Max’s Minute – April 2020

[Steady synthesizer music plays]

Hi, this is max Davis-Johnson, Boise State Office of Information Technology. Obviously, our world has changed about two months ago–not only our world but your world has changed. I want to talk a little bit about what what we’re doing in OIT and also make sure that you’re engaging with us because, you know, we’re here to help you get through all this transition.

Keeping the Trains Running On Time

So, we’re still trying to achieve our core mission of keeping the trains running on time, laying new track and creating raving fans. And so our core mission of keeping the trains running has been modified somewhat. Certainly we still want to make sure systems are available, networks are available, all these types of things. But we’ve added some layers such as VPN for people coming in to use our systems. We’ve added zoom has now become a core part of what we’re trying to do here at Boise State.

We use it for meetings. We use it for delivering classes. And we’re learning, every day we learn something new with zoom. You know, which can be exciting. We’re making adjustments but it’s become a big part of our keeping the trains running making sure that zoom is a big part of our portfolio.

Laying New Track

Laying new track: again it’s very critical that we continue to advance the University so we have several things even though we’re working remotely. We’re still still and adding new things to our portfolio. We’ll be upgrading our our phone system with improved voicemail features here in the next month.

One of the other things we’re doing here in the near future, in the next month, is we’ll be rolling out multi-factor authentication. And again, multi-factor authentication is where basically you log in, you get a token, it’s just to verify your identity. It helps improve the overall security profile of not only Boise State but also it helps protect your personal assets too.

We’re also looking at improvements to the Oracle financial system. You’ll see here in the next month something we’re calling Bronco Hub. It will be the gateway in the future, not only to the oracle financial system recording and reporting, but it also be the gateway into our HCM system, our Oracle HCM system, which will go live later in this year.

Creating Raving Fans

As far as creating raving fans, a lot of our focus from a true support standpoint was helping you transition to working remotely. We’re still here to help. Personally, I think our team did a wonderful job in helping you in that transition. If you have questions, you have concerns, continue to call the help desk. You know they’ve been very responsive.

We’re dealing a lot now with what I would call edge cases. Maybe they’re a little bit more difficult to work with, but we’ve learned a lot.

We continue to, we’re updating our presence on the web about how to work better remotely, how to teach better remotely, and how to learn better remotely.

We’re Here To Help

We really look forward to the day when we can come back together and be around each other. But, you know, for now, I think if you have issues, have technical issues, you want to talk through things, how to better use some of the online tools that we have, please, please reach out to the Help Desk and we’ll be as responsive as we have always been.

Be healthy. Be safe. Take care. And until next time.