Competitive Purchasing of Technology

The intention of state purchasing guidelines is pretty simple – to ensure a competitive bidding process for significant technology purchases (normally over $5000.00). But complying with purchasing guidelines can be time consuming and difficult.

What’s a school to do?

The answer to this question varies with each financial manager. And sadly we have seen a few clever attempts to circumvent purchasing guidelines as we have bid competitively on posted items. But for purposes of this article, we will assume that your brother-in-law is not part of the equation, that you are not getting kickbacks from favorite vendors, and your IT provider has an arm’s length relationship with your financial manager. With few exceptions, we have observed great integrity with the charter schools and managers we have had the pleasure of serving.

However, the sheer volume of purchasing in a school can lead to unintended purchasing that is less than compliant. Here is a suggestion that we have found to be pretty simple and complies with the intent of purchasing guidelines.

Disclaimer: I do not pretend to know every states purchasing guidelines and this may technically not comply with the rules of your state. Check with your local state office of education.

First, let’s illustrate an important concept and consider a story of two guys selling watermelons.

Two men formed a partnership. They built a small shed beside a busy road. They obtained a truck and drove it to a farmer’s field, where they purchased a truckload of melons for a dollar a melon. They drove the loaded truck to their shed by the road, where they sold their melons for a dollar a melon. They drove back to the farmer’s field and bought another truckload of melons for a dollar a melon. Transporting them to the roadside, they again sold them for a dollar a melon. As they drove back toward the farmer’s field to get another load, one partner said to the other, “We’re not making much money on this business, are we?” “No, we’re not,” his partner replied. “Do you think we need a bigger truck?”

What does this have to do with technology? More than you might imagine.

Margins for most technology purchases are razor thin and the marketplace is very opaque, meaning you can in an instant determine the best price for nearly anything digital. Just do a quick search on Amazon or eBay. By taking this small step, the chances of overpaying significantly for technology is reduced greatly. Know what it is you are purchasing.

So why not purchase from an online venue such as eBay, Amazon, or others? Good question; and the answer is you just might! Especially for the occasional one or two items that are primarily consumer electronics/technology. However, using eBay or Amazon becomes more problematic when you need a specific type of technology, a specific quantity (often large), and with the manufacturers warranty included (or extended warranty if you choose).

Furthermore, it is a little difficult for most schools to actually specify the correct solutions, they need. That is presumably why you have technology managers in your organization. The biggest mistake we see with respect to purchasing is what to purchase rather than how to purchase, or from whom. And then there is the installation and management of that technology going forward.

But I digress…

One of the simplest ways we have found to provide our schools with a competitive bid is to take three simple steps:

1. Identify clearly what technical solution is required (this is the most important step).
2. Utilize a technology distributor that represents a large variety of vendors.
3. Arrange for a cost plus, or percentage of invoice markup for your purchases.

Let’s look at an example of how this works:

 

Assume that a school administrator comes to us with a requisition for new desktops for all staff members. Specifications are agreed upon in advance and would include features such as form factor, operating system, memory, and storage requirements. Added to that feature list is a general idea on the budget available.

 

Our next step is to provide our distributors with those specifications and obtain competing quotes from their list of vendors. Now if you are dealing with a single vendor, your purchasing program will break at this point. So be sure you deal with a distributor’s representative, not a single vendor’s representative.

 

We work with two of the largest technology distributors in the US and, with few exceptions, receive a wide variety of products that match the required specifications. We then select based primarily upon price (all other considerations being equal). The school is then presented with our recommendations and the PO is obtained, the invoice is marked up the agreed upon amount, and the items are ordered.

This simple process provides our partner schools with a fair and competitive bid for items requested. The cost plus markup scheme can be easily audited to verify fair pricing and we provide the interface for warranty claims, service, etc.

 

One of our competitors claims to sell hardware at cost to their customer schools. Perhaps this is to offset the high fees charged for services, or perhaps they just need a bigger truck!

Technology Outsourcing: In House or Out House….

That didn’t exactly come out the way it was intended, let me start over. The subject of this week’s post is the physical location of your technical support staff, particularly those doing higher level support. Providing support in house is having your technical staff on premises at all times. Providing your support remotely (or out of house) is having your technical staff work from their office.

Which is better? Let’s take a deeper look.

There is a very wide array of remote access and connectivity capabilities now available to Information Workers. This creates an opportunity for your IT staff to provide remote support in some cases more effectively than being on premises. But there can be significant perception issues in those situations and it might be problematic if not managed properly.

Before you start down this road, here are three questions you must answer:

1. Do you have a high level of confidence that your technical support staff acts with integrity?
2. Are you able to provide meaningful measures of performance and results?
3. Is your support communication infrastructure instantaneous and rock solid?

As you think about those questions, let me describe a scenario that occurred shortly after relocating our office from Texas to Utah a few years back.

 

We were providing technical support to an organization that was going through a major system upgrade. They needed someone onsite each day for a few weeks to bring all the new pieces together and train a large influx of new staff members. And they were looking to our organization for that support.

 

Only problem was, we were 1200 miles away!

 

So, we set up a remote control system on each desktop and started to provide the support needed and found we were significantly more effective than being there in person. Here’s how:

1. It is quicker to move room to room by tabbing to a new window than by physically walking there.
2. It is far less disruptive to be virtually in front of a computer than being physically present. And there is no competition for the same physical space.
3. It is more effective for technical support to actually observe new staff attempting to do a process than to ask them to describe a process or problem.
4. It is far easier to transfer support files, help documents, or simply chat when the support technician is at his workstation than at the workstation having problems.

However, there was just one small problem. Although our support of the staff was very effective, the administrator who was dealing with an entirely different set of problems was not happy about the arrangement. Her ongoing question was “Where is IT when we need them?”

 

Perception made short work of this very happy arrangement.

I’ve thought about this experience often, when discussing the manner in which we provide technical support at our partner schools and have been much more careful to ensure everyone understands the process. What appears to be very effective from the perspective of your technical support team may appear to be getting taken advantage of by an unconvinced administrator.

 Some organizations just feel the need to be able to walk down the hallway to the server room (closet in many cases) and talk face to face with technical support. Fair enough, but when we are trying to spread limited resources as far as humanly possible in a charter school environment, this may not provide the most bang for your buck.

What tools are required to do this? Good question. In short, Office 365 for education – specifically the Lync client now integrated into the latest release. Earlier versions work equally well. There are other solutions, but none as simple or as effective – especially if your staff uses Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.).

Using Lync (see previous articles for more details) our partner schools have a very effective support mechanism. It starts with presence, which indicates availability of technical support; then provides an escalation of communication methods to solve the problem at the required level. For example, a simple text message exchange can solve many minor issues. If more detail is required a phone call (via Lync) may be required. And if necessary, either party can share an application or entire desktop view to the other while communicating about the matter.
And if we need to involve more folks, or just talk face to face, we do an instant video conference or video call. And all of this can be accomplished without prior arrangement, meeting invitations, or software installation.

You’ll probably want to evolve into a remote (out of house) support mechanism over time, should you decide it is practical. It is very difficult to gauge the effectiveness of your support team when they are operating remotely, if you have no baseline of experience on premises. And you will definitely need to have a proven help desk solution in place to track and report on help desk issues.

And this discussion makes a couple of very important assumptions – trust being the one and capability the other. If you don’t have complete trust that your support staff will bill you according to services provided, or if you have doubts about their capability to effectively solve problems quickly then this long distance relationship may not work.

As distance learning has proven, proximity to support resources is not always necessary. And if the teacher or technician is competent and provides the right set of tools, the experience can be very effective and enjoyable. I personally think it is grand to go to work right after my workout when it is only 20 steps away – never mind the shorts and T-shirt!

If your technical support is inhouse or in the outhouse (so to speak) and you would like to explore ideas on improving it, give us a call.

What we have here is a failure… of Leadership

One of my favorite lines comes from Paul Newman, in the movie Cool Hand Luke. It is similar to this weeks blog title, and most of you over 40 have probably heard it. Newman repeats the phrase, “What we have here is a failure to communicate!” He repeats it often and until his eventual demise.

I substitute the word Leadership, because communication is the single most important aspect of the Holy Grail called leadership.

This is not an article criticizing anyone in leadership at any school. Leadership is a tough business, a worthy objective, and a never ending quest. It is very hard work for most of us average folks who don’t possess the skills of (pick your favorite leader).

And I hesitate writing about leadership, because I have my own failings. But I’ll do it anyway – mostly because I can, and also because I believe there are a few key ways that leadership can be enhanced in the area of Information Technology in a Charter School.

It’s pretty simple, really. Somebody has to be in charge and everybody needs to follow. How you get there is not so simple.

We recently had an exceptionally talented teacher approach us about a new online learning system that she was excited to share with others. Fair enough, we always welcome new ideas and ways of improving things. Problem is, she wanted us to essentially pressure the other staff members into seeing the world in her particular view. Of course we could have pushed her agenda and made it difficult to use other similar services had we been so inclined, but that would be a conflict of interest and contrary to sound and ethical leadership.

Do you have similar challenges in your organization? We frequently see these shooting stars of good ideas hurling across the proverbial campus sky, only to flash one last time and crash to the earthy reality of resistance to change and failure to get people on board. Change is hard and change requires leadership.

Again, this is not about criticism, but better ways of doing things.

May I suggest a very old fashioned approach to this very common problem? We have observed positive results at schools that have implemented these ideas.

It starts with a committee, okay if the label of a committee is a turn-off, try “focus group” or “change engineers” or whatever you like. But assemble a group of enthusiastic individuals - preferably volunteers who enjoy technology – to meet as a Technology Advisory Committee. Include one or more individuals from the following stakeholder groups – students, teachers, parents, administrators/BOD, and IT.

Establish a set time to meet and give it a high priority, perhaps even throw in some perks for participation.  Don’t waste time or meet without an agenda, be organized and serious. Then begin the process of listening to ideas, problems, suggestions, and challenges and collectively formulate a game plan that is agreed upon by the group. Don’t rush things. If more information is required, delay a decision rather than rushing forward for the sake of decisiveness.

When ideas are vetted in a fair and open manner, the best ideas will ultimately bubble to the top. A wise leader can encourage this process by maintaining order, giving all stakeholders a fair voice, and ensuring the dialogue does not become personal or vindictive.

You should observe three important principals in these interactions:

1. Most good ideas come from the troops – teachers and students are where the rubber meets the road. They often have great ideas that bubble up because they are the primary consumers of IT.
2. Wisdom and perspective comes from experience –administrators will guide the conversations to avoid the pitfalls of policy limits, government mandates,  and budget realities.
3. Practical aspects of implementing are best addressed by your IT managers – building upon existing infrastructure is often a necessary compromise with new ideas.

Individual efforts, by any one group alone will never win the day. There has to be an agreed upon direction, with buy-in from all the stakeholders after vigorous debate, and a practical implementation plan put together that doesn’t completely undo the infrastructure already established.

Is your school missing the proverbial forest for all of the trees when it comes to Information Technology? Do you apply the same seriousness to deploying IT assets as you do financial assets?
Or is the culture at your school focused on position, power plays, and pet projects? 

By implementing regular Technology Advisory Committee meetings you are more likely to have a single, rational, and agreed upon process to determine what is best for the school.

Summary

It is possible to provide concise leadership in the area of technology. In our view it starts at the top by establishing a Technology Committee, with representatives from each stakeholder group. The committee meets regularly and deliberately to evaluate the desires and needs of the students through the advocacy of teachers, tempered with the wisdom and experience of the administrators, and guided by IT.
 
Bonus: A suggested methodology for your periodic TAC meetings:

1. Start Positive: Begin on a positive note.  Report on a new implementation or project that highlights success in your efforts.
2. Train Constantly: Have a 5 minute training session about something really useful that needs wider adoption. It may be the very issue you report on in the first item.
3. Encourage Participation: Have each stakeholder representative review one or two high level technical challenges or ongoing problems. Avoid getting too deep into the details.
4. Find Consensus: Informally poll your group to discover which challenges are your most pressing issues, then discuss it in more detail.
5. Propose Solutions: Encourage each stakeholder to propose a course of action associated with your top issue(s) without interruption.
6. Debate Proposals: Open the proposal up to vigorous, but moderated debate. Explore alternatives, question every aspect of the proposal, review cost/benefits, and consider implementation challenges.
7. Assign Action: Develop an implementation plan or resolution plan for the issue. Complex issues may take multiple meetings to solidify, but act to the extent possible.
8. Require Reports: Make assignments and reports on those assignments the subject of your next meeting – agenda item 1.
9. Repeat as needed: You might need weekly TAC meetings at first. Eventually you should be able to meet just once each month.

To outsource or not to outsource… that is the question

We recently learned that one of our partner schools is proposing to hire full time staff for their IT, finance, maintenance, and other services, which had previously been contracted out. Okay, at first glance this seems like a legitimate management decision, but is it?

While I cannot speak to other types of services, we experienced this exact scenario once before with respect to IT services at a K-6 charter school and it was disastrous.

Several years ago in Texas, a Vice-Principal was hired at one of our partner schools. He quickly determined that his expertise was sufficient to supplant ours and within a few months found a way to eliminate our contract to provide IT support on one day each week. This was a school that we had built from the ground up and was operating with a high degree of efficiency.

I will spare you the details, but by the following year the Vice-Principal was fired, the school was in financial distress (which led to the dismissal of the business manager), and the technology had pretty much been re-outsourced to the Regional Service Center (the state). And the terminated Vice Principal had so maligned our service model in the process of making the case for our contract termination, that we were not considered in rebuilding the infrastructure.

The whole process diminished efficiency, caused significant service disruptions, cost significant sums of money, and accomplished nothing of value.

So are there times when it is a good idea to hire a full time IT administrator for your school? Maybe, but in the dozen years or so we have been doing this we have found very few. For starters, the numbers (as in cost) just don’t add up. Furthermore, the administrative oversight of personnel is not significantly better. And the level of expertise is greatly diminished.

Restated, these are three reasons why outsourcing IT is normally a better idea than hiring full-time: Cost, Control, and Expertise.

Cost

According to a January 2011 survey by PayScale, the average high school principal in the United States earned a total salary package between $68,167 and $101,560. The Bureau of Labor Statistics validates those numbers, finding that administrators at elementary and high school receive an average annual salary of $85,220.

On the other hand, a similar study by the BLS for computer administrators employed in the highest-paying industries, computer equipment manufacturing and securities exchanges, salaries averaged $89,840 and $89,340, respectively. The number was less in the academic world, but not by a large margin. Granted there is a wide range of qualifications for Information Workers, but even non-degreed, yet certified Network Engineers earned up to $56,000 on average.

When competent Information Workers can earn nearly as much as School Administrators, it is difficult to understand the justification to hire a full-time Technology Director at most Charter Schools. This is particularly true when very few schools need full-time IT administrators. They rarely even need full-time technical support.

Our standard management model provides 1 day per week of onsite Network Administration, supplemented by the daily support required for the particulars of a school, either by a less qualified support engineer or a faculty member assigned to technology. The best scenario is having a faculty member assigned to support technology and serve as the point person in IT matters.

Let’s do the math, assuming a 50 week annual contract. A network engineer charging $65.00/hr. at 8 hours per week would cost $26,000. A desktop support technician charging $15.00/hr. for 20 hours per week would cost $15,000.  The total cost is $41,000. And this provides the full range of technical services required for most freestanding Charter Schools.

This is about half of the cost of hiring one competent Computer Administrator. I emphasize competent, because like in the experience described above, hiring to the level of your budget may in fact cause you to hire an incompetent Computer Administrator. The unintended costs of doing so can be enormous.

Control

Not long ago we had to let one of our desktop support engineers go. We were informed that he was not a good fit for one of our schools and our coaching him on his work ethic was not going well.  We reluctantly terminated this employee, only to find that the school had decided to rehire him as their employee instead of ours.

The situation went from bad to worse. Now, not only did we have the same HR problem as before, but now we had less supervisory oversight.

You will in all probability always need to have entry level desktop administration support. This is where competent Computer Administrators get started. Managing desktops, while getting training on network administration and specific line of business applications is the common pathway for information workers. And there is always an abundance of desktop administration to be done in a school.

But having administrative control of information workers is a tricky business. It is crucial that those so employed are extremely trustworthy and able to work well with others. After all, they control all of the access to information resources in the school and can without much difficulty view sensitive documents and even your email communication in many cases.

Having an outside entity manage your Information Systems can provide an important element of integrity into your infrastructure.

Expertise

You don’t hire a doctor full time to evaluate a medical condition and treat it. Nor do you typically hire a CPA full time to do your bookkeeping. And most schools only retain legal counsel for specific compliance or legal matters where specialized knowledge is required.

There are reasons, both economic and practical why outsourcing Information Technology is wise. Obtaining the requisite technical expertise is the most important reason. Some technical expertise is only required once, as in the design of your network or major system implementations. Other technical specialization may be required only intermittently when upgrading servers or network infrastructure. And much technical expertise is only required infrequently, such as network administration.

So why would you hire full-time to the highest level of expertise for those rare occasions when needed if the bulk of your technical support requirements exist at the entry level? This is a classic misallocation of resources.

Summary

At the risk of self-serving, it seems that outsourcing Technology Management is a pretty common sense approach. It costs less, provides more control, and delivers a higher level of expertise. And these are all good things.

But alas, a wise individual once told me “Common sense is not so common”. 

Please call if you would like to discuss the right mix of Information Management and Technical Support resources.

Migrating to Office 365

OK, you’ve watched the cool videos from Microsoft, read review after review about the merits of Office 365 for Education, and decided it’s just what the doctor ordered for your school’s ailing IT infrastructure. And it's time to act on that New Years Resolution of improving your school.

Now what?

Fair question. Regardless of the current state of affairs in your school, you will need to manage this migration in an orderly and methodical fashion. This, most likely, will involve a weekend, holiday, or other day off for your staff in order to minimize the inconvenience.

There are three major components of Office 365 for Education solution which you will address in this migration. In order of most to least difficult difficult to migrate, at a typical school, they are:

1.       Email - Hosted Microsoft Exchange
2.       Lync – Unified Communications
3.       SharePoint – Team and Public Websites

This is also the order in which I would recommend the migration or setup occurs. And please note, this is not a technical support document, but an overview of the process. If you are not comfortable with the subject matter at hand, you’ll want to get some help.

Practically speaking, the only real migration is email, as the other services generally do not yet exist.  Most everyone already has an email account. The closest thing to unified communications in organizations without Lync is texting from a cell phone or other mobile device. And the starting point for a SharePoint migration is normally a Team site for each organization in your school and a document library. Neither of these is difficult to setup, once you have done the harder task of designing how you want to organize your intellectual goodies.

One final thought before we dive in. It is very important that you have full buy in and the moral (and organizational) authority to do this. Change is difficult and there will be resistance. Furthermore, unless you have made a persuasive case as to the benefits that will flow to each of your end users, they may not follow your lead. In my experience most migrations spend 80-90% of the energy on the technical process and 10-20% (or less) on staff introduction, orientation, and training. Be wise and considerate.

OK, so let’s get started with a few generalities in the administrators control panel. There are several basic setup tasks that are not covered by the clever wizards that Microsoft provides. These steps can be done without impacting your users.

1.       Select the right licensing Plan and purchase sufficient licenses for your organization. (This is a bit tricky because most of you will select the A2 Plan for Staff and Students, which is free; but you still have to add it to the shopping cart and checkout).

2.       Add all of your users to the correct domain name to eliminate having the convoluted default domain name of you@yourschool.onmicrosoft.com . If you have not yet obtained a domain name from Godaddy, Network Solutions, or another registrar – STOP and do so, then follow instructions on how to verify that domain name so it is available within the administrators control panel. (Note: we recommend different domain names for staff and students)

Email

The general idea with most technology migrations is to establish the new solution while keeping the old one intact to the extent possible. Then we do a cutover at a minimally impactful time (weekend, holiday, etc.) while keeping the old system available for fallback should the migration fail. Finally we have a period of validation where we confirm the new system is working and then at an appropriate time deactivate the old.

If you do this properly, you will not lose any email and the change will be mostly transparent. If you plan and execute poorly, you will have an email outage and could lose important messages permanently.

Your email migration begins with the modification of Domain Name Records at your Domain Name Registrar. So when you are ready, head on over to Godaddy, Network Solutions, or your registrar and make the necessary zone file modifications. If you are not 100% sure how to do this, get assistance. This is the most crucial step for a successful migration. It only takes a moment to modify the actual Domain Record, but it can take up to 72 hours for those changes to distribute to the right places – so be sure you know what you are doing.

While DNS changes are propagating throughout the World Wide Web, you can start gathering the data from each of your users email accounts. The primary data you are gathering is email, but don’t forget the contacts. You should know which email accounts are most important to your organization and which users actually engage in email messaging, focus your priorities accordingly. Hint: I would probably start with the principal.

Your email migration will take different paths depending on three key factors:

1.       The type of email server in use – commercial or private, IMAP, POP3, Exchange, etc.

2.       The degree to which personal and school email is comingled
3.       The method by which your users currently access their email – webmail l or Outlook

Note: This is not technical support article on the particulars of exporting and then importing your email, contacts, notes, etc. But in one way or another, you will have to export email from each user’s old account into their new account if you wish to retain existing messages. This process gets a little tricky if your users are on Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL, etc. as these email accounts are their personal property and you can’t do this without their permission (as demonstrated by a username and password).

For the end user, email migration begins when you deliver the welcome message and temporary passcode to them. This temporary passcode is generated when you create a new user, but you can (and probably should) delay delivering this information to the user until you are ready to start the migration.

Write in big bold letters the following URL on any migration documents (email or paper) you hand out.

https://portal.microsoftonline.com

This URL is the sole place to acquire, modify, and access all of the Office 365 services. We will discover shortcuts to the various services later, but this single URL is vitally important. Before a user can do anything with the Office 365 for Education system, they will need to visit this URL and change the temporary password issued at the creation of their account, to a permanent one that ONLY they should know.

Once logged into the Office 365 for Education Portal, the Outlook link at the top of the screen will take your users to their new email account. And if you have managed this migration well, all of their messages and contacts will be waiting for them.

For some of your users, the Outlook Web Access experience will be all they desire. And while there is nothing wrong with using Outlook Web Access, they may enjoy a much more productive email experience if you install Outlook on their main desktop. For more information about Outlook on the Desktop vs. Outlook Web Access go here.

At this point, your Microsoft Exchange email hosted on the Office 365 for Education is setup. Your users can now access it from any browser capable device or email enabled phone or tablet.

Lync and SharePoint

As mentioned at the outset of this article, there is generally not a migration involved with Lync and SharePoint services within Office 365. For Lync it really boils down to getting your users to try it. We have literally had schools almost shut down when the staff had that ‘ahah’ moment regarding Lync. They were so excited to try all of the cool features, like instant video chat that they almost forgot to teach their classes.

With Lync, you can communicate with your team using a variety of methods all based upon an indication of presence or availability. These methods include text, voice calls, video calls, desktop sharing and file sharing, and of course email. Lync has the ability to transform the communication within organizations that utilize it wisely.

Likewise, SharePoint is a very transformational technology, but it requires a serious commitment to train and develop the system to the advantage of your organization. Watch for a series of articles about SharePoint over the next few weeks.

Summary

Implementing Office 365 for Education can be very straightforward for schools with chaotic or non-existent informational technology infrastructure. On the other hand it can be fairly complex for schools that have significant on premises facilities and resources in place. At either end of the spectrum, Office 365 provides a robust communication and collaboration platform that requires no hardware or no administrative staff onsite. The business case for Office 365 for Education is compelling and we recommend it enthusiastically.