Business Chief USA March 2019

BOISE STATE UNIVERSITY
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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