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.

Ten cool things you can do with Lync 2010

We just completed our first migration from BPOS to the academic version of Office 365. Okay, so there is no academic version of Office 365, just academic pricing (as in mostly free). At any rate, we were anxious to show the new capabilities to one of our school partners.

Yawn… their lack of enthusiasm was underwhelming.

It turns out that Office Communicator, while present in the school for the past 9 months was rarely if ever used in the day to day operations of running the school. In fact this was the second Unified Communications solution that we enthusiastically rolled out, only to find that the users were universally unimpressed.

No doubt there was a need for better training on our part, but the biggest problem appears to be the lack of understanding about what Lync 2010 (formerly Office Communicator) offers. Most viewed it as a simple Instant Messaging client and never really bothered to even set their status, much less use the other features.

Maybe I just don’t understand the classroom environment, but the benefits to using Lync 2010 seem remarkably relevant to the classroom.  And I think it would improve communication, discipline, and security in the school immeasurably, here are 10 really cool things you can do in the classroom with Lync 2010.

1. Take attendance. No, not student attendance, but staff attendance! There is no simpler way for your staff to report present and accounted for than by setting their status when they are in their classroom ready for the day. With one quick glance you know the status of your entire organization.

2. Make announcements. Do you take into consideration how distracting the school PA system can be when you are trying to communicate to a small subset of your organization? Using Lync to communicate directly to small subsets can be done with ease and without interruption.

3. Make Phone Calls.  Are you having difficulty justifying the expense of telephones on every teacher’s desk? Use Lync instead, it is a robust VoIP system that takes “zero” real estate (space) on your desk.

4. Direct connect with parents.  Properly configured, Lync 2010 can communicate with virtually every messaging system in existence. Sometimes a quick one-liner is all it takes to resolve an issue about a student, with a parent.

5. Produce instant video recordings. Can’t afford thousand dollar IP cameras, expensive DVR servers, and all the connections? Place inexpensive web-cams on the top of each teacher’s screen and rotate them around when needed. Documenting discipline issues becomes rock solid and the principal can be watching… real time.

6. Hold virtual parent teacher conferences. Do you have difficulty scheduling and managing parent conferences? With Lync you can connect with parents in a video conference on the fly with no advance setup requirements. They can be across town or around the world and still experience face time with your staff.

7. Send lesson materials. Do you ever need a resource, such as a photo or document from the library or resource center right in the middle of class? Reach out to the media specialist and they can deliver that material right to your desktop, you won’t need to leave your desk.

8. Improve team teaching.  Improving teacher utilization is an important part of managing resources and team teaching is often part of the mix. But let’s make it a lot easier. Lync 2010 allows teachers to share their desktops (or portions thereof) with others. Imagine the rich dialogue of interaction if teacher “B” get’s plugged into the classroom with teacher “A” with just the click of a button.

9. Extend your presence via Mobile Phone.  Recently released iPhone, Android, Windows phone apps now let you set your presence on the go, and communicate with your team members via your mobile device. Good idea when you’re out running an errand on school time, not so good on the weekends – but the nice thing is that you can always set your presence, whatever it is you choose to display.

10. Instant Messaging.  Topping off the list, with the most common feature in Lync 2010, is instant messaging. It’s interesting that users who send thousands of texts per month on their cell phones fail to see the benefit of text messaging from their desktop. The difference with Lync is that by setting your status (Busy, Available, Do Not Disturb, Be Right Back, Away, etc.) your team knows whether or not to send a message and may think twice about interrupting you.

These are the immediate things that came to mind with respect to Lync 2010, there are probably a dozen others. From a larger view, the term “Unified Communications” is mostly techno-babble when used outside the technical support community.  But what it really boils down to is a set of software tools that connect people with one another using technology in ways that are convenient, deeply integrated on all devices, and driven by your stated availability.

Summary

Lync 2010 is a core piece of the Office 365 experience and offers significant communication improvements in charter schools. It allows users to communicate with team members in a variety of ways and from a wide variety of devices. By understanding the status of team members, communication can be tailored for the right time and place for delivery.

And for those schools we manage, Lync 2010 is part of our customer service experience… and our status is always “Available”.

Driving Efficiencies in Desktop Administration

Let’s do a quick math test to give you an idea of the time typically spent doing routine maintenance on the computers in your school and then discuss ways you can dramatically cut those time requirements. We’ ll use round numbers to make it easy, starting with the assumption that you have 100 computers to manage.

At least once each month, you should be doing software updates, security patches, and system scans – the routine maintenance that keeps computers in optimal shape. Doing this maintenance will help keep your computing experience consistent, remove unwanted virus’ and spy ware programs, and apply the latest improvements in operating system and software program functionality.

In a perfect world this process would be entirely automatic, but there are a number of reasons why automation fails and part of desktop administration is monitoring and resolving those failures, proactively.

Back to the math quiz….

How much time does it take update 100 computers each month? If you do it the old fashion way and allow yourself 20 minutes per computer (that’s optimistic) you are looking at 2,000 minutes – plus travel time (between computers). That is roughly 35 hours; which approximates the amount of time we normally spend in an entire month managing infrastructure at a typical school. Not a sustainable model because there are more tasks required to manage technology resources than just updating computers.

The way to improve desktop administration is a three point approach consisting of automation, reporting, and remote control. These actions should be taken simultaneously and there are a wide variety of solutions to help you.

Whatever system you use, and there are several, you should focus on the following three areas:

1. Automation – implementing automatic updates that work within your security model
2. Reporting – providing a centralized inventory of computers and their current status
3. Remote Control – installing remote control tools for efficient technician access

Automation

At the most basic level, you should set your computers to do automatic updates from Microsoft,  but depending upon security settings or user account privileges, this might not work. Finding the right balance between local user access and security of the environment is tricky, but as it relates to automatic updates it can cause the process to fail.

In an enterprise the size of a charter school, the single biggest problem we see (in terms of wasted resources) is having an open desktop security policy, with local install permissions. Managing this is the first order of business when struggling to gain control of computer administration costs.

With no security (access control) in place you will quickly find every single computer in a different state. There will be different backgrounds or wallpaper, butterfly or alligator pointers, and a wide variety of default program settings, browser toolbars, and freeware (accompanied by malware) installed.

The conflict between automatic updates and access control is best managed by a programs such as  System Center Essentials, Windows InTune, or other third party desktop administration tools that provide sufficient security access to accomplish the automatic updates required, with no intervention on your part. The sooner you get control of your desktops – the sooner your support costs will plummet.

In order to measure the success of your update automation, you’ll need some kind of centralized reporting tool.

Reporting

Quickly evaluating the state of your desktop computers is the essential job of a reporting tool. Rather than waiting for a user to call the help desk to address a computer issue, a good reporting tool will notify your help desk well in advance of a pending computer problem.

Applying support resources in advance is almost always more efficient than resolving a problem after the issue has caught the attention of an end user.  And sophisticated reporting tools are both inexpensive and quite robust.

Not only will a reporting tool disclose the state of your computers, with respect to software updates; it will also report impending hardware failures, disk space limitations, device driver conflicts, and other developing problems. And often these are represented in very clear color coded graphs and charts to not only give you a realistic overview of system health, but allow you to drill down to details of a given issue.

Remote Control

Simply stated, Remote Control is the ability for your technical support team to reach across the limitations of physical space and control your computer.  This allows technical support to happen as though the support engineer were sitting physically at your desktop, when in fact they are on the other side of the building, city, or country for that matter.

But there is much more to the advantage of remote control than remote access. Most remote control solutions are Internet browser based and as such, a support engineer can open multiple support sessions at once – as many as a dozen or more, depending upon bandwidth, browser limitations, and the ability to keep track of a large number of simultaneous support sessions. This is the model of efficiency.

In a recent upgrade scenario involving a major Windows Service Pack, we measured the time to do it manually vs. remotely. The time required on site was more than four times greater than doing so remotely.  One significant benefit that is often overlooked with remote support is the ability to provide support services while the class is in session, which is not practical on site.

One of my favorites remote tools is LogMeIn.com, a free browser based program that works well, is easy to install, and can be configured by having end users click on a link within an email message and follow a short installation routine. There are many others that work equally well.

Summary

An efficient desktop management model looks at your infrastructure once each day to view the state of computers. It proactively manages required updates, mostly through automation, but manually if required;  then resolves any computer errors using remote tools that do not interrupt your class.

Our experience suggests that by investing 20 – 30 minutes each day, you can proactively manage 100 computers. That of course does not include repairing intentional damage caused by students, catastrophic hardware failures, or major operating system upgrades, which require physical access.

Want to improve the score on your math quiz stated above? With automation, reporting, and remote administration your total will be a little more reasonable than what you are doing now.  Contact us if you would like a free recommendation on the automation, reporting, and remote support tools that will best suit your situation.

What’s the big deal about Live@edu? It’s more than a free email account

Offering your students free email will get you about as much mileage as offering them free brussel sprouts for lunch. It's just not a big deal anymore to have an email account, with Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo mail, and Facebook mail all competing for young minds as an advertising audience.

However, there may be very good reason for your school to offer Live@edu services for students. Here are a few advantages of doing so:

• Increased collaboration and communication among students and teachers
• Security and control of your email environment
• Brand and community building with customized logos, color schemes, and campaigns
• Real world training for your students to communicate in a 21st Century work environment
• Reduced infrastructure costs

So, it’s not really just free, it actually pays you significant dividends! Let’s dig a little deeper.

 

Increased collaboration and communication

 

By giving students the ability to email, instant message, video chat, share documents, and store homework assignments in the Live@edu system, you give them a powerful set of creative tools. They can collaborate on project documents using Microsoft Office Web apps, free online companions to Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and One Note.

 

Security and Control

 

Because the Live@edu is centrally managed by your internal staff, you have complete control over access to the system. And with Microsoft’s advanced email security you significantly reduce the risk of phishing, virus, and malware attacks on your internal systems. And in the event of a disciplinary matter, you have access to email communication and message archives.

 

Brand and community building

 

Think about every email sent outside of your organization as a small advertising snippet. As your students communicate around the world and across the community, your institution becomes more visible, relevant, and cutting edge. Your Live@edu email and workspaces are branded with your logo and school name.

 

Real world training

 

Live@edu services are built upon the same technology as Microsoft Office 365, a powerful and widely used business communication and collaboration system. Your students will gain valuable experience in real world communication by using Live@edu. And they can plug into the Live@edu from anywhere and on any device.

 

Reduced costs

 

How much are you spending for student servers? Maintaining shared drives, keeping track of student documents, managing student access, securing other student’s work, and keeping ahead of student hacks is a significant IT management cost. With 25GB of storage per student and access control by Live@edu account, you can eliminate a great deal of administrative expense.

 

Summary

 

Building a communication platform for students to email, instant message, video chat, share documents, and store homework assignments seems like a lot of infrastructure – and it is. An equivalent cost to build and manage such a system internally would be thousands of dollars, not to mention the administrative time diverted from more strategic initiatives.

 

Showcasing your school as a leader in technology and forward thinking will generate interest and improve your recruiting efforts.

 

K-12 institutions have a very specific set of requirements for cloud-based messaging and collaboration solutions. No one brings a richer set of free hosted solutions to the K-12 space than Microsoft Live@edu. Not only are our enterprise-grade services cost effective and flexible, but they also prepare students for the next step with professional tools used in higher education institutions and businesses the world over.

 

Let us help you implement a Live@edu solution on your campus.

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.”

How much Technical Support do you need?

Many Charter School administrators have a background in traditional education and in the management practices found there. That can be both good and not so good. One area which doesn’t usually translate well is the size and complexity of technology, which often gets overbuilt.

Now it’s fine to overbuild the infrastructure if money is no object; and there is a certain level of infrastructure that needs to exist for current and future services. But we either see huge investment in infrastructure, followed by a wholly inadequate plan for managing it; or we see technology infrastructure as an afterthought.

If you are considering this subject in advance of build out, do your school a huge favor and enlist some professional help in the area of capacity planning. Many things affect the required capacity: student count, student demographics, campus layout, teaching methods, core curriculum, and business management practices. Doing the planning up front can not only simplify construction, but save tremendous amounts of money.

If you are an operating Charter School, the damage (so to speak) has already been done, but there are a number of things you can do to manage infrastructure more effeciently. But how much technical support do you really need? What drives the requirements for technical support services and what can you do to reduce costs?

Our well established model is to provide weekly scheduled technical support complimented by less frequent, but routine technology management. Our baseline is to provide 6 hours of support one day each week for a typical freestanding Charter School. You might find the following complexity calculator useful. This is not an exact science, just 10 years of experience and nearly all of it on the “too lean” side of support resources, but it will get you in the ballpark.

For our calculations, answer the following questions and add one points for each of the following:

•  Physical Servers  
• One point for each server in your organization
• Software Systems  
• One point for each server based Application (SQL, Exchange, Sharepoint, etc.)
• Desktop/Laptops  
• One point for each 10 desktop and laptop computers
• Network Topology  
• One point for each network type (Wired, Wireless)
• Number of VLANS  
• One point for each VLan or Virtual Network segment
• Physical Facilities  
• One point for each campus buildings connected to the network
• Social Media   
• One point if you have a formal social media campaign
• Virtualization  
• One point if you have cloud based resources or virtual computers
• VOIP On Premise   
• One point if you have an on premise VOIP phone system
• Websites   
• One Point for each actively managed websites

Now tally up your answers and apply them to the table shown below:

Management Models and accompanying Technical Support Requirements  

• FTE    
• Full Time Equivalent Technical Support Staff*    50   >50
• Complex   
• Weekly Management & Daily Onsite Support    25   50
• Median   
• Monthly Management & Weekly Support          10   25
• Simple   
• Quarterly Management & Bi-Weekly Support  >10   10

*Outsourced support technicians would likely cost more than a full time staff member at this level.

Focus less on the specific numbers and more on the concept of applying the right combination of both management level and support level technical assistance. An organization universally needs a management component to guide the acquisition, implementation, and management of projects. It  also needs periodic technical support. The amounts of both depend upon the roles and capabilities of internal staff. Accordingly, the range of support varies from a simple model, to a full time equivalent model, depending upon factors listed above.

While some Charter Schools start with a full-time technician on staff, this tends to be very short-lived for a simple reason. Prevailing wages for experienced information workers generally exceed wages for school principals and administrators. This is not sustainable and the result is constant turnover, which does not lend itself to reliable infrastructure.

Applying the right combination of management and support resources can have far reaching impact on your school, but it is a challenge to balance. And there are factors outside of your control that can completely undo a well-chosen team. Too many resources and the budget won’t sustain it, too little and everyone suffers from system outages, disruptions in the classroom, and frustrations in the front office.

Evaluate your circumstances, map out a rational IT support model, and then get your team to work. Having functional information technology without breaking the bank is possible, indeed it is the natural result of good planning and execution.

It’s time to upgrade to Windows 7… really it is.

Have you stopped for a moment, between fiddling with your Windows XP desktops, to consider the practical ramifications of running this outdated and no longer supported Operating System? You may be surprised at how much support time and resources are spent retaining it in your organization.

Sure, it still works and runs your existing programs. And yes, it will still work on those 10 year old computers, but at what cost?

The consumerization of desktop/laptop computers continues to bring prices down and features up as manufacturers compete for more business primarily through price. The benefit to you, the consumer, is that a new PC can be purchased for the rough equivalent of about 5 hours of modestly priced technical support. And how many times have you spent more than 5 hours, either all at once or piecemeal in resolving a computer issue.

Economics aside, consider what it really means when Microsoft “sunsets” an operating system, or it plain language, stops supporting it.

It does not mean that the software all of a sudden fails, nor does it mean that it will stop functioning at all in a steady state. In simplest of terms it means that Microsoft no longer does regression testing on new product releases. In other words, all patches, fixit utilities, service packs, hot-fixes, and new version roll-outs are not tested for backwards compatibility.

Due to the near infinite number of hardware combinations, system configurations, and software customizations it is impractical, if not impossible to test for backwards compatibility. Even assuring programs run on current Operating Systems is difficult enough. Furthermore, most new software is written or programmed for the new operating system architecture. Bottom line is you are on your own with Windows XP technical support.
In the back of your mind you probably know the upgrade is coming. But large upfront costs of purchasing and installing new workstations may persuade you to put it off. While that seems a reasonable course of action, the old saying of “Penny wise, pound foolish” really does apply. What you will begin to experience is support cost creep, an incremental, almost unnoticed, but constantly increasing expense to maintain your desktop/laptops.

Sadly, if your support personnel are paid on an hourly (break-fix) basis, rather than a support contract, they may not be motivated to push for the upgrade either.

Do yourself a favor, and do the upgrade to Windows 7. You’ll save money in the long run, and probably even in the no-so-long run. Even if you don't purchase new computers, do the upgrade! Windows 7 performs well on a large variety of not-so-new PCs
Now for some great news! The upgrade to Windows is very inexpensive for education customers. When you enroll in a Microsoft OVS-ES agreement for your school, you get blanket coverage for all computers in your organization. Furthermore, you also get a license to run Windows Office Professional 2010 on all of your computers in the school. Finally, there are many other software benefits you enjoy, such as work at home versions of the same software.

The cost of an OVS-ES agreement is determined by counting your full time staff and multiplying that number by $55.00 (approx.). Do the math and you will find this to be an extraordinary value. Windows 7, Office Professional, Core Client Access, and other benefits for a few dollars per PC.

Why you need a Help Desk

A help desk is a resource which provides information and assistance to troubleshoot problems with information technology equipment or services. It provides a single-point-of-contact for users within your school to report and resolve technical problems.

Our experience demonstrates a dramatic improvement in technical support function when a Help Desk is implemented, because it allows you to prioritize and track support requests, focus your limited support resources, and apply expertise at a level matching the issue at hand.

Help desks can be configured in various ways, but as a minimum should offer these 5 features:

1. Centralized system used throughout the entire school
2. Simplified interface for adding, updating, and tracking requests
3. Prioritized to effectively allocate resources and escalate support requests
4. Separate from you key infrastructure to eliminate your Help Desk from failing
5. Accountable to you in order to report and review technician effectiveness

What does your help desk look like now? Here are some we have observed first hand:

• Sticky notes handed to your IT person as they walk down the hall
• An interruption while in the midst of another support request
• An "oh by the way" mentioned at lunch
• A complaint in a meeting related to another subject

Although very common, none of these improve the performance of your IT staff. And in some cases these informal help desk habits can be very counter-productive.

Take the case of handing a sticky note to your technician as he walks down the hall (presumably on his way to another support request). Your interruption causes a lack of focus on the issue at hand, and the issue at hand causes a lack of attention to your request. This is a double dumbing down of the process.

An orderly help desk system is much more rational. User's generate support requests and are required by the system to categorize, prioritize, and then provide sufficient detail for the technicians. Technicians are notified much more efficiently and an accounting begins for that issue. Both parties, and others, can update information about the request and track the issue to resolution. Administrators can measure the rate and number of support incidents and have a better sense of the value a support mechanism is providing.

A byproduct of a robust Help Desk is the ability to archive resolved issues into a Knowledge Base which in turn provides a growing body of support information for your school. As this body of knowledge grows, the ability of users to self-help increases.

Most schools we observe, and all that we manage (by definition) have no full-time IT staff. A Help Desk in this scenario becomes a necessity. And we have found it very helpful to identify one or two gatekeepers in the school to take the responsibility of entering in technical support requests.The advantages of this arrangement are significant; a full-time support component, a better perspective about priorities, and a single point of contact for clarification and reporting.

Whether your school is large or small, simple or complex with respect to technology, or supported by internal or outsourced technicians you will benefit from a Help Desk.

In these resource constrained times you would be foolish to operate without one.