Hawkins named Solution Planning and Design assoc. dir.
11-year veteran of UIT brings 35 years of experience matching customers with technology
Marv Hawkins has spent nearly 35 years helping customers bridge the gulf between their dreams and their reality with technology.
With just shy of 11 years of experience at the University of Utah as an integration analyst and product manager in Administrative Computing Services and University Support Services, along with more than two decades of similar work at Salt Lake Community College, Hawkins was a natural fit to take the wheel as associate director of customer solutions in the Solution Planning and Design group.
When a department approaches University Support Services about a development project, Hawkins and his team will run an initial analysis to develop a business case.
If the scope is large enough to warrant further approvals through the governance process, they will handle that as well.
“We’ll actually be the advocate for that business case or that customer through the governance process if it needs to go to governance,” he said. “But we’ll do a lot of roadmapping for the customer as far as expectations.”
“As we create the plan-build-run model, we’re having difficulty finding educational institutions using that model,” said Hawkins. “In industry that’s a pretty common thing, but for education — to see how people actually put it into practice — it has been kind of hard. Because we’re doing things that industry is doing with half the people or less, it’s a challenge to not have an exact model of how to do business.”
Hawkins — who enjoys home improvement, cooking, and singing in his church praise group in his spare time — believes part of the challenge will be properly defining the consultant role to adapt to the customer.
“Industry is dealing with a small suite of applications, whereas we’re dealing with an enterprise that is really 20 or 30 companies under one roof trying to do the same thing,” he said. “So that suite of applications is much larger, with differing needs for different departments.”
He hopes to lay the groundwork for other UIT departments to build from as more focused planning takes root throughout the organization.
“We’re starting with USS, using that as the small model, then taking it to see what it would do if all UIT services came through that. So that if there’s a Teaching and Learning Technologies issue we could put it through the same kind of process,” he said. “So a customer could come in and make a request, whatever the request is, and then funnel it to the appropriate group to do analysis, to do business process work, to do the design, or to help them through a process of business change.”