Schedule

CHECK-IN: 11:30 AM - 1:00 PM

LUNCH / VENDOR HALL: 11:30 AM - 1:00 PM 

BREAK 2:00 PM - 2:15 PM

BREAKOUT SESSION 1

• Anti-Fraud at YC - 100% ID Checks (Canyon B Room) - Patrick Burns, Yavapai College 

Yavapai College recently moved to a model in which we ID-verify all new applicants before registration. In this presentation, we will discuss the technical details (e.g., recording in Banner with Data Connect), our partners' technology (Proof.com), and how our new process is working with our stakeholders.

• AV/IT Amplifier Podcast Live (Boardroom) - Ryan Gray, Yavapai College 

Live Recording of the AV/IT Amplifier Podcast - In-depth interview with an AZ Higher Ed IT Leader 

• Build, Buy, or Both: The Real Cost of AI Ownership in 2025 (Canyon C Room) - Jay B. Carlile, CDW 

Every AI conversation eventually hits the same fork in the road -- cloud or on-prem? But that's the wrong question. The right question is: what are you actually building, and who owns it when you're done? This session cuts through the vendor noise to give IT teams and decision-makers an honest look at the trade-offs across on-premises, cloud, and neocloud AI deployment. We'll cover what you gain with on-prem -- control over your data, predictable long-term costs, and performance you can tune -- and what it actually takes to get there, from capital investment to the technical complexity that rarely shows up in the brochure. While weighing the compounding cost of cloud AI tokens as agentic AI takes off, and the vendor lock-in that often comes with it. Attendees will leave better equipped to evaluate which path best fits their organization, budget, and risk tolerance.

• Students Are Not Couriers: Rethinking Roles in IT Processes (Canyon A Room) - Adrienne Howley, Veronica Duran, & Karissa Patefield, Central Arizona College 

In higher education, students are too often caught in the middle of broken or siloed systems: asked to deliver documents, relay messages between departments, or troubleshoot issues that should be handled behind the scenes. This session challenges IT professionals to rethink that model. Instead of designing processes that rely on students as go-betweens, we'll explore how to create seamless, student-centered systems that reduce friction and improve service delivery.

Attendees will examine common breakdowns in admissions and student services workflows, identify where responsibility is unintentionally shifted to students, and learn practical strategies to redesign processes using automation, system integrations, and clear ownership. The session will highlight how IT can partner with Enrollment Services to eliminate redundancies, improve communication across platforms, and ensure students experience a cohesive, supportive journey rather than a maze of handoffs. 

• Modernizing Endpoint Management in Higher Education: How Pima Community College Scaled IT Through Strategic Partnerships (Ventana Room) - Isaac Abbs, Pima Community College, Anuj Bhalla, Omnissa, & Phil Poje, Tech Orchard

Managing thousands of endpoints across multiple operating systems while supporting remote users, evolving security requirements, and limited IT resources is a challenge facing many higher education institutions. In this session, Pima Community College shares its digital transformation journey from managing a patchwork of endpoint management tools to adopting a modern unified endpoint management (UEM) strategy.

Attendees will hear how Pima leveraged Workspace ONE and strategic managed service partnerships to streamline device lifecycle management, enable zero-touch provisioning, improve onboarding and offboarding processes, strengthen security, and reduce operational overhead. The session will explore lessons learned, key decision points, and the measurable benefits of partnering with experts to extend IT capabilities without increasing headcount.

Join Pima Community College, Tech Orchard, and Omnissa for a candid discussion on modern endpoint management, operational efficiency, and how colleges can do more with less while delivering a better experience for both IT staff and end users.

BREAK 3:15 PM - 3:30 PM

BREAKOUT SESSION 2

• Enabling an AI-Powered Workforce to Achieve Maximum Productivity (Ventana Room) - Matt Borja, Yavapai College

Demonstration of a proven, viable workflow that exploits the agentic capabilities of AI to accelerate teams in their research, development, and release of technical solutions at scale.

• AV is IT: AVoIP and Presentation Technology as Enterprise IT Deployments (Canyon B Room) - Ryan Gray & Patrick Keeling, Yavapai College

A look at how Yavapai College is deploying AV systems as Enterprise IT deployments and enabling the benefits of networked hardware and AVoIP transport to improve the student experience.

• Be Ellucian SaaS Ready: Why Groups are the Key to Security (Boardroom) - Ivy Walker, Pima Community College

Moving from a class-based environment to a group model in Banner Access Manager not only saves time but also simplifies the security architecture. This session is designed to bridge the gap, turning your current class structure into a scalable, secure, and automated group-based architecture. 

• Mining the Missing Element: Unearthing Opportunity in the CRM (Canyon C Room) - Chris Lucas, Pima Community College

This presentation explores the strategic implementation of Element451, moving beyond simple software adoption to a mission-driven "mining" of student data. We first navigate the complex change-management hurdles of aligning diverse stakeholders and overcoming the natural friction that arises during a major CRM rollout. Once the system is live, the focus shifts to auditing real-time data to uncover our "missing elements." These are the overlooked local high schoolers and trailing students who were previously invisible to our outreach. By collaborating across departments to define these gaps, we leverage advanced workflows and automated communication journeys to ensure no student falls through the cracks. Ultimately, this initiative demonstrates how technical synergy and data-driven strategy can transform operational silos into a unified mission for student success. 

• Cut the Stack, Not the Experience (Canyon A Room) - Anna Becker, Pima Community College, & Max Nadler, Pathify

Budget pressure and shrinking enrollment push every IT team toward the same hard question — how do institutions trim the tech stack while improving the student experience at the same time? Pima Community College answered it by consolidating systems into a single Campus Experience Hub.

This session walks through Pima's path over the past year: folding a separate intranet, web portal and mobile experience into one front door, then handing content ownership back to the departments that know it best. The result moved maintenance off a single overloaded team, retired stale and unsearchable content and freed IT staff to focus on higher-value work.

Anna Becker, IT Project Manager at Pima, joins Pathify's Max Nadler for a candid conversation on the governance model that made adoption stick — widget guidelines, a page style guide, dedicated admins and announcement workflows that keep the Hub running on its own. A live demo and audience Q&A close out the hour.

Attendees will leave with a practical framework for consolidating systems, building cross-campus buy-in and proving the payoff in both dollars and reclaimed staff hours.

DINNER: 5:00 PM - 6:00 PM

KEYNOTE SPEAKER: ADOBE

EVENING EVENT: GENTLE BENS - 6:00 PM 

BREAKOUT SESSION 3

• Beyond the Blue Light: Modernizing Higher Ed Security with Verkada  (Ventana Room)- Isaac Abbs, Pima Community College, & Pat Nevins, Verkada

Learn how Pima and Maricopa are modernizing physical security with Verkada.

• Privileged Access Management and Cadential Security Protocols (Canyon B Room) - Wayne Wilson & Gus Thompson, Pima Community College

This presentation covers Privileged Access Management (PAM) and Cadential Security Protocols. focusing on how and when to use them.

• The Future is Accessible (Canyon C Room) - David Parker & Michelle Tong, Pima Community College 

This presentation breaks down the new ADA Title II final rule, providing a clear understanding of the WCAG 2.1 Level AA legal requirements for state and local government digital services. We will outline a strategic roadmap that transforms compliance into an opportunity for comprehensive digital review, establishing a steady glidepath toward meeting deadlines rather than a last-minute mad scramble. 

BREAK 9:45 AM - 10:00 AM

BREAKOUT SESSION 4

• Auto Indexing Document Images in Banner (Canyon C Room) - Mike Burke, Pima Community College

In early 2025, Pima Community College transitioned many of our student and employee document submission and approval workflows to SoftDocs. While these tools significantly improved our processes, we identified two remaining gaps: updating Banner and other systems with captured data, and automating the indexing and storage of documents within our document management system. This presentation outlines our solution for document retention and management, leveraging SoftDocs, GoAnywhere, custom internal code, and Banner Document Management functions to automate the export, transfer, and indexing of document images and metadata.

In this presentation, we will talk through how we got to our solution and discuss how we overcame the challenges and obstacles. 

• "Futz Around and Find Out": Cultivating a Play Mindset for AI Adoption (Ventana Room) - Tony Sovak, Ph.D., Pima Community College

How do you get non-technical users to adopt advanced AI tools without overwhelming them with jargon? Traditional tech training often feels like reading a dry manual, but the general public needs a different approach. This session explores how Pima Community College successfully drives AI adoption through a non-credit community education course built around a low-stakes "sandbox" environment designed to demystify AI. Instead of rigid instructions, we teach learners to cultivate a low-stakes "play mindset" and simplify "futz around" to learn by doing. 

By framing AI as a collaborative "Thinking Partner" rather than a complex software application, we help everyday users overcome tech anxiety and build real-world confidence. Attendees will learn how this community-focused, conversational framework can serve as a blueprint to improve tech adoption strategies, bypass "boring training," and encourage self-directed exploration across any user base — whether the general public, college staff, or faculty.

• Low-Lift, High-Impact: Building Career-Ready Critical Thinkers in the Age of AI (Canyon A Room) - Shauna Chung, Dan Armstrong, & Ryan Hively, Adobe

Preparing students for an AI-powered workforce requires more than teaching them how to use AI; it involves helping them think critically, communicate effectively, and solve problems creatively. In this session, we will explore simple, practical strategies that help students develop these transferable competencies, moving beyond generating content to higher-order thinking and communicating ideas with purpose. Through real classroom examples, attendees will discover how Adobe’s easy-to-use suite of digital tools can support deeper student engagement, authentic assessment, portfolio development, and career readiness without requiring major curriculum redesign. Leave with actionable approaches that can be implemented across disciplines with high impact. 

BREAK 11:00 AM - 11:15 AM

BREAKOUT SESSION 5

• It's Not VMware! It's Hyper-V (Canyon B Room) - Josue Robledo, Central Arizona College

A walkthrough of our move to Hyper-V, with a few lessons learned along the way. We will cover what we tested, how we made the call, and what actually happened once things hit production; some things worked great, and a few made us rethink our life choices. Expect real examples and honest lessons.

• ARMOR (AI Readiness Model for Operational Resilience) (Canyon C Room) - Mark Whitworth, Principal Advisor, SLED Solution Consultant, World Wide Technologies 

Helping organizations securely operationalize AI across six key areas:

1. Governance & Compliance

2. Model Protection

3. Data Protection

4. Infrastructure Security

5. Secure AI Operations

6. Secure Development Lifecycle

• Anthology Bird of a Feather (Boardroom) - Cameron Sanders, Thomas Thompson, & Michael Jacob

This session will be an informal round-table group discussion for all Anthology customers. It will be led by a panel of CIOs from Central, Eastern, and Northland.

• The Modern SOC (Canyon A Room) - Scott McGowan, Pima Community College & Ryan Capps, Palo Alto Networks

Explore how Pima Community College is transforming the traditional Security Operations Center into an intelligent, AI-ready defense platform. In partnership with Palo Alto Networks, this session will highlight practical strategies to reduce alert fatigue, accelerate response times, and improve operational resilience through automation, unified visibility, and modern security architecture.

• Fraud is Everywhere-Prevent Two-Factor/Account Takeover and other Document/Selfie Verification Use Cases (Ventana Room) - Isaac Abbs, Pima Community College, Casimiro Lovato-Winston &  John Van Weeren, Voyatek 

As remote, digital interactions increasingly define the higher education experience, the need for robust and adaptable identity verification strategies extends beyond verifying student identities during admissions. This session is designed to provide higher education leaders with effective, actionable insights into emerging methods of verifying student identity and credentials throughout the student’s time at the institution.

 Through a focused exploration of real-world use cases—ranging from selfie re-verification to unstructured document capture and planning for Department of Education requirements for IAL2 compliance—this session will include innovative solutions for maintaining institutional integrity and trust in student identity verification processes. Attendees will gain a clearer understanding of how these approaches can enhance identity and account management workflows, support remote learning programs, and ensure readiness for evolving regulatory requirements, ultimately enabling a more secure and seamless student experience. 

BREAK 2:30 PM - 2:45 PM