Leadership Development Program

CUCCIO offers a Leadership Development program to aspiring IT Leaders within its member institutions. This program provides a bespoke program specifically focused on encouraging and mentoring the next cohort of Canadian Higher Ed IT leaders. While a ‘proof of concept’ program was initiated in 2018 with a cohort of 14 individuals, the program officially began in June 2019 with a cohort of 17.

The CUCCIO Leadership Development Program is overseen and managed by the CUCCIO Executive Director, Lori MacMullen, in conjunction with active CUCCIO member CIO, Gayleen Gray from McMaster University, and is primarily facilitated by retired University of Toronto CIO, Robert Cook, in conjunction with ‘guest’ appearances by other active member CIOs. 

Participants are nominated by their IT leaders and, once accepted, they are committed to attending three in-person sessions coinciding with the CUCCIO meetings in the spring, fall and winter semesters. Augmenting the 3 onsite visits, regular online learning modules using face-to-face web conferencing tools are held in between the in-person meetings, ensuring ongoing learning throughout the year.

The in-person interactions at each of the CUCCIO regular meetings help the cohort to come together to build a strong relationship with each other, while also actively interacting with current CIOs to gain insights into current issues, challenges and successes taking place at universities across Canada. They get a unique opportunity to be ‘at the table’ while their CIOs interact, share and collaborate around key issues.

Focus areas for the program material include:

• Leadership in the Academy
  • Upon completion of this module, participants will have a broad understanding of the context in which universities operate, and in particular, of the unique aspects of working in this environment.
• IT Strategy and IT Governance
  • This module will provide participants with the skills required to align business needs and organizational vision in order to develop and deliver a future IT vision (big-picture thinking), along with how to facilitate prioritization and buy-in from stakeholders and senior administration.
• Leading Institutional Change through Higher Ed IT
  • This module provides participants with skills and understanding of how IT can lead institutional Change Management, Relationship Management, Portfolio Management, Risk Management and more.

Cybersecurity Benchmarking Project

Botnet infections example

Celebrating This Year's Finalists

Innovation Award

University of Northern British Columbia: To enhance business continuity through the application of Docker containerization technology.
2017 Award Recipient

The 2017 Innovation Award was awarded to the University of Northern British Columbia (UNBC) for its project to enhance business continuity through the application of Docker containerization technology.   UNBC’s containerization project took the process of configuring servers and software from months to a few minutes.  Enabling ITS at UNBC to deliver value to their customers faster and at the same time improving UNBC’s position with respect to business continuity readiness the implementation of Docker containerization helps to prepare UNBC for a future where cloud computing will be ubiquitous and access to these services will be need to be provisioned rapidly and effectively.  

Innovation Award Finalists

Simon Fraser University:  The Official SFU App Suite
Providing students, faculty and staff with a suite of apps endorsed and supported by the university community, the Official SFU App Suite is comprised of four apps (SFU snap for campus experience, SFU Vault for access to storage and files, goSFU for access to courses, enrollment, etc. and Canvas for access to learning tools and services) all available for Android and iOS. 

University of Calgary:  Secure Compute
Calgary’s Secure Computing Program creates a unified virtual research environment to enable researchers to manage their entire project data lifecycle (collect, store, analyze, share, collaborate, and preserve information) through one secure environment, with a specific attention paid to restricted and confidential research data, such as personal health information.

Collaboration Award

University of Alberta: ShareIT Project
2017 Award Recipient

CUCCIO Community Award

Unlike the innovation and collaboration awards, this award honours a member institution or individual who has demonstrated a passion for CUCCIO’s principles of information-sharing, collaboration and knowledge creation throughout the community.

The 2017 CUCCIO Community Award was awarded to Rick Bunt, Retired CIO University of Saskatchewan and the first elected president of CUCCIO. Rick exemplifies these traits and characteristics through his commitment to CUCCIO since its inception. As a founding Board member and CUCCIO’s first elected President, Rick’s belief in the principles and value of information sharing and collaboration has never wavered.  His commitment to making collaboration happen, not only for his institution but for the Canadian higher ed IT community overall continues even in retirement. From participating on the founding Board of CUCCIO, to sitting as a member of both the Compute Canada and CANARIE Boards, to helping shape and drive a national conversation on Canada’s digital research infrastructure, Rick’s contributions to our community are too numerous to share in their entirety however CUCCIO was delighted to honor Rick’s many contributions with the presentation of the 2017 CUCCIO Community Award.

Celebrating This Year's Finalists - 2018

Innovation Award 2018

The University of British Columbia: Emerging Media Lab
2018 Award Recipient

The 2018 Innovation Award was awarded to the University of British Columbia’s Emerging Media Lab.  The Emerging Media Lab (EML) is an experimental space where faculty, students, and staff from all disciplines collaborate with industry and community. Its mission is to evolve learning by creating tools and techniques using emerging media including Augmented, Mixed, and Virtual Reality.  At EML, all members regardless of their role are encouraged to collaborate and experiment with emerging technologies. In this space, faculty members become subject matter experts and students turn in into innovators who can find solutions for faculty members’ problems and answer their questions. EML provides an incubation venue for UBC community especially students outside their academic activities where they can experiment with emerging technologies such as VR, AR, XR, BCI, AI, etc. in order solve educational challenges and enhance learning and student engagement.  For more information on the Emerging Media Lab at UBC please see:  http://eml.ubc.ca/

The 2018 Innovation Award Finalists

Simon Fraser University:  A New Network Data Architecture using Software Defined Architecture
Virtualization technologies have led to an explosion of private cloud services being offered in Simon Fraser University’s primary data centre, the SFU Data Centre.  This has driven an increased importance for responsive high-security networking, but the legacy network was large and complex, making it costly to secure and maintain.  The University required a new network solution to efficiently tackle the increasing demands. The creation of the SFU Data Centre in April 2017 offered the opportunity to implement a new Network Architecture using a modern network solution.  The architecture team made the decision to design and implement the new Architecture using Software Defined Networking (SDN) as the core networking technology in the SFU Data Centre. SFU faced and conquered the challenge of putting together a design that maintains the desired flexibility and agility without sacrificing security or operational efficiency.

For more information on this initiative please contact Randy Raine at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. 

University of Ontario Institute of Technology (UOIT):  Artemis Cloud Implementation
The implementation of Artemis Cloud at McMaster Children’s Hospital and South Lake Regional Healthcare supports the acquisition, analysis, and redeployment of high frequency physiological data. This data, in combination with electronic medical record (EMR) data is made available to support a multitude of medical studies by the hospitals. A multi-tiered consent model allows a consenter to designate where the patient’s physiological data can be used.  Artemis Cloud is the next phase in a highly successful, award winning research project to make use of high frequency, high fidelity physiological big data in neonatal intensive care environments.  Artemis was developed in local (in hospital) settings and this phase develops the capability to utilize a cloud model, enabling utilization by multiple Neonatal Intensive Care Units (NICUs), independent of size or location.  For UOIT IT Services, it represents a highly visible, highly successful first foray into formal IT support for research, which we intend to leverage into a growth.

For more information please see:  https://itsc.uoit.ca/artemis-cloud-is-in-production.php.

Collaboration Award

Nova Scotia Higher Education IT Shared Services (HISS)
2018 Award Recipient

CUCCIO Community Award

Unlike the innovation and collaboration awards, this award honours a member institution or individual who has demonstrated a passion for CUCCIO’s principles of information-sharing, collaboration and knowledge creation throughout the community.

The 2018 CUCCIO Community Award was awarded to Art Exner, Associate Vice President, Information Technology (IT) Services, University of Regina.

Albeit in his usual understated way, Art Exner exemplifies a commitment and passion for this community through the various roles he has assumed in CUCCIO.  As an active member of CUCCIO Art is one of a handful members who have missed very few meetings.   Serving on the Board for two terms (a total of 6 years), Art was a member of the Governance and Nominations committee and helped to guide a review of the process to appoint the officers of the Board.   In 2014 Art assumed the role of CIO Liaison for the Information Security Special Interest Group (SIG) and plays an active role in providing guidance, direction and advice to the group.  In this role Art has helped shepherd a number of activities including access to an on-line security and education program, development of a soon to be released RFP for SSL certificates and most recently the adoption of an information sharing protocol for CUCCIO members.  In addition to his role with the Security SIG Art serves on the CIO Advisory Committee to CANARIE and the Compute Canada Cyber Security Task Force.

Celebrating This Year's Finalists - 2019

Innovation Award 

The Innovation Award recognizes innovative IT projects or initiatives that have significantly advanced teaching, learning, research or administration within an institution or in the community.  The recipient of the 2019 Innovation Award is the University of Alberta’s Plaintext Password Sniffing Project.   

To ensure technology and its related services continue to play a key role in supporting teaching, learning and research the University of Alberta has established an internal vision of 'Reset, Reshape, Refocus'.  Under this vision that the Security Team implemented a unique and innovative approach to better secure the campus community.  By leveraging an existing technical investment to enable plain text password sniffing, they successfully built a tool that not only alerts when someone has entered credentials into an unencrypted web-form but also expires those credentials automatically.

The 2018 Innovation Award Finalists

NGSIS Platform Modernization - University of Toronto
For the past ten years, U of T had faced a crisis during its student registration period with its Student Information System (SIS).  To address the issues of an aging and costly mainframe and an outdated code base, U of T embarked on an intense three-year initiative called the Next Generation Student Information Services (NGSIS) Platform Modernization Project.  On November 19, 2018, the project successfully launched and the U of T SIS transformed from a legacy mainframe application with roots in the mid-1970s to an internet-savvy application with modern smarts.
This truly monumental project can now handle approximately 9,000 concurrent users compared to the previous 700 and has set the stage for future technological innovation. It was a complex and risky initiative requiring masterful leadership and architectural wizardry.
For more information on this initiative please contact Frank Boshoff at fThis email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Research Administration Information System - University of Victoria
Intensive research activity at the University of Victoria requires careful management of over $100M in research funds annually. To accomplish this, the Office of Research Services (ORS) maintains databases of research ethics, grant applications, funding and awards, contracts, publications, theses, talks, meetings, etc. for reporting purposes. UVic-RAIS is by far the largest in-house build by UVic to date using modern technologies with over 2,000 hours of technical and design effort and 70,000 lines of code written.  RAIS represents innovation in technology, features and approach, with the focus on ease of use and access for our UVic researchers.  With this innovative development, the UVic-RAIS team has raised the bar on research ethics management systems.
For more information please contact Ivan Petrovic at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Collaboration Award

Cyber Incident Response Framework - Information Security SIG 
Information security is a high profile, high risk area of concern and attention for all CUCCIO members.  Those acting against our information security interests are freely sharing and trading information about us.  Our failure to share information and best practice, and to act in a coordinated fashion, puts our members at increased risk of organizational harm.  This challenge, posed by the CUCCIO CIO’s to the Security Special Interest Group (the SSIG), was the motivation behind this collaborative effort.  Using the SSIG as a recruiting device the group self-organized, identified a lead author to outline and develop the document based on community direction, and through discussion, debate, and contributed material arrived at the guide submitted to CUCCIO and planned for join publication with CAUBO.
For more information please contact Kevin Vadnais at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

The 2018 Collaboration Award Finalists

Learning Management Consortium Migration of Moodle to the Cloud - University of Alberta
This project was a collaborative effort across multiple teams within the University of Alberta, NAIT and NorQuest College to innovatively design and leverage cloud technologies to improve and enhance the Moodle Learning Management System platform used by over 50,000 students across the three institutions. The multi-tiered project was a success as a result of the innovation and collaboration across all of the teams. The University of Alberta, NAIT and NorQuest, as well as their students, are the benefactors of a greatly improved infrastructure and environment that was deployed by the collective team.
For more information please contact Rick Fix at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

The Learning Technology Environment (LTE) Renewal Project - University of British Columbia
The Learning Technology Environment (LTE) Renewal Project's goal was to deliver a learning technology ecosystem that empowers students and faculty to achieve their learning and teaching goals by providing dynamic, pedagogically sound, convenient, and user-friendly tools.  Faculty and student-led peer engagement and consultation were critical to the success of the LTE project.  Using a very different selection process than in the past professional staff helped support faculty in the pilots, evaluated security and integration requirements, and several participated on the RFP evaluation committee, along with faculty and student representatives and learned that they can never go back -- faculty members' and students' direct and meaningful involvement in technology selection is critical to a project's success.
For more information please contact Marianne Schroeder at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

CUCCIO Community Award

The CUCCIO Community Award recognizes an individual, group or institution whose efforts exemplify CUCCIO’s desire to build, support and enrich the higher education IT community. Unlike the innovation and collaboration awards, this award will honour a member institution, individual or group who has demonstrated a passion for CUCCIO’s principles of information-sharing, collaboration and knowledge creation throughout the CUCCIO community.
The recipient of the 2019 CUCCIO Community Award, Gayleen Gray, CTO and AVP IT at McMaster University exemplifies this same commitment to our community.  She has been active in CUCCIO almost since its inception - first as a deputy CIO and now as a CTO and AVP of IT in her own right.   She never shies away from sharing her knowledge and experiences – both good and bad.  And she is always ready to help a colleague in whatever way she can most recently by helping to refine and launch CUCCIO’s leadership development program.  She plays a mentorship role with a number of members in our community and with her participation in the leadership development program has taken a whole new group of future leaders under her wing.