Breaking the Bottleneck: A Cross-Functional Approach to Research Security Requests

Wednesday, September 30, 2026 | 2:15PM–2:45PM MT | Mile High Ballroom 4CD, Lower Level
Session Type: Breakout Session
Delivery Format: Presentation
For anyone who has worked to build trust with researchers, watching IT become the obstacle is personal. The security exception request queue was where that trust was quietly eroding, leaving researchers waiting, frustrated, and increasingly likely to route around us rather than through us. The problem wasn’t the policy. It was that IT, Governance, Risk, Compliance, and researchers were operating from entirely different understandings of what was being asked, why it mattered, and what a reasonable path forward looked like. This session presents what happened when an IT director with roots in research campus IT, a systems administrator with supercomputer experience, and a GRC analyst who understands that compliance only works through collaboration decided to treat that gap as a solvable problem and built a cross-functional framework that reduced average approval time by 77% and repositioned IT from obstacle to trusted partner in research planning.

Presenters

  • Jeremy Hessman

    Director of IT; Dodge Family College of Arts and Sciences, University of Oklahoma

  • Dinesh Rama

    IT Systems Support Administrator, University of Oklahoma

  • Emily Vittitow

    Lead Security Analyst, University of Oklahoma