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1The Hidden Cost of Disparate K-12 IT Systems

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2 The Hidden Cost of Disparate K-12 IT Systems

Few, if any, K-12 school systems have the luxury of purchasing a complete IT infrastructure system all at once so that it’s perfectly integrated from the start. Instead, most districts add IT components gradually, as their budgets allow.

During this slow build up, technology evolves, district leadership and staff change, and the district’s needs change. Even with careful management, IT infrastructure can become burdened with disparate systems, needlessly redundant functions, and shelfware.

With less-than-careful management, IT systems can become many-headed monsters that keep district IT staffs in permanent firefighter mode, running from flare-up to flare-up.

Introduction: The Making of an IT System Monster

IN THIS REPORT WE WILL EXAMINE THREE MAIN AREAS WHERE HIDDEN COSTS RESIDE:

Our report concludes with some action items that will help you find and reduce hidden costs in your district.

Sometimes the additional costs of dysfunctional IT architecture are apparent. For instance, it’s easy to see the additional cost of having staff members spend hours every week on repetitive, manual data entry because certain systems cannot exchange data automatically.

However, many other costs aren’t so obvious.

The true cost of disparate IT systems — in money and in time — can be challenging to measure. However, making the effort to uncover how your IT systems may be needlessly compromising cost-effectiveness and quality is valuable. It’s the first step in addressing the root causes of these hidden costs so you can make better decisions going forward.



IT resources, operations, and budgets can become labyrinths where costs can hide.

Even CIOs and other IT experts — not to mention superintendents and school boards — can easily get lost searching the labyrinth for IT expenses they can eliminate. Moreover, the search for savings becomes more difficult with IT architecture built mainly in silos that make integration difficult or even impossible.

It’s easy to assess each silo independently, without looking deeply into the potential savings of more interactive platforms.

Let’s take an aerial view into the labyrinth and see where some IT budget beasties tend to hide:

COMPLEX IMPLEMENTATIONS

Adding anything from a simple application to an enterprise-level software suite to a fractured IT system will increase your implementation timeline and staffing requirements. Chances are, you’ll have to pay for outside expertise to integrate the new software and hardware.

It’s better to pay for the outside expertise when you need it than to risk a botched implementation. However, always ask for input during the implementation planning process about what your IT architecture might need to avoid extra expense for future upgrades or additions.

Ask for input during the implementation planning process about what your IT architecture might need to avoid extra expense for future upgrades or additions.

Even if you’re migrating to cloud-based services, which is increasingly where the K-12 world is heading, the integration with existing infrastructure doesn’t happen by itself. Until the barriers between your systems are removed, expect to pay more for every significant IT implementation.

ONGOING MANAGEMENT AND MAINTENANCE

The more varied and diverse your mix of IT platforms is, the more in-house expertise you’ll probably need to manage and maintain those systems. For example, your SIS may require different skill sets to support it than your HR systems, curricu-lum management systems, and so on.

IT Systems Management:A Labyrinth of Hidden Costs



In this type of fractured IT architecture, your district is maintaining multiple platforms just to provide what users see as a somewhat connected flow of functionalities.

Also, the more workarounds your IT staff or consultants have to install to make your data flow properly, the more specialized skill sets you’ll require. This makes it more difficult to replace an experienced IT staffer -- the learning curve will be steeper and the potential for costly errors increases.

ABANDONED FUNCTIONALITY

At some point, virtually every K-12 district will succumb to the allure of a shiny IT product that promises extraordinary benefits, but in the end can’t deliver. This can happen for many reasons, not the least of which is that the product doesn’t mesh with the rest of the district’s IT architecture.

The standalone nature of such a product may be too big a hurdle for IT personnel and users, requiring them to significantly change the way they complete work tasks in order to use the product. Alternatively, perhaps it doesn’t work as intended because the rest of your system doesn’t support it.

Whatever the reason, the shine quickly wears off the new product and it becomes shelfware.

Even products that are working perfectly can become shelfware when they are rendered obsolete — sometimes without prior notice —by the implementation of a new system.

Shelfware is a classic hidden cost. It’s not being used, so it’s mostly forgotten.

Shelfware is a classic hidden cost. It’s not being used, so it’s mostly forgotten. But it may still be occupying physical space if it includes a hardware component. It may be consuming physical or virtual rack space you’re paying for. Or perhaps some special coding the product required is still adding interest to your IT operation’s “technical debt” — even long after the product is forgotten. (See the sidebar, “How much technical debt is your district in?”}



Technical debt is a banking metaphor. Programmers sometimes have to write a quick and dirty coding fix for a problem that’s threatening a big release deadline. It’s like taking out a loan to get the product out quickly.

The “interest” in this metaphor is the extra work programmers must do down the line because the quick fix begets more and more work-around coding.

To reduce or eliminate this interest, program-mers need to pay down the principal by going back and properly restructuring the base code, so the workaround code can be removed without changing how the system performs.

In building an IT architecture for a K-12 district, sometimes applications, modules, hardware, etc., must be added quickly or cheaply to meet an urgent need. You can usually see that these products won’t mesh with the rest of your platform, but you probably figure you can always patch it with some coding sleight of hand, or maybe next year’s budget will allow for a better solution … but you know the drill.

It never gets fixed.

And the interest starts building up, often invisibly.

The mismatched component limits interoperability of future modules. Without knowing it, people are wasting work hours on tasks that wouldn’t be necessary in a properly integrated system. Another consequence is that your district may not be getting data it could be using to improve operations or classroom outcomes.

To pay down the technical debt generated by years of quick fixes and misfit components, your district may have to replace some or all of its enterprise-level systems.

This is almost always a difficult sell to a school board, especially because technical debt is difficult — some experts say impossible — to quantify.1 Although this interest burden is hidden, it is real, and it should be factored into IT infrastructure decision making.

Software developers have a term that helps describe what happens to IT architecture that’s full of patched up applications and integration workarounds. The term “technical debt” specifically applies to coding, but the metaphor works for overall IT infrastructure as well.



Business functions including HR, payroll, purchasing, and general accounting are often where the oldest and most cobbled-together IT resources are employed. These are classic back-office functions, and traditionally they haven’t received the same attention as student-facing systems.

In years past, it wasn’t practical foranything but the largest districts to consider comprehensive IT solutions such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) tools for business and HR operations. ERP systems, which came mainly from the world of large manufacturers, were too complex and expensive for the K-12 world.

This is no longer the case. ERP platforms designed specifically to integrate into K-12 IT infrastructures can be scaled down for medium- or even smaller-sizeddistricts.

ERP platforms designed specifically to integrate into K-12 IT infrastructures can be scaled down for medium- or even smaller-sized districts.

Also, many of these products are delivered as a cloud service now, which increases cost efficiency and smooths out implementations.However, as long as things appear to be running smoothly on the surface, K-12 administrators and boards can

easily miss common sources of hidden costs that an integrated business and operations IT platform could eliminate, such as:

MULTIPLE UNNECESSARY LEARNING CURVES

The more separate and unintegrated software and hardware solutions your back-office functions tie to, the more learning curves there are to be split between your staff members. Burdening one person with handling too many of these systems can create a service bottleneck. But also, this can hurt productivity, according to the American Psychological Association.2

This isn’t to suggest that your district’s HR and business staff can’t or shouldn’t multitask -- most districts would grind to a halt pretty quickly without flexible, cross-trained staff members.

The point is that having to learn multiple system interfaces makes it needlessly more difficult to train staff. Moreover, switching between disparate interfaces and machines carries hidden costs in time and mental effort.

The Back Office: Gathering Place for Patchwork Systems



Another common problem associated with steep learning curves is when only one or two people in the district have mastered a certain task or skill in a platform, and they are sick or on leave or leave their job altogether. How many work hours are lost while urgently training somebody new?

A unified business and operations platform can provide all back-office staff members with a single, coherent dashboard. This makes it more intuitive to learn a variety of functions, and to slide between them quickly. It can also give senior administrators easier access to data they might otherwise have to wait to receive from an individual.

Spending less time on office functions can free district leaders to concentrate on instructional outcome-based tasks.

VENDOR SUPPORT PINBALL

This time waster could be in any section of this report, as it affects business and HR staff as well as IT and teaching staff. However, often, the job of working out difficulties with IT system vendors starts with the back-office people who first notice the problem.

The first task isn’t always contacting the IT vendor responsible for the issue — sometimes the first task is figuring out which vendor can best solve the problem.

Product X’s support person may tell you, “That’s not a Product X problem, that’s a Product Y problem.” Then Product Y’s expert troubleshoots the problem and concludes, “Yep that’s a Product Z issue for sure.” And on it goes.



Busy back-office staff members just want the problem fixed, and even when it is fixed, too often it isn’t anyone’s specific responsibility to follow up on the root cause of the issue.

A thorough post-mortem might begin to reveal that platform incompatibility — rather than a failure of one particular product is the true source of the problem.

FRAUDULENT EXPENSES AND PAYMENTS

Fraud is a deliberately hidden cost, and as such, it can be one of the most difficult to find. Back-office tasks such as accounting, procurement, payroll, and inventory management are the most common tools used by fraudsters in K-12 systems. And their jobs only get easier when these functions are tied to disparate tools and platforms.

A unified business operations platform helps districts create clear transaction trails. However, when line items must be imported manually from a variety of applications that don’t talk to one another, the opportunity for fraud increases.

A unified business operations platform helps districts create clear transaction trails.

Look at it this way: The more difficult it is for people with budget oversight respon-sibility, e.g. department heads, board members, and auditors, to drill down and verify the path of a transaction, the easier it is for someone to hide a fraudulent act.

In a system built on manual workarounds, the chain of purchasing approval can be more easily broken secretly than in a properly configured automated system.

Automated systems can also be gamed, of course. Usually, this happens when one person has access to passwords for multiple, stitched-together back-office applications.

If you’ve been around district offices long enough, you’ve probably seen this scenario: Over time, half a dozen employees come to know the district’s only password to the payroll software, and the only password to the HR software (which doesn’t talk to the payroll software), and so on.

At that point, only the honor system is stopping employees from adding fake employees to the payroll system and using them to embezzle funds.

In fully integrated and secure system, an employee’s password will grant that person access only to specific functions, and using that password creates a documented trail. Thankfully, in most school districts the honor system works pretty well -- but it’s better not to test that.



Perhaps the most precious resource a school district has to offer is teachers’ time.

Providing teachers with the time they need to give their students engaging and thought-provoking learning experiences is a district’s top priority.

Unfortunately, much of teachers’ time is squandered fixing errors and mitigating problems caused by inadequately integrated IT platforms.

In fact, sometimes it’s the teachers themselves who “integrate” systems by spending their time manually moving information from one application to another. Every time that happens, teachers lose precious minutes of their instructional day.

Consider these integration-related causes of lost (or less effective) prep or teaching time that can easily hide beneath a district’s radar:

CLASS ROSTERS AND OTHER STUDENT DATA THAT AREN’T UPDATED IN REAL TIME

An up-to-date class roster is a requirement in order for teachers to run their classrooms well. In too many districts, teachers only discover roster discrepancies when, for example, a new student is standing in front of them.

The out-of-date class roster is a classic example of how the lack of real-time synchronicity between back-office systems devours instructional time.

Say an elementary school teacher is getting a new student mid-semester and is notified via the SIS at the same time the class roster changes. Even if it’s shortly before the student’s first day, the teacher will have time to assign a desk and a cubby, update

The Classroom: Where Hidden

Costs Hurt the Most

the seating chart, get the textbooks, etc.

So, as soon as that new student appears in class, he or she can be introduced, sit right down, and class can start -- there’s no learning time lost while the other students look on and the teacher hurries about trying to get the child settled.

Some districts have “lightweight” registration systems that teachers use to get new students set up quickly in the classroom. But if the teacher enters the student’s name slightly differently than the back office did — or makes any number of other entries that don’t square with the protocols of the sys-tem that stores the student’s permanent ID — that means someone in the back office is going to have to reconcile these entries later.

This is only one of many common scenarios in which teachers serve as the mechanism for manually updating student data because it doesn’t cross applications seamlessly or in real time.



LACK OF TRANSPARENCY IN STUDENT PERFORMANCE AND ASSIGNMENT DATA

Learning management and student assessment tools are becoming more sophisticated and versatile, but too often, they’re not integrated adequately into a district’s IT infrastructure.

If teachers have to manually transfer data from these tools into a SIS, for example, this results in several potential hidden costs:

The parents’ time and energy,

for the same reason.

Although systems that support real-time feedback can increase educator and learner understanding of students’ progress toward learning goals, the feedback is even more valuable if it is in one, easily accessible place.

To achieve this, we need to connect information about learning that happens across digital tools and platforms. Learning dashboards integrate information from assessments, learning tools, educator observations, and other sources to provide compelling, comprehensive visual representations of student progress in real time.

A learner’s attendance data, feedback from instructors, formative and summative assessment data, and other useful information can be madeavailable in formats specific to the needs of each stakeholder. Learning dashboards can present this data in easy-to-understand graphic interfaces.

These dashboards also can offer recommendations about resources to help students continue theirlearning progression, as well as identify students who may be at risk of going off track or even dropping out of school.

Across larger education systems, these dashboards can help educators to track learner performanceover time as well as monitor groups of students to identify opportunity and achievement gaps.

Although teacher dashboards are becoming more commonplace, student and family dashboards also offer promising opportunities to help students take control of their learning.

If data from learning management and assessment tools are not fully integrated into the overall student data architecture, it simply won’t be used to its full advantage. The U.S. Department of Education’s: 2017 National Education Technology Plan Update advocates for a dashboard that all involved parties can use to get on the same page3:

The teacher’s time to manually

transfer data, rather than prepping

lesson plans, communicating with

students or parents, or any other

educational functions.

The teacher’s mental energy in

learning a separate application

interface from the school’s main

interface. Again, this energy is

much better spent on

educational tasks.

The student’s time and energy,

which may be misspent (or not

engaged at all) because it takes

days to see assessment results, or

learning management tasks

are not posted in real time.



SOFTWARE TRAINING THAT SUPPLANTS PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT

In many K-12 districts, the time allotted for regular teacher training or collabo-rative learning is devoted to, essentially, software training. The amount of time allotted to software training increases as the number of disparate application interfaces increases. This represents an “opportunity cost.”

An opportunity cost, according to In-vestopedia, is “a benefit that a person could have received, but gave up, to take another course of action.”

Training teachers to use tech solutions in classrooms is a worthwhile use of training time outside the classroom -- as long as the solutions are carefully chosen to integrate with existing applications whenever possible.

Otherwise, choosing tech training over other types of professional development and collaboration represents a serious opportunity cost for advancing teachers’ professional growth and instructional skills.

U.S. Teachers Have Fewer Non-Instructional Hours Built into Their Work DayIn the U.S., it’s even more important than in many other high-performing countries to ease the burden of manual administrative tasks. Why? Because according to a 2017 Center for American Progress report, American teachers spend significantly more of their work week engaged in active instruction.4



The search for the hidden costs of disparate IT systems is, in effect, a search for the lack of “data interoperability.” In an excellent series of posts on the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation blog, data interoperability is defined as “the seamless, secure, and controlled ex-change of data between applications.”5

K-12 education lags most industries in interoperability, says blogger Jami O’Toole in the first post of the series. She uses the example of an address book on one’s phone that can be transferred instantly to a work contact list, Facebook, or LinkedIn. That is the type of interoperability standard K-12 IT infrastructures should strive for — as long as the data can remain secure.

How to Uncover and Reduce Hidden Costs



Conduct a thorough process review

Choose standards for

interoperability

Hidden costs won’t be revealed solely by examining hardware and software. You need to start by reviewing how district employees interact with your IT infrastructure, and whether or not they should be performing those functions. A thorough process review is a major commitment of time and resources, so school boards should sign-off on a budget for extra staffing and possibly outside consultants if necessary. The real danger is starting this type of assessment and not seeing it all the way through.

The review should result in: • Documentation of your current daily employee interactions with your IT systems • An analysis of redundancies or other inefficiencies • Recommendations for improving operations.

With that information in hand, you will be ready to begin working with vendors to find the solutions your district needs.

One paradox about the education technology space is that it can be difficult to choose a single data standard that will improve interoperability because there are so many standards to choose from, including those from the EdFi Alliance, IMS Global Learning Consortium, and other organizations.

If you’re working with an integrated system vendor, it’s important to ensure that the vendor, not your district, is responsible for providing solutions based on a consistent interoperability standard.

Consider these three initial steps toward improving your district’s IT system interoperability and leaving far fewer places for the cost of poorly integrated systems to hide:



Invest in training

(including follow-up training)

for your staff

Training can easily be the most costly element of a large IT implementation, so it’s tempting to choose a vendor’s least expensive training package. However, remember: all the slick functionality in the world won’t do your staff or students any good if they don’t know how to use it. An application that gets a quick uptake from your staff is more likely to stick and less likely to become tomorrow’s shelfware.

To make the most of your investment in IT resources and the initial training, be sure to schedule follow-up training — in person, online, or via self-guided study — so users get beyond basic proficiency and begin to master all the features.

When employees become proficient users of applications, they often begin to find areas that need to be improved and create ways to make the software do what they want. On the other hand, when users have trouble learning the software, they tend to either simply stop using the application or find manual workarounds. In both scenarios, the district is losing money while staff goes outside the technology to solve its problems.



Unified Systems Improve Future Infrastructure Decision Making

1.“Technical Debt,” October 2003, Martin Fowler 2.“Multitasking: Switching Costs,” March 20, 2006. American Psychological Association (© 2017)3.“Reimagining the Role of Technology in Education: 2017 National Education Technology Plan Update,” January 2017, U.S. Department of Education4.“Reimagining the School Day,” February 23, 2017, The Center for American Progress (© 2017)5.Interoperability series, Feb.24 - April 25, 2017, the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation blog (© 2017)

If your mismatched systems cannot channel all the data your district produces into retrievable, actionable form, you can’t use it to look for the IT solutions that tend to have the most positive impact.

One of the best ways to avoid hidden costs in the future is to leverage data analysis.

A key factor in your district’s IT strategic planning and budgeting should be building an IT architecture that not only improves day-to-day operations but also yields data that can help you make informed decisions about future resource allocation.

By doing this, in effect you’re weeding out hidden IT costs at the best possible time — before you incur them.

CONCLUSION:

One of the best ways to avoid hidden costs in the future is to leverage data analysis, and eventually the more robust process of predictive analytics. But it’s kind of a catch 22.

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