very good time for the Cloud Infrastructure Migration Planning (CIMP) project. We have one more sprint (number 10) before the winter recess. Then we will break and not start our next sprint until January 7.

What/Who is the Review Board?

In August, the Cloud Infrastructure Migration Planning (CIMP) project established the Review Board to act as a sounding board and approval body that sits between the Cloud Advisory Group and the Cloud Steering Committee. The Review Board includes the following project stakeholders: Sriram Chari, John Connerat, John Ellis, Jimmy Kincaid, Brad Sanford, and Steve Wheat.

Unlike the Cloud Steering Committee, the Review Board has the time to listen and discuss technical and process details of the project. In fact, the members of the Review Board seem to relish in the details, which has made the Review Board an extremely valuable, and sometimes difficult, check-point for key design decisions.

Presenting to this very technical Review Board made up of mostly LITS Leadership has been an important milestone for project team members from both a technical and professional development perspective. Repeat presenters to the Review Board have learned to be more effective presenters and to better anticipate questions. This has resulted in higher-quality proposals and recommendations, which has led to quicker decisions for the project team.

Zach Cox

“My Review Board experience was very informative, especially regarding the valuable feedback they gave,” said Zach Cox, cloud security specialist. “Their input allowed me to fine-tune my approach and ensured I was working in the right direction for leadership. It’s absolutely wonderful to have this interaction between the working group and the steering committee.”

The current meeting schedule is roughly every two weeks. The format for the meetings is to have rotating presenters from the project team go before the Review Board. If you would like to listen to the December 5 Review Board meeting, here is a link:

https://emory.app.box.com/file/362733132810 (download and play locally for best quality)

Workshops

The CIMP project includes more than twenty-five team members with different skills and levels of experience. One of the challenges of having such a diverse team is we don’t know enough collectively about AWS to design and build an effective solution. Typically, we have a common understanding of what we would like to achieve and we know technically what we would like to do, but we are not familiar with all of the configuration options within AWS to know the best way to implement it. Sometimes this problem extends beyond technical details to the actual words we use to talk about the options.

The project team is developing a series of workshops to help address these issues. The purpose of these workshops is to bring the larger team together to go over key AWS features and work through exercises together. This has helped to develop a common understanding and vocabulary, which has helped to make the team more efficient.

To date we have had the following workshops and we are in the planning stages of a DevOps workshop and Database workshop:

AWS Security – Part I

AWS Security – Part II

Identity & Access Management (coming soon)

While the initial intent of these workshops was to address the needs of specific teams, we have found the workshops to be beneficial for the entire team. I suspect the same is true for staff outside of the project team.

Contact Us

If you have questions or want to get more involved with the migration work, please contact us at: LITSCloudAdvisoryGroup [at] emory [dot] edu.

You may also reach out directly to any of the CAG members: Alex Berry, Ramya Bommareddy, Joel Burke, Steve Collins, Zach Cox, Eddie Feliciano, Mark Kawasaki, or Paul Petersen.

Please let us know if you have feedback on the content or format of our update.

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LEAF hosts a cheery holiday party for Emory Libraries

By Wade Moricle | December 21, 2018

The traditional Library Book Tree with its builders (L to R): Yvette Wright, Kelly Kautt, and Caroline Corbitt.

The Library Employees Advocacy Forum (LEAF) hosted its annual LEAF Holiday Luncheon in the Woodruff Library this week, and the event did not disappoint. Held jointly in the Jones Room and the Schatten Gallery, the luncheon featured a full meal of chicken or salmon, a seemingly endless row of desserts made by staffers, and the kind of holiday good cheer that the event is known for.

University Librarian Yolanda Cooper gave a short speech in which she thanked Emory Libraries employees for a great year, not only for the major projects, but for the everyday work everyone does to make the organization a great place to work. She gave special thanks to the employees who will be working during the Winter Recess.

Revelers enjoyed eating in the Schatten Gallery.

One of the nice aspects of the luncheon was the sense of space and camaraderie created by having employees sit both in the Jones Room and at various tables throughout the gallery space. Each table was decorated to look like a present covered in wrapping paper and it made the festivities have a cozy, intimate feel.

According to this year’s LEAF chairman, Doug Goans, “We wanted to capture the holiday spirit. We are very pleased with the turnout and the atmosphere and many thanks for the LEAF officers, representatives and volunteers that helped make the party a success.”

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Doggie Study Break gets four paws of approval

By Erin Mooney | December 21, 2018
photo of a dog therapy dog

Finn!

Thanks to everyone who participated in last week’s Doggie Study Break, in which we brought therapy and service dogs into the Jones Room of the Woodruff Library in order to give our stressed-out students a much-needed respite from their studies.

We worked with two groups last week for the Study Break – Pet Partners (therapy animals) and Canine Assistants (service dogs). Thanks to everyone who donated to these two wonderful organizations!

310 students attended last week’s event and MANY of our staff volunteered. We appreciate Yolanda Cooper for allowing us to host this annual study break and we look forward to seeing you (and the pups) next year!

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