If Bill McGee is doing his job correctly, nobody notices.
As director of the UGACard Office, McGee and his staff of 10 manage a system that touches almost every corner of the university.
Behind each card swipe, hand scan and payroll check announcement, information is transmitted through the system. Accessible at 650 individual locations on campus and about 130 off campus hotspots, the system is accessed some 8 million times a year.
So if it breaks, it breaks big.
“We work behind the scenes. No one knows what we’re doing, but I can assure that if printing service goes out for one week, everyone from the president to the janitor will know all about what we do,” McGee said. “For us to be truly successful, you shouldn’t know what we’re doing—unless it’s helping customers.”
McGee is a mountain of a man. At well over 6 feet tall, he seems built more for professional sports rather than high tech operations. A former medic in the U.S. Army Reserves, he’s been serving the University of Georgia Food Services under J. Michael Floyd since 2007, when he left a similar position at Clemson University.
But what he’s brought to the larger and less-centralized Georgia system is a personal touch.
“We have a wide range of responsibilities to the system, but it’s all about engaging with people all over campus,” he said. “We reach out to those people and talk to them. We’ve created a more efficient workflow because it’s easier to know that if someone has a problem in Physical Plant, the Business Office or in the Ramsey Center, they can just pick up the phone, call and tell me what’s wrong instead of trying to figure out themselves and write it down and send it to us.”
That kind of relationship is vital for auxiliary services, he said.
“Every auxiliary operation is like running a small corporation,” he said. “We serve our customers, which is mostly people within this university. We have to operate like any other corporation and make sure we keep our customers happy.”
But he goes beyond that. McGee recently was named first runner-up for the state of Georgia’s Volunteer of the Year Award. He earned the accolade for his work teaching a class for the Campus Emergency Response Team run out of the Office of Security and Emergency Preparedness.
McGee teaches about emergency triage and care—knowledge that can save lives. He’s passionate about CERT, which educates participants about disaster preparedness and trains them in basic disaster response skills.
“Bill not only believes in the CERT motto of ‘do the most good for the most amount of people,’ he lives it through his daily actions,” said Steve Harris, director of OSEP. “He is the most dependable and dedicated UGA CERT volunteer on our current roster.”
In fact, McGee’s success at his job may stem from how well he relates to what he does.
The hand scanners his office operates are programmed to “learn” users better over time. Every time someone’s hand is scanned, the machine takes a special kind of picture. The more often someone uses it, the better it becomes at identifying their hand.
McGee is the same way. He has a knack for remembering faces, and rarely forgets anyone he’s taught.
“It’s all in the relationships,” he said. “If you’ve taken CERT and I see you on campus, I always say hey. The courses build that kind of community.”
