It’s 11:00 p.m. and your WiFi just went down. You were just about to turn in that assignment on Blackboard too, and if you don’t get it in before midnight, your grade is going to suffer. You turn towards the sky and curse out SLU ITS, Saint Louis University Information Technology Services, for their inability to keep their Internet from going down from 10:00 p.m. to 4:00 a.m., the time of the day with the most online student traffic. That’s the typical story – ITS is invisible until something stops working. It’s not just students who need ITS either; it’s staff, faculty, physicians, and everyone in between.

IT makes the world go round, serving as the backbone of the technology everyone else is dependent on, but, to the passing physicians who she helps support, Glenda Jackson is just “an IT.” It’s early morning, the sun rose about an hour and a half before, and she is comfortably – well, as comfortably as she can be – sitting in her desk chair, a headset on her head. Oval shaped glasses sit on her nose, the arms of which disappear into her brown hair. She’s forty-seven, but appears neither particularly young nor particularly old. Light comes in through the blinds over the window behind her head. Most of her time is spent in this spot, a change from what Glenda calls the “hole” of a cubical she had been in a couple years ago, before her department moved from Saint Louis University’s medical campus to the Wool Center. When she’s not behind her computer, she’s her daughter’s biggest cheerleader, chasing after her and trying to keep up with her busy high school life, and her husband chases after her in return. Now, though her daughter is with her in the house, just a few rooms away, Glenda is in work mode.

As usual, her day starts with emails and putting out the fires that had started during the night. From there, it’s meetings, meetings, and more meetings. At ten in the morning, she organizes a Zoom call with all of her employees, where she tries to be as diplomatic as possible by laying out a number of tasks and giving them options as to what they want to do. Her team members accept their jobs and head off and she’s back to meetings. She looks at applications and they do the applying; they own the project and she directs. Over the last few months, after the initial brutal strike of COVID-19, not much of that has changed – she just has to be smarter, more particular about her communication. Now, she relies on chats and video calls instead of being able to get up from her desk and meander over to where the rest of her coworkers are. It’s almost better this way, she tells herself, because there are fewer distractions. More focusing and fewer distractions turns into longer hours but, there’s no clocking out at 5:00 p.m. at home. There’s always time to finish one more task. Though she’s getting more done now, she still misses the big window in her office back on campus.

Glenda never enjoyed the type of work that came with the stereotype of IT. She doesn’t like coding, sitting alone at a computer; she likes talking to people. Thankfully, though her journey ended up being longer than she planned, she ended up as a Director of Revenue Cycle Technologies, where she serves as a key communicator at SLU ITS, both talking to people and handling more technical information. IT work takes more than just a singular coder: it requires people of all types.

From Southern Illinois University Edwardsville as a Management Information Systems, which was interrupted when life got in the way, she went to SLU and became a secretary first before working her way up to an analyst, then a supervisor, then an assistant director, and, finally, a director. This slow, winding path took a total of twenty-five years – years she considers fruitfully spent. Each year has brought new experiences and new challenges and each year going forward will bring even more. This year’s new project was something that she was particularly proud of and excited for. It also happened to come at the perfect time.

The realm of ITS that Glenda’s department focuses on deals with physicians and patients rather than students. It’s a side that few people consider when they say, “SLU ITS.” They support all of SLU Hospital’s technological needs, monitoring systems such as Epic, the electronic health record, and IDX, billing and scheduling software. However, just before the 2020 pandemic hit, they were helping to set up a pre-registration kiosk for the hospital’s new building. Now fully operational, this project holds a special place in Glenda’s heart, because, instead of behind-the-scenes work like quietly updating a server, this was directly community-facing, directly helping patients. It’s triumphs like these that make ITS truly shine.

Though ITS is not perfect – Glenda mentioned that about 40% of the things she does are planned and the other 60% involve her putting on her hypothetical firefighting suit and putting out fires – it’s important to her that she is always striving to do better – she wants to reduce fire percentage to about 30% by next year.

Back when she was still in the Wool Center, what feels like a long time ago at this point, while Glenda envisioned herself beating down fires with the blanket of her managerial skills and years of experience, just one cubical over, John Heartlein, the Director of Server Storage and Backup Operations, thinks about his position a little differently.

“I equate us to the offensive line of a football team. No one knows who the offensive linemen are,” Heartlein said. “Everyone knows who the quarterbacks are on the football team… but the most important part of the football team is the offensive line. If they’re not doing their job, nothing works.”

People don’t know what goes into it, they only get glimpses, and if they’re doing their job well, it’s as transparent and intuitive as possible. IT is quiet from the outside, but bustling with noise on the inside, formerly filling the third floor with noise. Now, when John goes to work, he likes to joke that the commute is a lot shorter, as he simply gets things done at the computer set up in a spare bedroom in his house. Though it’s a lot easier for him to run on his own schedule now, there are some perks he does miss.

“I have to pay for my own coffee now, so that’s a bummer,” he said, laughing.

In the comfort of his own home, John is quick to smile, 50-years-old and donning rectangular glasses, who can talk for a long time and keep it interesting for longer. However, there is not always time for a lot of idle chatter – there is work to be done. The workdays now spent at home shifted a lot starting in March, where his department’s workload suddenly skyrocketed. In just five months, John and his coworkers fit in about two years’ worth of projects.

“I oddly didn’t feel exhausted. It was kind of exciting and invigorating to do all of that work in adapting our systems to remote learning and remote work,” Heartlein said.

When he considers all of the work that he’s done through his life, as an environmental studies major on the self-described “seven year undergrad plan” to a chemist out of college, it’s this kind of work, the ever-evolving, ever-shifting nature of SLU ITS that keeps him motivated and helps him thrive.

Like most of his coworkers at SLU ITS, he has not been regularly visiting SLU’s campus for months. However, unlike those coworkers, a lot of his communication was already online. About three years ago, SLU ITS outsourced much of its internal, server and operations related IT work to HCL Technologies, a company based out of Noida, India. At that time, John had already been with the department for about nine years. John truly loved all of the people he worked with and, but, when SLU tightened the belt and let some of them go, he had to do his best to connect his former colleagues’ work with the new, overseas company that was brought in. The lack of a proper knowledge transfer was painful, but he and the remaining members of his team worked through it. He feels better knowing that those who were let go received benefits for seven years after they were fired. Now, talking to the people from HCL is a normal part of his day and they are a key part in the smooth running and operation of SLU’s technology.

Not everything that came from the outsourcing was painful, though. Last February, John had the opportunity to travel to India to visit HCL. He vividly remembers stepping out of the plane in the New Delhi airport and entering an entirely new world. India was somewhere he never thought SLU would take him and, amongst the general touristy sightseeing that he was able to do, he visited a school that the HCL sponsored. Hearing about the good deeds of this company that had replaced many of his cherished coworkers was one thing, but seeing those things in action, witnessing himself how big of a difference HCL was making in the lives of the children at that school, really left a resounding impression on him. On campus, he is happy to help people on his end, receiving thank yous and beaming when people express their confidence in him and his team, and this business trip helped him see the indirect help from across the ocean.

A bit closer to home, Rob Day spends much of his day driving and walking back and forth from location to location. He has not one office, but two, with one in SLU’s Fitzgerald Hall and the other in the law school. Even more, ITS has space in the Caroline building on the South campus, where he also spends a portion of his time. All of that is not counting his home office. These spaces usually contain a MacBook, well-loved and suited for most everything he needs it for, and oftentimes extra monitors to help display more things when he needs the space. There’s a stack of computers being worked on, with an inbox and an outbox for random bits and pieces of hardware, and a cup of coffee on the desk with either a Keurig or French press somewhere. The trash can is full of the empty k-cup pods that fuel his long days, which, though he does not technically start until nine in the morning, usually begins closer to nine with him on the phone. He’s off at five in the evening theoretically, though he often is still working until 6:30 p.m., even keeping one eye on ITS until 8:00 p.m. On nights when SLU is doing upgrades or there are outages, sometimes he is there into the dead of night, finally emerging and breathing the fresh city air at 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning.

As an ITS End User Services (Campus) Manager, much of his job is scattered all over the place. Before COVID-19 hit, Rob had been a manager for less than a year, though he certainly learned to adapt quickly. He goes where he is needed and does what needs to be done – a bonafide jack of all trades for SLU ITS. Though all days start with a lot of coffee, each day is different after that. He could be in faculty calls, building computers, handling customer service escalations, working on SLUCare’s Telehealth system, or anything in between. Like John, Rob thrives in this constantly shifting environment. If he disliked it, he would have left long ago, but now he’s in his ninth year with the university, having moved from working solely at the law school before transitioning to SLU ITS. The job is nearly as fast-paced as the motorcycles he rides or the remote control cars he drives around in his free time – perhaps even faster than his Australian Shepherd dog, Dusty, who waits patiently for the opportunity to go on another adventure with him.

While Dusty waits at home, there is always much to be done on campus. Recently, SLU ITS was part of the project to renovate one of the spaces in the Busch Student Center into a new Esports lab. Facilities and TSI Global did a lot of the initial work, but ITS did a fair share of the heavy lifting and work setting up. Rob was there when the members of the Esports team were finally allowed into the completed space, hearing them say “wow” after they saw it for the first time and getting the praise of Nick Chiu, the varsity program’s director, who was thrilled with everything that had been done. That type of instant gratification, the gold star pinned on the shirt of the workers after the successful completion of a project, is only part of what makes the work SLU ITS does so deeply soul-satisfying.

For the invisible people hidden away in their cubicles next door to the business and finance offices, or the people running from office to office or server room to classroom trying to fix the big and small problems the inhabitants of SLU’s campus have, it is about making differences. For patients, for students, for physicians, faculty, staff, and anyone in-between, SLU ITS is there to try and make everyone’s lives easier. It may not seem like it all of the time – it really does seem like simply stomping on smoking branches right as the destruction is starting sometimes – but they are there. And when the people they are helping smile, even if you can’t see it, they smile back.