Rebuilding a law school’s technology for self-service
A top US law school ran its technology as a centralized service that couldn’t keep up with what faculty and students needed. Over 18 months, we restructured it into a distributed, self-service model, owned the product roadmap across the portal, website, and student platform, and cut roughly $900,000 a year by moving to insourced open source.
When technology is centralized and slow, the people who depend on it stop asking for help and start working around it. A top US law school had reached that point. Its technology ran on a centralized model that couldn’t serve faculty and students well, leaned on expensive vendors, and lacked the basics of resilience. Sensitive student data fell under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), and the school’s infrastructure was under repeated attack from nation-state and other threat actors. The status quo was both fragile and in the way.
We restructured it. The school moved from centralization to a distributed, self-service model, guided by a product roadmap and a $3 million budget, over 18 months.
As Product Owner, we led the student portal, the school website, and the affiliated student social platform, including its content moderation, while managing more than 20 direct reports, a mix of local and offshore vendors, and executive and faculty stakeholders. Underneath the products, we built the foundation the school had never had. We stood up its first data center with proper development-to-production environments, which raised both reliability and performance. We established cybersecurity response policies and runbooks to handle the recurring attacks, and kept student data FERPA-compliant in the school’s first data warehouse. We put disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity (BC) plans in place as part of a data-center infrastructure-management strategy, with asset and configuration tracking in the school’s first configuration management database (CMDB). And we shifted to an insourced, open-source model that cut roughly $900,000 a year.
What changed
| Measure | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Operating model | Centralized service | Distributed self-service |
| Annual cost | Vendor-heavy baseline | $900,000 lower per year, insourced open source |
| Resilience | None to speak of | First data center, DR/BC, CMDB |
| Student data | At risk | FERPA-compliant data warehouse |
Handing control to the people who use the technology, with the resilience to stand behind it, turned the school’s IT from a bottleneck into a platform. It is the oldest engagement in this collection and the one furthest from today’s stack, but the shape of it is familiar: a product-led operating model, built to last, in an industry, higher education, where delivery has its own particular constraints.