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While many of today's school districts have created wireless classrooms equipped with sophisticated whiteboards, they continue to grapple with budgetary constraints, IT staffing concerns and the difficulty of integrating disparate systems that are implemented all too frequently without the benefit of long-range planning.
Districts continue to spend most of their IT dollars on hardware, says Todd Kern, senior analyst for K-12 solutions at Eduventures, a Boston-based research firm that specializes in the education sector. In fact, districts last year spent $4.4 billion of their $6.2 billion technology infrastructure budget on computer hardware, he says. Enterprise software and technology services, much of which is provided by local solution providers and integrators, generated about $1.8 billion in revenue last year, Kern says. The bulk of IT spending, representing about $4.4 billion, went toward computer hardware.
"K-12, as an industry, is on the order of $800 billion a year, but the vast majority of that is for buildings and personnel," Kern says.
Far too often, districts purchase equipment without looking at the bigger picture--how schools will actually use the technology, the existing infrastructure, support and maintenance costs, and integrating the new with the old.
"A lot of districts are still in reactive mode," says Dave McIntosh, director of sales at Data Networks, a solution provider that specializes in K-12, higher education, and local and state government. "What a lot of districts want to do is hop right in and implement a system without doing the analysis and design first. They want to see immediate results. We determined that architecting and putting into place a manageable structure is a challenge for school districts. Typically they've evolved and grown in bits and pieces, and nobody took a step back to ask, 'How does this fit together?'"
That can be a costly error, McIntosh says. In fact, one school district customer in Maryland couldn't get the performance it needed out of a new human resources system purchased by the prior IT director. When a new department head entered the picture, he determined the expensive solution did not--and could not--meet the district's needs, he says.
"They're probably going to replace a system that cost about $800,000," McIntosh adds. "A new IT director came in and realized he needs to assess the system before he moves forward."
Another client was considering a $500,000 solution until it tapped Data Networks for an IT assessment service.
"In many cases, the infrastructure and environment they have can't support [the solution] without any upgrades," McIntosh says. "Otherwise, they're going to put the system in place and they're not going to get the performance. We went in and did an assessment on the strength and security of the network."
The need for this type of service is only going to increase, industry executives say. Like their enterprise cousins, school districts are facing a tidal wave of data, all of which must be stored and secured. Likewise, districts must securely store e-mails and instant messages. Taking a one-off approach to IT purchases--never an ideal scenario--will make the challenge overwhelming, executives say.
NEXT: The sad state of centralized information systems.
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