Why your technology sucks...

A close friend of mine has a favorite saying, which I hear far too often and goes like this… “It is what it is”. I think about those words on occasion when someone tells me the technology we manage really sucks. Happily those days are relatively few, and an occasional reality check about managing technology in a freestanding charter schools helps put things in perspective.

After all, it’s a Charter School… it is what it is!

The very essence of the Charter School movement is competition. And in the final analysis, that means producing more, with less; fewer resources across all departments, including technology. In a traditional school, with significantly more resources you will find that on some days, their technology also sucks.

Recently, our performance at a school came under criticism of this nature. My response is this post.

Two years ago we agreed to manage technology at a large K-12 Charter School. On staff was a full-time Network Engineer and regular student aids assisting with desktop management. We estimated that between 50-60 man hours were devoted each week to technology support. Our proposal, based primarily upon budgetary constraints, was a contract to provide the same level of support but doing so with only 8 hours of Network Engineer level work accompanied by 15 hours of desktop technician level work each week. If you do the math, that’s a 70% reduction in man hours.

We started our engagement by suggesting infrastructure improvements to both simplify administrative tasks and allocate some technical tasks to staff members. We made modest system improvements and implemented a help desk solution to track our progress.

Fast forward two years, and you will find that in most objective measures that technology is slightly better, but still lacking. In my opinion, that is a success story. Understandably, from the perspective of several users, the technology still “sucks”. And while this is a reasonable response and we understand occasional frustrations, “ It is what it is”.

Now, don’t mistake my message. There is no excuse for mediocre service and our intent is to always improve upon our processes.  And we continually adopt new management practices as we discover them. But if there is not a slight degree of discomfort with the level of service provided, I submit you are over budgeting for those resources. It would be nice to have sufficient resources to pay teachers what they are worth, buy whatever supplies we want, have gourmet lunches, and have an IT department – but that is not the world in which I live, nor is it the world in which most charter schools exist.

If you regularly have those “our technology sucks” days, here are a few immediate things you can do to make it better.

1.       Have regular technology meetings, or devote regular time in staff meetings to discuss technology support. Get specific details about problems your staff experience, evaluate the commonality of the problem, and decide upon an acceptable level of resolution.  An unresolved issue for a single user is very annoying, but compared to an entire system outage affecting a large portion of the staff, it can probably wait.

2.       Find an objective way of measuring and reporting on the performance of your technology support team. This is most easily measured by a case or service issue resolution report. How many service tickets are created vs. resolved is much more relevant than a list of things that did not get resolved. It is possible that your expectations are mathematically impossible, given your available resources.

3.       Conduct periodic surveys on the subject of technology. Invest sufficient time gathering a broad-based consensus about what works in your organization and what does not. Be willing to accept the fact that your processes and policies may be counterproductive and a barrier to technical innovation. Be open to change driven by well informed and reasoned consensus.

4.       Don’t be unduly swayed by a few vocal users to adopt systems or solutions that don’t align well with your mission and your methods. And be sure to consult with your technology support team about proposed changes to gain perspective about compatibility and ease of implementation. Ideas that work well in a single classroom may not scale to the entire school, but in fact may add unnecessarily to the level of complexity in your organization.

5.       Recognize the inherent challenges of an overbuilt infrastructure. This is a common challenge in charter schools who model infrastructure after traditional schools, only to find that large sized enterprise solutions are not only expensive to install, they are expensive to maintain. Technology scales up quite well (meaning expands), but scales down only with great difficulty. If you have sufficient infrastructure to run an entire district, you’ll be hard pressed to keep it running on a budget for technology that is sized correctly.

There is no “happily ever after” in this story. If you are struggling to keep the doors open, pay for teachers, and maintain or build facilities; chances are you will struggle to keep all of the computers working perfectly all of the time. But finding an acceptable level of support is possible.  

And the next time someone tells you that your technology sucks, just smile and agree with them. Then kindly quote one of my favorite sayings. It goes like this… “Nothing is so bad that it cannot be made worse by complaining about it.”