Visionary, curious and endlessly inventive. Words that colleagues would use to describe Frank Boshoff, assistant director of Technical Solutions & Architecture within EASI. When Frank joined the university in 2007, he arrived from IBM with a wealth of enterprise-scale experience. Nearly 20 years later, his impact can be felt on some of the university’s most significant technology transformations.

We are deeply grateful for his leadership, mentorship and laughter he brought along the way. As he steps into retirement – with no shortage of big questions to ponder and books to read – we thank Frank for his remarkable contributions and wish him every happiness in the adventures ahead.

Swetlana Signarowski
Executive Director, Enterprise Applications & Solutions Integration (EASI)

Frank Boshoff
Assistant Director, Technical Solutions & Architecture

Joined U of T: September 7, 2007
Last day with EASI: July 17, 2026
Retirement Date: August 31, 2026

How did you arrive at U of T and how have your roles changed over the years?

I arrived at the university after a decade-and-a-half at IBM as a consulting IT architect. My original role was to manage a small team (four people) of web developers in the Student Information System department. After a few weeks, I realized the university had no formal IT architecture – it didn’t have a CIO at the time either – and enormous amounts of time and effort were being wasted creating and operating duplicate systems (don’t other organizations have 126 email systems? They have only 1!? – that will never work here…).

I started explaining the benefits of IT architecture to whoever was polite enough to bear with me. A few months later, a CIO was established and not long after that, I was designated the enterprise architect – a label that has remained attached over the years, even as my job changed with the university’s needs.

How has IT evolved at U of T and in higher education and what do you think the future holds?

IT at U of T changed rapidly during COVID. Adoption of Teams, ubiquitous remote access (without tunnelling through one’s desktop computer – remember desktops?), rapid reduction in paper-based processes because nobody could co-locate to work with paper, all contributed to adopting digital processes. The university is more efficient than it was as a result, but it could be even more effective if IT systems became more helpful. Hopefully, it won’t take another existential threat to galvanize the application of technology to reduce human labour. After all, who wants to grind all day, every day, if machines can do all the dreary, tedious and repetitive work? People should demand more of IT to make their jobs easier. The best way to go about this is to find out who else shares your frustration and create a consolidated request for better IT solutions – technologists love creating massive efficiencies. AI seems to have potential, but for now, it is best treated as a massive database of the world’s knowledge with a natural language interface – very handy, but lacking initiative. When might institutions grant professional degrees to specialized LLMs so that we can trust them, just as we do engineers and doctors?

What have you found most interesting about working at U of T?

The enormous complexity of the organization, the missions it pursues, and the important outcomes it achieves. Working here is so much more satisfying than merely syphoning dollars from parts of the population and transferring money from one billionaire’s pocket to another billionaire’s pocket – that’s what most coding accomplishes in the commercial world. Here, one feels part of the constant search for the truth, of discovery and of a force for good. I hope that my small efforts help the university prevail because in this increasingly unstable world, institutions such as this one are needed to correct the faults, flaws and fallacies that have taken hold over the past couple of decades (largely thanks to technology – the irony).

What were some of the key projects that you were most proud to work on?

Migrating ROSI off a mainframe computer to distributed, inexpensive virtual machines is a standout because so many mainframe migrations fail. It saved the university a significant amount of money every year and positioned it well for ROSI’s modernization.

Adopting cloud computing is another initiative that has made access to new technologies and services much easier than in the past. Cloud computing provides the flexibility and capacity the university needs in modern times.

What will you remember most about EASI and U of T?

EASI seems to be at the centre of the action when it comes to interacting with divisions in enabling efficient business processes. Everyone takes payday for granted, and it is EASI that makes it happen several times a month for thousands of employees, without fail. The people in EASI know how to handle pressure.

What advice would you give to those working in IT at U of T?

The IT industry is changing faster than ever, so strive to keep knowledgeable about technologies that would benefit the university on a large scale, not just at the team level or department level – dare to think big. Test your ideas by discussing them with whoever is willing to listen – you will learn more from their feedback and it will improve your thinking.

What do you plan to do in retirement?

I’d like to determine, just for myself, perhaps, whether Category Theory really is a practical joke played on mathematicians, or whether it has some uses when applied to functional programming. There is also all the reading I hope to catch up on, ranging from archeology (what is the latest thinking of how Göbekli Tepe came about and why is it considered to have been buried?), to industrial design (why can’t toilet roll holders be simpler and just better – why bother changing a functional design?), to learning more about the base-60 numbering system and why it prevails in time measurement thousands of years later (should we not metricize time? Or are the units of time like the Qwerty keyboard – so ubiquitous we must put up with it – doesn’t everyone want to type 35 times more words using the home row?). And what’s with the number zero – why did it arrive late and make so many things indeterminate and hurt our brains? Is zero (nothing) the source of everything? Is everything in the universe just information – if something imparts no information, does it exist? So many questions! I’ll be fine… I think; or maybe I think… so I’ll be fine.