iRK’d - Tech Mutiny

At iR, we start with two core principles that guide our actions, our solutions and our partnerships. To us, these principles are self-evident:

1. Our clients are intelligent, dedicated professionals.

2. Despite this, neither our clients nor their institutions necessarily know the most efficient way to do their own jobs.

Our clients are intelligent, dedicated professionals, and our mission is to empower them. That is not a universally held attitude. In discussions with other custom developers, their approach is to assume that the users are careless, ignorant, dangerous or lazy and to make every effort to protect the system from the users. We don’t underestimate the need to protect data and to guard against accidental damage, we simply believe that trained users want an automobile, not a subway token.

It may be true that at some institutions, the first reaction to a problem is to say “that’s not my job”, “that’s not in my contract.” Our experience with clients suggests the opposite—to a fault. Most take ownership of too much, work too long on something that is inefficient, go the extra mile to do the impossible. We strive to save these people their own time by suggesting ways to be more efficient and achieve the same level of excellence.

We consider our mission to be both high touch and high respect. We willingly engage our clients in examining HOW they do what they do. There is no software that will organize or streamline an inefficient human process. We willingly get swept up in the frustrations and power struggles and turf wars and institutional inertias that characterize this domain. We don’t sell one-size-fits-all work gloves. We make recommendations. Sometimes we even refuse to work with organizations that we believe will remain painfully inefficient.

Our years of domain experience allow us to bring a perspective to the project that may be missing at the institution. Frequently we find that work flow procedures did not change when the school went from paper to computer, or certain tasks, like student directory or contract printing, have followed the employee, not the office. Often no administrator has ever asked the admin staff why they do a task the way they do it.

Because of this, we insist on coming to campus to implement. We insist that the academic leadership be engaged in the process. We insist that the organization have all the affected users present at the implementation training. Our implementation is often the first real campus review of some procedures in anyone’s memory.

At first blush it might be off-putting that we believe we may have a better suggestion about how to do a job than the client does. In our experience, most schools and offices are grateful for the opportunity to review their procedures at this level. We know this systems review is the crux of our responsibility to our client, and the foundation for a successful long-term partnership.

Welcome to the iRIS Guide! We offer this tool as a service to the independent school community. We hope that schools will find this an efficient and effective way to locate vendors and services.

We believe that a healthy, strong independent school community is a benefit to all.

As independent school people, we know that Independent education is a laboratory for new ideas as well as a guardian of values and tradition. Boarding schools provide a beloved, nurturing home for generations of scholars. Independent schools can provide the best opportunities for students and families—small classes, engaged and dedicated faculty, wide art/music/sports opportunities, extensive college placement guidance. All this, provided in an academically rigorous environment that is both welcoming and supportive.

In the same way, we believe that a rich palette of choices in terms of vendors and services is a benefit to the schools themselves. No one company, including iR, is right for every school. Having choices for websites or databases is important, and search committees need a way to start the process.

We offer the iRIS Guide as a service to the independent school community. We hope that this tool will serve schools well in doing initial searching for a vendor, and we hope that it provides visibility for all companies. As times get tougher, we wish the best for all. While I am a loyal USC Trojan and thoroughly enjoy a yearly victory over UCLA, Cal, Stanford and Notre Dame, I don’t want to see them eliminated. USC football has value only to the degree that the league and the competition are strong. We feel the same about our fellow vendors.

Why should iR take the time to manually assemble this list when schools can use Google? It is not because we don’t think that wiki’s and Google have their place. Our intent is to cut to the chase. A Google search for “independent school database companies” yielded 310,000 results, and the first pages did not include the “usual suspects” that are the main vendors in this space. There are three main web companies in this space that have most of the multi-school market. A google search found 13 million hits! The same occurs with food service companies and marketing/design firms.

Why not make this a wiki and let everyone contribute? There are existing wiki’s for this purpose, and we point to them in iRIS. In some cases, because wiki’s are owned by everyone and no one, they can get quite out of date. It is a case of the “tragedy of the data commons.” We are willing to be responsible for the accuracy of the data. Wiki’s are great, we just choose not to use one in this case.

Being one of the listed vendors, we make no comments about our fellow vendors here—except to list them. We make every attempt to simply provide an alphabetical listing of names. We do not encourage or accept any comments or recommendations. We leave that to independent sites. Any company listed can write to have its name removed, and any company not listed can be included. We will extend a company listing to show phone and primary contact, but each company will have to request that. We do not wish to aid spammers in locating anyone.

Finally, this is not meant as a listing of schools. It is a listing for schools. There is no attempt to link vendors to schools. Also, there are dozens or hundreds of excellent local vendors not listed here, that serve one or two schools. We are not deliberately excluding them. We would be happy to list them here if they contact us, providing them with a potential wider audience.

We hope iRIS proves a useful tool for schools looking for vendors and services and serves the greater vendor community well as we sail together into choppy seas.

So if a school can’t reasonably expect to integrate everything, what is reasonable? Just because every system can’t be integrated doesn’t mean that nothing can be integrated. This is where the school planners need to be realistic.

What needs to be integrated are the most common, most time consuming, most universal registrar tasks done by the majority of users, along with the enrollment/admission process. In short, the Registrar and Admission databases.

Registrar Tasks and Integration

I frequently hear administrators tell me “Our integrated system is fine. The only thing we do separate are the comments. We have a separate FileMaker (or Access) file. And we still type the transcripts and do attendance by paper.” My response is, “What EXACTLY is your registrar system being used for?”

If the same system that tracks the teachers, classes, students and grades is not the same system used for creating and managing the parent comments, the time cost is enormous to everyone. If transcripts are typed elsewhere because the system is not flexible enough for what the school wants to print, the duplication is wasteful and error-prone. This is the integration that is essential, not the names and addresses of parents.

The non-negotiable for any successful registrar system is that it integrates the following three tasks. This is where integration is crucial:

• Term end grades and comments
• Transcripts
• Attendance

Admission/Registrar Integration

The information about families that is gathered by Admissions should connect directly to the school, and the family information that the school has on enrolled students should be available to Admissions for inquiring siblings. The Admission office needs accurate numbers on the current student body and their re-enrollment status in order to understand the space demand for the coming year. Contracting new and old students, and managing their enrollment and re-enrollment should be a coordinated effort between offices that use an integrated database.

Business Office and the Re-enrollment Process

It is important that the Business office have access to these numbers also, but that does not necessarily mean that the school accounting package must be integrated with the Admission/Registrar system. If the Business office can view this data, and can work with the other offices to keep these numbers accurate, then the systems can stay quite separate because they really have little in common, and data security for the accounting system is paramount.

A school simply cannot rely on computers to coordinate people or offices. If the school is Balkanized into offices that do not regularly talk, and do not share calendars or updates, there will be miscommunication, dropped balls, and left hand/right hand scenarios that are all too obvious to parents and students. A united, coordinated public presence is the result of a fluid, flexible sharing of information between cooperative colleagues. There is no digital “magic bullet.”

Part of that cooperative coordination is a regular meeting with all the relevant offices. If the school has a person tasked with the database coordinator role, he or she may organize and run the meetings. This would be the typical agenda for such a meeting.

1. Review of a print-out of any/all data changes that have come in since the last meeting.

• Hopefully most of these come in digitally, and are sync’ed across many of the databases, but that will never be perfect.
• A review of policies about how to gather information that comes to coaches, nurses, and others rather than digitally on the website.

2. A sharing of “community news” across all offices. Births, deaths, marriages, divorces, job losses, moving, graduations, scholarships, awards, expulsions, etc.

• What needs to be done here will vary depending on the relevance to each office.
• Care must be taken here to assure confidentiality where appropriate.
• Example - One enrolled sibling, the nephew of a trustee, is being dismissed for a disciplinary infraction. Each office will need to be very sensitive to how to process this information in terms of how to interact with the family in the coming days, months and years.

3. An exchange of “coming events” for each office.

• Example - Alumni/development is holding an event to honor a donor who has given for a new gallery space. The registrar could easily provide a list of current art students and their families. The admission office may realize that it is the same night that they are holding the first revisit program and they may want to coordinate with prospective art students.
• Example - Admissions is expanding their receptions to new areas. Development may have some input into who to reach out to, as well as have interest in the gathering of information about people who come to such events. It would be helpful to plan together.

4. A planning of data exchanges between offices or the discussion of standards or practices.

• Discussion about standards such as Street vs. St., Road vs. Rd.
• Discussion about who should enter new info and how that gets passed to others and checked.
• A “heads up” to offices that new data is coming their way, at the beginning of a semester or start/end of school.
• A “heads up” that one office is getting an upgrade or is migrating to something new and they may be down for a period or may welcome some friendly guidance or additional leeway as they get organized again.

The goal is that, while each office is separate and ultimately needs to show its own productivity, by working together they can collectively offer a united front. That makes everyone look good, be more effective and better serves the greater community.

One of the most important tools at your disposal is your own data. If you can’t analyze, search, view, list and manipulate your own data, its value is lost to you.

Wandering through your own data, performing ad hoc searches, is called “noodling.” You need to be able to ask questions and get answers instantly. Not the staff, not a consultant—the Director. Instantly.

Noodling is not reporting. With reporting, a summary set of data is presented in a standard form. Noodling is free form. There might be 5 or 10 standard reports. Reports are periodic summaries for the Board or the admin meeting. Noodling lets you ask any question and get an instant answer. Noodling provides daily directions to your journey.

• How many people have applied so far this month/year/week?
• How many people who have applied asked for financial aid info? Last year?
• Which feeder schools provide the best candidates?
• How many people who came to that fair did we accept?
• How many students from the Middle East were admitted in the last 3 years? Should we do that trip again?
• What is our success with consultant X recently?
• What school did we lose the most candidates to last year? The last 5 years?

Noodling makes you more aware of your situation. Noodling lets you do your homework. Noodling lets you support your hunches with real data.

If either you don’t know how to search your own data, or your current database solution is too complex for you to learn, you can’t noodle. If you can’t noodle, you can’t be as prepared as you need to be.

If you don’t noodle in your data every day, you need to ask—is it our database, or is it me? If you don’t noodle, to some degree you are flying blind, you are going through the season on auto-pilot. If you don’t know that, someone else might.

If the goal of a school is data coordination, there must be a layer ABOVE the individual offices that actually manages the coordination. This layer need not be complex, but it must exist. This is the role of the database coordinator. Schools can easily establish this job for little additional cost, if it does not already exist.

An assortment of offices will not self-coordinate. No software package in the world can be counted on to coordinate equivalent offices either. Integrated systems can be implemented that limit access so that it is difficult, or impossible, to make changes—but that hinders, not aids in coordination. Making it so difficult to edit data will negatively affect the productivity of each office.

Each office should be as autonomous as possible, within reason, and then their collective efforts coordinated.

There are nine IT jobs at a school, and this is one. (See Nine Jobs). If one of these jobs is not staffed, then the school suffers to that extent. The database coordinator job does not need to be a full time position. Potentially the network administrator could also assume this role, depending on temperament and expertise. At the same time, if the school has only one IT person, or only contracts with an outside IT service, this job is probably going to be either poorly done or not done at all. The secret to success is regular communication between offices, rather than emergency cleanup or frantic damage control.

Database Coordinator Job Description

• Understands basic data structure and functions of all the systems
• Understands how to import and export data from all systems
• Documents and schedules movement of data between systems
• Chairs the regular data coordination meetings
• Serves as source of information for all offices

This person needs to be mostly a mediator, with a touch of technician. This is a people job as much as a tech job. This person sees the school as a whole. She does not dictate to the offices, she advises each and coordinates all.

One of the main reasons offered for total database integration at a school is the elimination of double data entry: it is wasteful, and a potential source of mismatched records. If there was only one set of data, then all that duplication cost could be eliminated—an enormous savings to the school.

But maybe the cure is worse than the disease. Let’s ignore for now the issues of using a single set of data, such as multiple office user error, conflicting data permissions, training needs, and flexibility limitations, and do some calculations on the costs of data entry.

1. Admissions admits 150 students each school year. This information needs to go into:

Business accounting system, Student Information System, Development Office system, Library system, Web Portals

2. It takes a temp typist 5 minutes to type each record. Total of 750 minutes = 12.5 hours. Allowing for breaks, errors, interruptions, this is 2 days. (16 hours)

3. At $15/hr, this job would cost $240.

4. For 5 offices, that would be $1200.

5. Let’s assume that it takes twice as long - a total cost of $2,400 per year.

6. Replacing out and migrating all databases, with training, conversion, yearly fees etc could run between 80K and 200K.

Math Problem: How many years does this school need to do this typing before this migration is cost effective?

In the pursuit of efficient data management across campus, schools go through four phases, completing a cycle about every 4-5 years. I call this the “integration merry-go-round.”

Phase 1: Our school is a mess
Numerous school leaders point out, with barely restrained disgust, the lamentable state of affairs across the campus.

“Our data gets entered over and over in each separate office.” “We solicited a dead person! The Development office needs to be better connected!” “Obviously the answer is one integrated system.” “We need to get rid of all the separate systems.” “Some people may just have to change for the overall progress of the school.”

Phase 2: This time we do it right
Someone takes on the task of convening a school-wide study that grows with a life of its own.

“A committee will be formed to collate all the different office needs.” “We are going to put out an RFP and look at all the available companies.” “We are only going to look at completely integrated systems.” “We are going to pick one vendor by March and have everything installed by July 1.”

Phase 3: The data emperor’s new clothes
No one wants to point out the obvious to an assembled group, or to make a stand.

“We all agreed.” “I didn’t agree but wanted to be a team player.” “We just need more training.” “We can’t ask for more money because we just bought this.”

Phase 4: Mutiny
One by one, either with or without central approval, offices chart their own course.

“They are never going to decide anything so I need to just move my office alone.” “I am doing most of my work outside the system anyway.” “I have a mandate from the Board to improve XXX, and that means I need a better database.”

Which phase is your school in?