2017 award winners

Promise of the Future/Rising IT Leaders award: Emily Hunt

This year's awardee, Emily Hunt, has shown the professional and personal traits that exemplify a rising leader. To quote some of her colleagues:

"Emily has exhibited leadership as a consultant inspiring everyone in her area to get involved in improving documentation and procedures. The leadership she exhibited as the Mission Critical and E-Learning Coordinator has cultivated a fresh morale and sense of purpose for Mission Critical. And the leadership she exhibited as the SharePoint Transition project manager brought the many complex parts of the project into focus and enabled them to find adequate and timely replacements for various needs."

"Twice she has been asked to take a leadership role over a team that was recently restructured and taking on more work. In each situation, she has made significant progress in encouraging the teams to collaborate and get out of their comfort zones, while gaining the respect of more senior, established team members."

Spirit of Leadership award: Tom Visnius

This year's winner, Tom Visnius, has demonstrated leadership skills across the Enterprise Systems organization in UITS, not just within the confines of his home team. He actively participates in and contributes to strategy discussions that will benefit services to employees, and he influences the technical direction in UITS. Within his own team, he is a proven leader with innovative solutions and great training and mentoring skills.

His involvement in the ES Technology Advisory Group, and his future involvement in the PeopleSoft/ERP Development COP, has influenced and will continue to influence the direction of Enterprise Systems technology. He develops deep knowledge of other areas through his business relationships and understands how their automation solutions might be applied; by the same token, he sees other areas having issues and recommends solutions to fix them based on his expertise and experience, and he is willing to help those teams find and implement appropriate solutions.

Above all, he has tremendous integrity, exhibits almost inhuman positivity, is friendly and straightforward, and behaves like a true professional in every interaction.

IT Leadership Team Collaboration award: the HRMS team

Over the past year, the HRMS team has led the way in adopting new features and functions in PeopleSoft to better serve the business and end user employees, have been handling every administrative efficiency initiative in a timely fashion as well as adding new features for faculty in eDossier and Activity Insight.

Watch for a call for nominations next year so that you can help honor those who serve the university and their colleagues well. A selection committee will review all submissions and notify the award winners.  A formal awards ceremony will take place at the IU Statewide IT Conference.