Max’s Minute – July 2020

So hi, this is Max Davis-Johnson, Boise State University Office of Information Technology.

Today, I’m going to talk a little bit about what we’re doing this summer and what we’re planning to do this fall.

Classroom Upgrades

One of the things we’ve really been trying to get ready for this fall is get the classrooms ready.

The majority of our classrooms have the ability to record both sound and video but it’s limited to the podium space where typically the instructor stands.

Sound from the audience, or if the faculty member moves around while teaching, it’s hard to pick up.

And, so, in 80 of our classrooms were adding both enhanced video and enhanced sound. Whether it’s in person, whether we’re streaming it live, whether we’re recording it for broadcast later, it’s going to be a much richer experience going into this fall.

Fall 2020

Honestly going in to this fall, even though we’re planning for certain events, we’re also going to have to be very flexible, very nimble, very agile, all of these things. Because we know things are going to be dynamic and things are going to be changed, and we’re planning to respond accordingly.

At the same time, as I’ve said many, many times, we still need to keep the trains running, we still need to lay new track, and we still need to create raving fans.

OIT By the Numbers

In the first six months alone here of this year, we’ve completed 91 PMO projects, and this doesn’t include our large development projects. We’ve responded to over 22,000 Help Desk tickets, and we’re going to continue at this pace moving forward.

From an OIT perspective, as far as our workforce, most of us are still going to be working remotely in the fall. We will have some people that will be flexing, be working both on campus and off campus, and then we’ll have about 30 or 40 of our staff that will be here on campus doing the necessary hands-on work that we need to do as OIT.

Campus-Wide Initiatives

Moving into this fall, besides all the classroom work we’re doing to get ready, we’re still advancing on some of our major projects.

Our HCM Cloud HR and payroll cloud implementation is still active. We’re planning to go live at the end of the calendar year in December.

We’re continuing to work on Salesforce.

We’ve made tremendous progress on our business intelligence environments. We completed multiple strategic initiatives there as far as moving to the Oracle technology stack. We’ve got a landing page, reporting hub, one-stop shop where you can go to access the majority of your data and reporting needs here at Boise State. It doesn’t matter what technology is behind it, you’ll go to that one place to access it.

From a mobile development standpoint, we’ll continue to enhance both Boise State Mobile and myBoiseState.

We’re actively engaged in what we’re calling the Storyboard App that will be part of the Foundational Classes curriculum. It’s a partnership with the faculty and the students involved in that and we’re really excited about that.

So there’s a lot of really good things we’re working on.

PMO Project Status Reports

As a reminder, if you want to know more about projects that OIT is working on this summer, you can go to our OIT Project Management Office website project page and you can see projects that are active, you can see projects that have recently been completed, you can see projects that are in the queue, you can see a list of projects that are going to go live in the next 30 days.

And if you want to see some of what our larger projects are, you can go to our large development project webpage which is here. And again, these are projects that have been recommended or basically vetted by our IT Planning Council and approved by our IT Governance Council or ITGC.

We’re Here to Help

Again, OIT, we’re here to help, we will continue to be responsive, we’re going to continue to engage, and we’re going to continue to make Boise State as successful as we can in this new world that we’re now facing.

So again, thank you for listening, and until next time, bye.