Empowering School Leaders to Manage and Lead I.T.

A presentation given at the Digital Education Show in Dubai on Wednesday 16th November, 2016.

 

What is Digital Governance and why you need it in your school - Digital Governance Part Two

An Introduction to Governance

Corporate governance structures exist to ensure that executive management act in the best interest of the organisation/shareholders and not merely to maximise their own self interests. For example, school leaders will be familiar with the concept of Financial Governance which ensures that employees know the limits of their authority to commit the organisation’s financial resources. This usually takes the form of policy document which outlines the rules on expenditure, contracts, salary levels etc. Digital Governance works in a similar way. 

Digital Governance

An organisation’s Digital Governance document is in effect the rule-book outlining

• why the strategy is the way it is (the principles on which the strategy is founded) 
• who can make IS/IT decisions; 
• how IS/IT decisions are made; 
• what is permitted in the organisation. 

Digital Governance ensures that a year group/department/colleague can’t declare UDI and strike off in their own direction. These policies outline the rules for anyone who wants to purchase a new device/software program/app, and put in place procedures to check that the proposed development is aligned to the school’s wider strategy and compatible with the rest of the IS/IT network. 

“[It] is concerned with promoting consistent and coherent decision-making behaviour across an organisation regarding Information Systems (IS) and Information Technology (IT) in order to maximise the value the organisation derives from IS/IT” (Peppard and Ward, 2016, 368). 

The ‘Why’ of Digital Governance 

Digital Governance allows an organisation to align IS/IT developments to the wider vision and direction for the organisation. For example, Digital Governance enables organisations to standardize systems and processes, which ultimately bring greater efficiency and reduced costs. Digital Governance is a way to break down the ‘silo culture’ of some organisation as it puts structures in place which encourage alignment and collaboration. 

The ‘Who’ of Digital Governance 

There is significant debate about who should be making IS/IT decisions. There are real dangers in leaving these decisions to IT Network Managers as, too often, decisions are made from self-interest. Equally, there are dangers in allowing enthusiastic administrators/ educationalists who do not understand the technical aspects of school networks to dominate -they are fundamentally responsible for the legacy spaghetti. Instead, it is worth considering two other common models:

1. Digital Governance Committees. These groups combine some of the senior team with teachers and the Network team. Together they can evaluate new technologies and put in place the necessary infrastructure to ensure that it is effective. Such a group is well placed to draft the initial Digital Governance Document and to revise it as necessary. Large organisations may like to differentiate between a wider digital governance group, which oversees policy, and a narrower network architecture group, which looks at the technical specification of the network required to deliver that strategy. 
2. Digital Leadership Roles. It has become quite common for large firms in industry to appoint ‘Chief Digital Officers’ (CDOs) to drive digital change from an executive level. Some schools have appointed Assistant/Deputy Headteachers/Principals to fulfil this role. This is undoubtedly an excellent solution as it means that a single senior leader has time and authority to drive the necessary change. However, the difficulties are cost and finding a candidate with sufficient pedagogical and technical knowledge to be able to do the role effectively. 

The ‘How’ of Digital Governance 

As with all other areas of school life, there are inevitably good ideas competing for limited resources. The Digital Governance document should define the process by which IS/IT decisions are made and how competing IS and IT priorities should be managed and implemented. It is often helpful to consider these as either ‘demand’ or ‘supply’ decisions: 

1. ‘Demand’ Decisions include deciding how much to invest in IS/IT and how these decisions are prioritised. (‘We want to be able to . . . . ‘) 
2. ‘Supply’ Decisions include deciding on required IT capability, how projects and programmes will be managed, and IT services delivered. (‘Here’s how you can do it . . .’) After Peppard and Ward, 2016, 371 

The ‘What’ of Digital Governance A Digital Governance document should define the School’s IS/IT policies on the following areas: 

1. Define the core Information Systems for the organisation 
   At JESS our core Management Information System is iSAMS and we are endeavouring to consolidate other systems into it. 
   At JESS, we are moving to a Teaching and Learning environment in Office365, migrating away from a locally held Intranet. 
2. Define the compatibility requirements for new software 
   At JESS we are endeavouring to ensure that all educational software can either be run from remote desktop, or on the Cloud. o 
   We are endeavouring to ensure than all other administrative systems integrate with iSAMS. 
3. Set out the rules for procuring Cloud-based services. There is a trend away from making a one-off purchase of a ‘software package’ to contracting for ‘software as a service’ on an annual licence. The same applies to ‘storage as a service’. In many ways these are no different from other contracted services which fall under the remit of financial governance. 
4. Define the specification for hardware procurement outlining specification requirements and clear expectations in terms of performance. This should include the specifications for Servers, Switches, Cabling, End-user devices, and other Peripherals (especially printers!) o There is much to be said for having an agreed specification for the ‘standard classroom’ – this brings greater reliability to the system, allows for quick and easy replacement if a piece of kit fails, and aids familiarity for teachers moving between classrooms. o For example, at JESS we have a policy of replacing Interactive White Boards (IWBs) with 75” Screens. This means that we will not be replacing like-for-like when IWBs fail. (In practice, we reallocate resources to ensure that the new monitor is installed in the location in the organisation where it will be most effective, which is not necessarily the classroom where the IWB failed.) 
5. Define BYOD and Guest User Policies. Schools need to have clear policies on Bring Your Own Device and outline the Terms and Conditions under which non-school devices might be connected to the network. 
6. Define the School’s User Behaviour and Security Policies. It is essential that school have clear policies relating to data access and levels of security, which outline what to do if the event of a failure or breach. These should sit alongside the school’s Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) which defines the way in which all users in the organisation conduct themselves on the network and online. 

Given the fast-moving nature of IS/IT, each policy needs to be subject to regular review, at least at six month intervals, although it makes sense to review hardware specifications on a monthly basis, given the rate of change in this area.

Links, References and Further Reading:  

• Does your school have a legacy spaghetti network? - Digital Governance Part One
• Peppard and Ward The Strategic Management of Information Systems Fourth Edition 2016, pp.366-389
• Westermann, Bonnet and McAfee Leading Digital 2014, Chapter 7 pp.133-151

Does your school have a legacy spaghetti network? - Digital Governance Part One

Does your school have a
legacy spaghetti network?

Most school IT systems have evolved with well-meaning enthusiasts in the vanguard of the IT revolution: a school management system here, a time-tabling package there; a laptop programme in Physics, an iPad programme in French; a great app for English teaching here, a graphing package for Maths there.

Most school networks are testimony to at least a decade of anarchy. 

It is common for schools to hold data in multiple databases and to use a range of local, network and web-based packages which aren't integrated. Each new teacher and administrator joining the school brings great new ideas and 'innovation' and, with it, even more complexity to an already overloaded system. The result is what Information Systems experts term legacy spaghetti.
Ultimately this situation is a failure of a past school leadership which did even know they needed to understand how IT systems work before setting them up. Such an oversight is both understandable and forgivable for it was a time when IT expertise was not part of the school leader's toolkit, but it does pose a significant challenge for today’s school leader.
Why is legacy spaghetti a problem? 
‘Legacy spaghetti schools’ are tying themselves up in more and more layers of complexity that mean that pupils, teachers and school administrators are wasting precious time and resources. At some point the school reaches a point (and perhaps yours is already there) when the whole system begins to run so slowly that upgrades and simply adding more RAM and Terabytes just won't solve the problem. In the long run legacy spaghetti means that the school network will no longer be fit for purpose will prevent schools from keeping up with innovation. Resolution of these historic issues is possible but it does require strong Digital Leadership today and good Digital Governance going forward.

In Part Two Digital Governance - What it is and why you need it in your school I will explore what is Digital Governance and how schools can put it in place.

10 Questions to ask your IT Manager (that s/he doesn't want to be asked).

These questions were drafted in order to empower school leaders to take greater ownership of the key strategic area of IT in schools.

1. If there was a major fire in the server room, how long would it be before each of these services could be restored: email, telephones, school MIS and accounts?
2. If a generous donation of £250,000 was given to the school specifically for IT developments (in addition to the normal budget) what would you recommend we spent it on, and what would be the advantages for the school and end users (Pupils, Staff, Parents)? 
3. If your budget was suddenly cut by 50%, how could you cope, and what would be the effects on the School and the end users? 
4. What would be the effect of our main Internet connection being severed by a JCB somewhere? What services would we lose? Have we any backup systems in place, or would they have also been severed by the same JCB? 
5. Can you show me any records of the systems' reliability over the past 12 months? Do you regard the reliability as acceptable? If not, how could we improve it and how much would it cost? 
6. What might happen if a major incident occurs while you (or any one specific member of your staff) are away on holiday abroad for 2 weeks? 
7. How many individuals are sufficiently privileged administrators that they can see my (the Head's) documents, emails, etc.? 
8. If a pupil got hold of a staff password, and started using it, how would we ever know, and how long might it take to find out? 
9. Can you retrieve a file which was last seen one month ago, and how long would it take to retrieve? 
10. For each member of your technical staff (including yourself) what would be the immediate effect on the running of the system if they suddenly (with no notice) left? What specific tasks would it be difficult for the others on your team to perform, and how long might it take to recover fully from the loss? Is there adequate documentation to minimise such a problem?

These questions were drafted by the ISC IT Strategy Group in 2009. 

Don't be tempted by iPads as a School Marketing tool - Learning the lessons of the past. Mobile Device Strategy for Schools (Part Two)

There is a real danger that iPads are going to be the latest in a long-line of products that schools have purchased more because of their marketing impact than their educational use.

Grown-ups love iPads =
Parents love iPads.
Parents love the idea of having had an iPad at school.
Parents are undoubtedly taken in by the iPad-loving school:  "The School X has issued iPads to every pupil from age 3! what a forward-looking school!"  - etc.

So let's buy some iPads! Parents will love them!

A word of caution: we've been here before.
Using ICT to market a school is not new.
We saw it in the 1990s with Interactive Whiteboards - and we all wasted a lot of money. IWBs were visible technology - prospective parents could see them on the walls of our classrooms when they went around on tours - they were bright and shiny. There was an element of 'keeping up with the Joneses' - "the school down the road has one in every classroom - we need them - or we'll miss out/ fall behind/ not be seen as technologically savvy." And we are hearing it all again today . . .

IWBs were a great educational tool in the right hands but we all know that very few teachers know how to use them to their full potential and for many they were just a very expensive mouse.

But surely iPads are different?

Every time I have attended a conference, or a meeting of headteachers in the past year or so, a colleague will confide that their bright and shiny iPads in which they have recently invested a large portion of their annual ICT budget haven't really had the classroom impact they expected. Further discussion reveals that they were keen to have some iPads for what are essentially marketing reasons, but had not put the necessary research, training and investment into infrastructure to provide the platform for improved teaching and learning to take place.

iPads undoubtedly are a great bit of kit in the right hands, but they are not the right tool for every job and there are number of issues that need to be considered before taking the plunge - tempting as that marketing advantage might be.

1. Infrastructure
   The first step towards an effective mobile device strategy is to ensure that the necessary supporting WIFI infrastructure and Internet connectivity is in place before the roll-out of the mobile devices. In many ways this is the most important aspect and is the easiest to overlook. WIFI points, high-speed wiring and a good Internet connection are not sexy - they are invisible - they do not sell to parents. The WIFI network needs to have the capacity to cope with more traffic than you expect - think two devices per pupil.  You may need to put filters on the WIFI so that they can't spend all day streaming YouTube to their phones.
   
   At Berkhamsted, we rewired the school four years ago at a specification that was fairly future-proof and then spent 18 months (working in partnership with Meru) to ensure that the School's WIFI infrastructure was up to scratch before allowing pupils to have access to the WIFI network for their own devices.
2. Training of Staff
   IWBs, when used by skilled practitioners, made a significant contribution to teaching and learning. However, very few teachers ever mastered them to the extent that they were able to make a difference. Training of staff in the use of new technology is vital. iPads are no different. Just because iPads are fundamentally like iPhones and relatively intuitive to use does not mean that it is easy for teachers to harness their functionality to enhance teaching and learning in the classroom. Teachers are going to need training in how to incorporate Apps into their lessons. This is a fast-moving area of education because new Apps are being developed all the time - the required skill set is always changing. Rather than attending training courses, teachers are best advised to tap into one or more of the specialist networks who share ideas and best practice through Twitter and their Blogs.
3. Think about how pupils are going to need to use the iPad:

• Will the iPad be personal to the pupil? or will the iPad be a shared school-owned resource?  iPads really are designed to be a personal device - that is their great advantage - they are portable and are always at hand.
• Does the iPad need recharging at school? ("Sorry Miss, my iPad is out of charge.") Where and when will this be done? How will this be done securely? Does the school need to invest in lockable charging stations? Who is going to be responsible for charging school-owned iPads: the teacher/ department/ ICT technicians?
• Does the device have sufficient memory to perform the tasks required? (A 16 GB iPad could hold 10 feature-length movies, 4,000 songs or up to 32,000 photographs, but once you start loading some of the more complex Apps and games on there the space can shrink quite quickly),
• Can the pupils organise their files sufficiently well on an iPad to be able to make it an effective note-taking tool?  iPads are designed around an App-based structure, whereas learning is likely to be organised around a subject-based structure. 
• Do you need to print work that is produced on the device? How and where will this be done? Will pupils have access to WIFI printers? Will pupils have to upload their files to a Dropbox and then access them via networked Desktop PC to be able to print?
• Are there specialist peripheral devices to which pupils' devices need to connect (e.g. dataloggers in science)?  Can these connect by WIFI? or do they require a USB port?
• How long can we expect an iPad to last?  They seem to be much more like mobile phones (two year shelf life) than laptops (four to five year shelf life).  (We are having to replace class sets of iPads bought for a trial after two years because of the general 'wear and tear'.)

All ICT strategists agree that mobile devices are the future and, rest assured, we are all grappling with these questions. There is no 'one-size fits all' solution - each school's needs, finances and levels of expertise will be different and necessitate a different approach. However, one thing of which I can be sure is that those schools who embark on introducing mobile devices as part of their marketing strategy are going to waste a lot of money in the process.

 “Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” George Santayana

Some things Prep Heads need to know about ICT

A Presentation given to IAPS Heads' ICT Training Day at Berkhamsted School

View more presentations from independenthead.

School ICT - Be clear about what you want from your ICT team.

It is very easy to blame the ICT team for the poor performance of a School Network, but the School Leadership team needs to recognise the part that it should play in making strategic decisions about what is and what is not an acceptable level of performance. There needs to be a constructive dialogue between the Senior Leadership Team and those responsible for running and developing the School Network. One way of achieving this is to establish agreed key performance guidelines for the Network Manager and the ICT Support Team, in the form of an “Internal Service Level Agreement”.

No school network can be 100% reliable, but it is a reasonable expectation that there should be a very limited “down-time”, when the network cannot be accessed. An internal SLA might outline that there should no “down-time” during the teaching day either for maintenance or for Internet access. This may mean that the ICT technical team need flexible working contracts to do maintenance before school, in the evenings or at weekends. The bigger jobs, such as replacing servers and key switches, need to be planned in advance, ideally to be done in the holidays; but, say, on Field Days or during the whole-school Carol Service if they have to be done in term.

Likewise, it would be reasonable for a school to insist that all work is backed up regularly, say on a daily basis, but that some key areas, such as email and the school management system, are backed up more regularly. An internal SLA might outline, not only the agreed expectation, but also the time to retrieve a given piece of information from archive.

The same principle applies to ICT support. An internal SLA in this area might, for example, outline an expectation that a technician will attend a lesson within five minutes of receiving a call that a teacher’s or administrator’s computer is not working; and that if it can’t be repaired immediately, a replacement will be provided within 30 minutes. This would require that the ICT support team have spare machines that are pre-installed with the relevant software that are ready to go into classrooms. There are budget implications and questions of policy in having this level of support available. For example, Heads need to balance the policy issue of having perfectly good machines sitting on the shelf in an ICT office, when they could be used somewhere around the school. This is another instance of an SMT decision that should not be left to the ICT team.

Internal SLAs allow Heads and Senior Leadership teams to agree acceptable standards and thus provide a framework within which School ICT purchasing, network development and training decisions can be made.

This blogpost includes material from an article "What a Head needs to know about ICT - Structures and People" which will be published in the ISC Bulletin next month.

Think differently about ICT strategy - think of ICT as you do electricity

There is a real danger of putting ICT strategy into a special category, but this status is unjustified. It may be helpful to consider ICT in the same way as we think of electricity. Electricity is taken for granted in every classroom; it undoubtedly facilitates teaching and learning, but it would be odd to ask how teachers might use electricity in a Geography lesson. This might have been a hot topic a hundred years ago, but not today. ICT in essence is no different to electricity. It is the newness of the technology that has blurred our vision. Much is made of ICT networks, but, when distilled down, there is very little fundamental difference in delivering electricity to a classroom and providing connectivity and Internet access. Both are delivering power through cables, routers and junction boxes.


Consider how you organise your school ICT team.

Our forebears throughout the twentieth century had to come to terms with the power of electricity – first light and heat, then plug-in appliances, such as washing machines, televisions, dishwashers, microwave cookers and so on. Two key aspects that faced electricity users of a previous era, face schools today in regard to ICT today – namely infrastructure issues [wiring the building] and training needs [how to use and maintain the appliances]. It is helpful to think of ICT strategy in terms of these two categories. ICT has now reached a stage in its development in schools where there is much to be said for separating the two areas of ICT network and ICT support.


The ICT Network Team

Network managers are concerned with infrastructure issues – thus this is essentially an “Estates Department” matter. As with the wiring of a house, there will be times when an area needs to be upgraded in order to cope with the additional demands of what is plugged in [consider how schools have had to put additional electricity sockets into boarding house studies in order to cope with the demands of the twenty-first century student], but fundamentally supplying connectivity is something that will be routine from now on.


The ICT Support Team

There are two key areas of ICT support: maintaining the machines [think washing machine or photocopier repair man]; and training people to use the machines and to get the most out of what they can do. The computer is, after all, just another electrical device.

On the whole, school ICT support teams have focussed on the first of these roles, replacing maintaining, repairing and replacing computers, upgrading software, distributing printer cartridges. Schools will always need this sort of support to trouble-shoot the inevitable technical problems, although as ICT equipment become more reliable, the relative importance of this role is likely to diminish. However, a strong ICT Support Team that is focussed on training can transform the way in which ICT is used in the classroom and can make a significant difference to teaching and learning. This is the more important area to which School Leadership teams should direct their energies over the coming years.

This blogpost includes material from an article "What a Head needs to know about ICT - Structures and People" which will be published in the ISC Bulletin next month.