California State University, the largest four-year public university system in the country, made headlines when it announced recently that it intends to continue with remote teaching in the fall term at all 23 CSU campuses, affecting most of its 482,000 students. This was a bold move. I applaud the CSU system, or any college or university, as the rapid shift to online instruction amidst COVID-19 has been an undertaking of historic proportions.
Lost in the headlines is the amount of work that IT teams must do to enable remote access to HR applications for nearly all university staff and faculty. For Cal State, more than 53,000 faculty and staff need access to essential information and systems. Along with student users, in total, that is 535,000 (mostly remote) users accessing student information and HR systems from all over the world.
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The repercussions of this decision are wide-reaching. First, Cal State must be able to keep students engaged and provide parity to classroom learning. Beyond that, there are myriad implications placed squarely on the enterprise applications that support these institutions.
With millions of students, faculty, and staff depending on these applications to keep operations running smoothly, how will campuses look to adapt these systems to their new normal? How can they ensure these systems can meet these new demands?
Piyush Pandey, CEO at Appsian, is a technology executive with 18 years of global experience in strategy, sales, mergers & acquisitions, and operations within software companies. Over the last 10 years, he has worked with enterprise software companies including Oracle, Epicor, Concur, Citrix and Microsoft on various transactions. He has held various leadership positions at Procera, Deutsche Bank, Stifel, Wipro Technologies and a wireless startup.