Max’s Minute: IT Planning Process and Summer 2019 Projects

Max’s Minute April 2019

Hi, this is Max Davis-Johnson, Boise State University Office of Information Technology. Today I’m going to talk a little bit about our planning process and some of the projects that are coming out of that, and some of the things we’re going to be emphasizing over the next three to six months here.

Planning Process & Partners

We’ve been working closely with a group called ITPC which you’ve probably heard us refer to them, and that’s Information Technology Planning Council. Basically ITPC has come up with an extensive list of projects over a five year time frame. They’ve been able to prioritize them all within selected areas. And then that list of projects has been taken to what we call ITGC, or IT Governance Council. IT Governance Council consists of all the university VP’s and they basically have endorsed and blessed that plan.

You know, certain criteria to be that, some of it’s time, some of it’s the breadth, some of it’s the cost of that project. And a good example of that would be the HCM Cloud project which we’re currently in the middle of right now. And like I said, there’s probably 20, 30 projects on that list that spans a bunch of different areas and spans over the next five years.

Communicating with Students Now and Forever

One of the big initiatives coming out of that, and we have a task force in place, that will have a major impact on the future here at Boise State, is something called CRM, or customer relationship management system. Basically, it would help with the recruiting of undergraduates, graduates coming in. It would it would expand our efforts to communicate, to reach out, activities that we do with while students are here on campus. And that’s right now where we have a big hole in our portfolio.

We’re talking helping drive student success, advising, and understanding what our students are doing and how best to communicate with them. And then once they do graduate or they leave the university, the opportunity to reach out to them. So we’re looking for a system that can basically span that gap from beginning to end.

Trusted Data

Another key thing moving forward, and we’ll be working on actively over the summer, is this whole idea of trusted data. If you looked at the recent edition of educause, every year they put out an annual top ten issues list. Five of the top ten issues are involving trusted data. Which are things like cybersecurity, data governance, data privacy, you know, how we use their data. So we need to basically come up with our risk-based strategy of how we address all these things.

High-Performance Computing

From a research standpoint also we will be, we’re in the process of defining and pulling together our next generation, our next iteration, of our high-performance computing cluster. We currently have R2, and this will be R3. We’re looking to get that in place at the beginning of the calendar year 2020. We have some sustainable funding now to move forward there.

We’re looking at both industry partnerships, and a partnership with Idaho National Labs and moving forward with that. So that really is exciting to help sort of change our research landscape.

Want to Know More?

You can visit the OIT large development project website, which is part of the OIT website and find out more detail about all the projects on that, and obviously if you have any questions about that, please refer directly to myself (max@boisestate.edu), or Brian Bolt (brianbolt@boisestate.edu), or Mark Wheeler (mwheeler@boisestate.edu) who are co-chairs of that committee.

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Max’s Minute is produced by the Office of Information Technology at Boise State University. (208) 426-4357 or helpdesk@boisestate.edu.