“ THERE ’ S A REASON WHY UNIVERSITIES HAVE BEEN AROUND FOR A LONG TIME . THEY ’ RE TYPICALLY DELIBERATE ABOUT THEIR DECISION- MAKING PROCESS ”
BOISE STATE UNIVERSITY
352 solutions offered by Amazon Web Services . “ We decided to go down the AWS route ,” says Bolt , reflecting that it took a year-and-a-half to unite the IT , purchasing and legal departments in support of “ buying a commodity as a service , not a capital investment .” He laughs , “ no kidding . So after eighteen months , we had a signed contract with AWS , which provided us a suite of tools to use for new projects .” Once the department had access to AWS , their governance strategy took a note from the academia playbook : “ we work a lot with faculty members that seek out grant opportunities . Granting agencies , such as National Institute of Health , will put out a call for proposals along the lines of ‘ we have a need . Write your response , and we may or may not give you money to do the research ’. We decided to do something similar within our own organization and call it a ‘ call for participation ’.” The team drafted up a call for participation , asking for applications and solutions for AWS machine learning and data lake storage . “ The response was interesting ,” chuckles Bolt . “ We have seven participants from our technology office , and the person who
“ THERE ’ S A REASON WHY UNIVERSITIES HAVE BEEN AROUND FOR A LONG TIME . THEY ’ RE TYPICALLY DELIBERATE ABOUT THEIR DECISION- MAKING PROCESS ”
— Brian Bolt , Deputy Chief Information Office , Boise State University
wanted to be our project manager was actually our solutions architect , so he really decided to stretch his skills .” He reflects that , “ one of the reasons why this worked is that we had the business unit say they wanted to be part of it as well . They actually brought the problem to us . They wanted to forecast demand for the Summer sessions so that they would know how many classes to schedule and how many adjunct professors to hire .” Regardless of the level of success the project achieves , Bolt is excited to both broaden the horizons
MARCH 2019