Mentoring is a way to pull back the curtain and show people how UCSF works and helps you stay connected to generations who have come to UCSF after you.

Erik Wieland 
Customer Success and Solutions Architect, Enterprise Systems 
UCSF IT

Erik's Career Journey

Tell us about your role. 

I'm the technical manager for the digital accessibility compliance project, determining what we need to do and clearing technical roadblocks to get us to compliance. I am in charge of the data and the technology, making sure that the systems can talk to each other to figure out how we're doing and what we need to do to get further along.

‌Tell us about your career journey. 

‌I’ve been at UCSF for 28 years, bouncing between individual contributor and manager. My original career path started with helpdesk and desktop support in the Department of Medicine. I moved into system administration and web development. I became a supervisor, then I became the director, the only job I ever wanted. Due to changes from a new central services model, I became a Customer Engagement Manager in UCSF IT. That role is very similar to what I do now. It's a super fun job. As the customer success and solutions architect for Enterprise Systems, I actually get to build stuff.

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You’ve been actively involved in mentorship at UCSF. Why is mentoring important?

‌Mentoring is as valuable to the mentor as it is to the mentee. The reason I got into mentoring was to help people avoid the problems I had early in my career. I had great ideas, but I was missing the part about bringing people along with me. I have to involve them in the process and help them be part of the solution, they are more than just an implementer or a checkbox. Mentoring is a way to pull back the curtain and show people how UCSF works and helps you stay connected to generations who have come to UCSF after you.

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What is the best advice you've received? 

‌The best advice I got was to get a mentor and start taking management training, to understand how to be managed as much as how to manage.

My first mentor told me to get involved in committees or any group that’s outside the box of my job, because it provides perspective on how the whole university works.

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What is the best advice you give your colleagues? 

It’s called Hanlon’s Razor: “Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by ignorance.” The idea being that the other person isn’t doing that to you, or not doing that for you, they just don’t know. It’s your job to have a conversation with them. Try an inclusive approach like, “Let’s look at the problem and solve it together.”

Tell us more about your work on the digital accessibility compliance project. ‌

It took a lot of record maintenance to have visibility into what we were doing and how well we were doing it. I looked through 6,000 website records to categorize them and pull them into the dashboard. I set up standards and processes for maintaining those records. I did the same thing for 4,000 application records, developing a dashboard for the application attestations.

‌I set up integrations between systems to pull that data in, correlate it, and make sure we understand who owns what, who they report to, and how they're doing. 

‌We also launched a Versa assistant called Digital A11y in December that answers questions people have, using all the great content we wrote for the website.  

‌‌This month, we hope to launch a free PDF remediation tool that will save about 90% compared to commercial products and work just as well.

FAVORITE COOKIE JAR TREAT 

Oatmeal Scotchies (butterscotch) 

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