TECHNO GEEK

NEIL LIMBRICK, partner and IT consultant, Limbrick Consultancy LLP, founder of theEducationCollective and ambassador for the Association of Network Managers in Education (ANME), shares his expert advice on how you can effectively evaluate the IT provision in your school

There is an old joke that crops up from time-to-time – ‘Words cannot describe your beauty, but numbers can; six-out-of-10.' This is a great demonstration of how selecting the right way to evaluate information can determine how successful it will be.

As a full time IT consultant for the education sector, I have to quickly evaluate elements of a school’s IT provision. Systems, people and vision all play a part in working out where to invest time and money. Initial questions like, ‘What keeps you awake at night?’ or, ‘What works really well?’ help unearth issues and highlight individual perspectives on the provision based on what is important to the school.

Over time I began to realise there are three key zones; this applies to everything from use of software, like your MIS, to staff effectiveness or investment in equipment.

The three zones then form a development timeline:

● Crisis management ● Value added ● Stable and reliable Crisis management – if you have ever had to think about whether to use a system because it might not work then this sits squarely in the crisis management zone - or if you spent money on something that is not being used - like interactive screens/white boards. Stable and reliable – at this point the provision is effortless to engage with and you do not give using it a second thought. It does exactly what you expect it to and provides everything you believe you invested time and money to get. Value added – sometimes a product or service exceeds our expectations; it not only achieves what you set out to do but it also does a whole lot more – giving you the maximum value out of your investment. A specific example could be Office 365.

When you adopt an eco-system like O365 there are teething problems – staff need to learn and engage, filters and other settings need to be adjusted to get the flow of email right. At this point you are somewhere to the left of stable and reliable to some degree. Then you get the hang of the system as an organisation and people use O365 for email effortlessly with some people, perhaps, using it for saving files to the cloud. Email is the most common reason people adopt O365 and so, at this point, you are squarely at ‘stable and reliable’.

If you then seize the opportunity to use some of the additional features like Forms, Teams or Sharepoint, you are really getting the maximum value out of the system and probably save money from not having to have other solutions in place, or even ditching on site servers completely.

Hopefully, none of the provision in your setting is to the left of ‘stable and reliable’ but, if it is, then this is probably the first thing to address. Beyond that it is about looking for the opportunities, perhaps balanced with likely impact, and with a strong influence from your school development plan.