Curtin University makes headway on 'radical' tech shakeup

Curtin University has completed the first phase of a multi-year IT transformation, decommissioning its legacy infrastructure and building a cloud platform in partnership with AWS as the foundation for future digital services.

Curtin University
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The Perth-based university hired CIO Jason Cowie in late 2018, who laid out a “radical transformation” to lead what he described as a “radical transformation” of its IT operations.

This first phase culminated in the consolidation of Curtin’s core IT infrastructure into AWS and the centralisation of IT and resource management functions into ServiceNow.

With this work complete, the university is shifting its focus to front-end initiatives, including a unified student app powered by AI.

Speaking at ServiceNow Knowledge in Las Vegas, Cowie said he positioned the program to senior leadership as a multi-staged, innovation-driven investment.

“The story I pitched to the executive leaders was, ‘Let’s treat you like a venture capital fund. You give me a round of funding; I’ll give you a round of innovation. If you like that, then you give me another round of funding. And at any time, if I haven’t delivered enough innovation, then you stop giving me funding.”

Building the foundation

After joining Curtin University from Gartner six years ago, one of Cowie’s first steps as CIO was to restructure the IT team with a focus on attracting a “higher calibre” of tech capabilities.

The reorganisation, in tandem with the digital roadmap development, set Curtin up for the first significant IT overhaul: building a cloud-based infrastructure on AWS.

“Before I joined, I was asked to sign off on a proposal for a new data centre refresh,” Cowie told iTnews during the conference.

“I cancelled it, and I said, 'No, you don't refresh your hardware until you know where you're going'.

"When we designed the new roadmap, we convinced the executive that you couldn't build that on top of what we had because what we had was all fragmented and disconnected.”

With the roadmap in place, the IT team began working with AWS to co-develop a “foundational cloud”, which, in Cowie’s words, aimed to “reinvent the platform that houses all of our applications, connects all of our applications and then brings the data into a great data lake”.

The launch of Curtin’s new cloud platform, alongside its subsequent optimisation and migration, enabled the university to shut down one of its two on-premises data centres and address its sprawl of 900 applications, a figure described by Cowie as “insane for a relatively simple business”.

As of today, Curtin still has 500 applications but also a long-term plan of reducing this to "as little as 50.”

“If I have 900 applications, I can't control those,” Cowie said. “If I have 50, and we can control the sources of truth, and we can control who they talk to, then it's a much easier, much more secure step.”

Everything visible

In 2021, Cowie and the IT team adopted ServiceNow as the IT service management software, initially focusing on incident management and support.

Upon receiving additional funding, Curtin began expanding its use of ServiceNow over the next two years, first encompassing project management, including workload tracking and performance.

The rollout was later broadened to include comprehensive risk and audit tracking across Curtin’s IT assets, as well as a performance dashboard tailored for executive leadership.

As of last year, the university had adopted ServiceNow’s CIO Dashboard, using it as a centralised resource management tool that enabled Cowie and the IT team to prioritise projects based on value and impact.

“We started out doing what everyone does with ServiceNow: managing tickets and managing requests,” Cowie said.

“We could have stopped there, but we wanted to get to a point of having everything visible and everything tracked in one central place.”

According to Cowie, the CIO Platform has played a critical role in both streamlining IT operations and improving stakeholder buy-in.

“I can see [every project] that's coming in,” Cowie said. “I can see [their] performance. I can sit with the CFO and say, ‘This is how much we're delivering’.

"My governance team uses all the data on this in the projects and the tools to measure our performance, and the directors get a quarterly scorecard of performance.”

To further encourage stakeholder engagement, Curtin has also activated ServiceNow’s Idea Portal, allowing users to submit, vote on, and view requests for product enhancements or new projects.

The next phase

With the core backbone in place, Cowie is focusing on the second phase of Curtin’s IT transformation, which “will touch every single aspect of the university”.

Delivered in "horizons", phase two will concentrate on front-end experiences, including student-facing platforms, digital engagement and academic service delivery.

This phase aims to modernise how users interact with Curtin’s systems, using AI and automation to simplify processes both for staff and students.

At the heart of Cowie’s vision is an end-to-end application that would emulate the seamlessness of internet banking for the student experience, but underpinned by AI-powered recommendations.

“Students would have one app,” Cowie told iTnews. “If you look at universities today, there are a myriad of [student-facing] applications.

“But if you look at the success of internet banking, it's bringing all of that into one experience, and that's what we want to build.”

Curtin currently has several AI use cases in place, including a virtual patient for health students, a conversational kiosk for the Student Connect desk and an AI digital assistant to handle common student and staff questions.

Another goal is to use AI to help manage the lifecycle of Curtin’s 50,000 IT assets, including automating refresh cycles and adding recommendations for future procurement needs.

“[We want to] really use our data, our digital experience, powered by AI, to solve a business problem that ideally makes us a more digitally-savvy university," he said.

“It also removes the minutiae so that the staff, particularly the academics and researchers, can spend more time doing what they do great, which is their academia.

“If you can reduce that workload, then there's a greater focus on the student experience.”

Eleanor Dickinson attended ServiceNow's Knowledge 2025 conference in Las Vegas as a guest of ServiceNow.