Jeff Oliver, Manager, Network and Telecom, IT Services

Jeff Oliver (BSc ’96) is signing off as Manager, Network and Telecommunications at the end of October, ghosting the ULethbridge campus on Halloween and ending a 30-year career in Information Technology. It’s no trick and certainly no treat for the folks left behind. 

“The team I work with is wonderful,” says Jeff. “We’ve got a lot of really good people. The climate at the University is, for the most part, gracious.” 

Three days after his final day of work, he and his wife Rose, who’ll be retiring the same day, will jet off to Italy for a three-week vacation that includes stops in Croatia and Amsterdam. They hope to do more travelling in the future, and after taking some time to let retirement settle in, they plan to volunteer more. They also like to “play in the dirt” and devote time to maintaining their yard, a trait Jeff likely inherited from his wheat-farming grandfather. 

Born in Saskatchewan, Jeff grew up in British Columbia and studied electronics at college. A position at an office equipment dealership brought him to Lethbridge in 1988, but he soon advanced as far as he could and so began looking for another career. 

His electronics course at college included a specialization in repairing computers, so taking computer science was a logical step. 

“After my wife and I married, I came here and did a computer science degree,” he says. “I’ve always been a bit of a take things apart, fix them and put them back together kind of person, whether that’s a toaster or computers. Quite honestly, they’re not a lot different.” 

When Jeff started his career in Information Technology (IT), there were maybe 300 computers on campus, mostly desktop versions. While portable computers existed, they were much boxier than the streamlined laptops of today. The computers were mostly in computer science labs, but the psychology department had several, and the Faculty of Education was in the beginning stages of acquiring them. 

“Most people didn’t have them in their offices, and we were still teaching with overhead projectors,” he says. “We had paper exams, for sure.” 

The university had mainframes on campus for Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software, such as Banner, for financial and student administration tasks. After starting in ITS as a system administrator and being involved in the implementation of the firewall, he transitioned to becoming a network administrator. 

About 25 years ago, the University decided to install network infrastructure — network cables, switches, routers and the like — to all offices. The infrastructure is still in place, although vendors and technologies have changed and replaced in the intervening years as advances have been made. 

“The interesting thing I like about technology is it never stops changing,” he says. “And, as somebody who works in it, if I decide I’m not going to keep up with the latest stuff, I’m going to be obsolete in a couple of years. It changes so fast.” 

While he’s seen many changes, the concept of virtualization has been most transformative. Back in the day, a server was a discrete physical object whereas today a single physical server hosts many virtual servers. Similarly today a single physical network can be segmented into hundreds of virtual networks, allowing it to be expanded as far as necessary. And the number of devices that are essentially computers, smartphones and televisions, for example, that can be connected to a network has exploded. IoT (the internet of things) has been a reality in the higher education space for a long time whether it be a room controller to turn on a projector, a door lock or camera, or your smartphone. 

“In a lot of respects, technology has allowed us to do way more than we used to be able to do,” he says. “However, we’ve become way lazier than we ever have been, and when technology fails, because it does, we don’t know what to do.” 

Whether it’s human error or an equipment problem, technology fails at times. A system can be made more fail-safe, but that can be a costly measure. Sometimes, a failure happens for reasons outside of the University's control. Jeff recalls an incident about 20 years ago when, suddenly, the campus had no internet. At the time, the University was using City of Lethbridge fibre cables. 

“After a couple of hours of investigation, it turned out that a family of marmots had gone into a manhole and chewed the fibre,” he says. “Marmots are a protected species, so they had to get Alberta Fish and Wildlife to come in and trap them live. It took about two days before we had internet.” 

And then, there was a flood in 2013 when a waterline was broken during excavation work on the south plaza outside the Student Union Building. Water made its way through the Library, the University Centre for the Arts and University Hall, where water rained from the ceiling in a data centre. 

Probably the most important recent event was the construction of Science Commons. The building was big enough in scope that the University could build a network for the future. The network infrastructure features enhanced security and increased operational effectiveness. The Cisco Software-Defined Access system weaves together wired and wireless networks and allows users access to the resources they need wherever they go on the network. 

“This technology has now been extended across the campus and we are starting to leverage some of the inherent features to enhance our security postures,” he says. 

Despite all the technological changes Jeff has seen, he says his degree not only gave him the fundamentals but also taught him how to learn things. 

“The University is a great place to work,” says Jeff. “From a professional perspective, the University is big enough that we get to do some very cool things but small enough to be nimble and do it across an entire organization.”