The Goldilocks Number: Systems Complexity

This is the fifth in a series of eight posts devoted to illuminating the factors that determine the “right size” for a school technology department.

A typical school uses several different computer systems including email, student information systems, classroom management systems, wired and wireless network routers and switches, security, payroll and related HR systems, calendaring and scheduling, web sites, blogs, and wikis–to name a few! The impact on support staff is simple: the more complex the systems, the higher the demand on the support staff.

Systems Complexity
Many of the computer systems used in schools begin as small, test projects within the tech department and grow to eventually encompass the entire enterprise. Add to this burgeoning number of desktop and laptop computers and software, student 1-1 laptop programs, smart phones and other mobile devices, and you have a technology ecosystem that is vastly more complex than it was when schools started  to experiment with email in the 1980s.

In-house or (ahem) Out-house. Security concerns often led schools to want to keep systems “in-house,” resulting in pressure to hire additional staff to maintain them. But increasingly, schools are following the lead of business and are starting to out-source some of these services.

• Hundreds of K-12 schools, colleges, and universities have outsourced email and other services to Google.
• Other “hosted services” are offered by companies specializing in the K-12 market, who assume responsibility for maintaining the hardware and software associated for back-office operations such as finance, human resources, advancement, facilities management, student record information systems, systems security, and data back-up.
• Many businesses have out-sourced their support operations, as you may well know should you have had the opportunity to speak with someone named “Andy” in Bangalore who, despite classes aimed at helping him shed his Indian accent, doesn’t quite pull it off.
• I am convinced that for most schools it makes sense to outsource “commodity” services such as email, calendaring, databases, student information systems, web site hosting, advancement, payroll and HR.
• Given the mandate of schools regarding student safety and privacy, I would be reluctant at this time to move all security services off-site.
• Further, I would be reluctant to out-source first level tech help desk responders.Time is so precious in the classroom that teachers often need immediate responses to issues that may be impacting their teaching. In addition to this, the goal of the help desk is to work with the employee or student to solve their problem while simultaneously increasing the person’s ability to self-help the next time. This “teaching relationship” is difficult to create and maintain at a distance.

New Technologies. Adding to systems complexity is the inexorable introduction of new software and hardware, greater interoperability between systems, increased security threats, and an entirely new means of communications contained under the rubric of social networking.

• In a bid to help contain costs many schools are adopting Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) which often means that the tech staff has to learn how to support new operating systems (usually Linux instead of Windows or Macintosh) and open source applications, which do not offer the same kind of support as their commercial counterparts.
• The server room of the future will contain few, if any, actual servers. Such equipment that there is may be in the form of network “appliances”: firewalls, access controllers, Internet bandwidth shapers, and the like. Servers will be located off-campus in the “cloud.”
• More important than servers will be Internet bandwidth and redundant Internet connections.
• By 2020, it’s possible that wireless technologies will progress to the point where even network closets and Ethernet jacks will be relics of the past.

Platforms. Three operating systems dominate the computer market: Windows, Linux, and Macintosh. Most schools use various combinations of these, with one of the three platform predominating on desktops and laptop computers, with Windows and Linux commanding the server room.

• The more diverse the platform mix in the school, the greater the demand on the support staff.
• Macintosh computers are considered by many IT professionals to be easier to maintain than Windows or Linux.
• There are more developers for Windows and Linux than for Mac, so there are more resources and trained professionals to turn to when needed.
• Mobile operating systems such as Apple’s iOS, RIM, Android, and Maemo are developing so quickly that they may supplant standard laptop and desktop operating systems; at the very least the number of devices running them will impact support staffing.

Data Exchange. Among the “holy grails” schools are looking for is a comprehensive database solution that works well for advancement (development), student information, and business offices. While several claim to offer such versatility, there’s often one area in which these unified applications fall short. This leads to the need for two or more systems to be able to “talk” to each other; intelligently exchange data amongst themselves.

• The best systems provide for near real-time data exchange between systems. For example, changes to a phone number of a parent made in the student information system are immediately propagated to the business and advancement office systems.
• A more common scenario is that this happens hourly or daily, through what is called a “batch job” performed when the systems are not being heavily used by employees.
• Another approach is that that changes are “proposed” by one system to another, and a human operator for each system must review and commit the changes to the system.
• The worst case scenario is that changes need to be made by hand in each of the different systems.
• To get to the best system requires that the support staff be trained and facile in each of the systems, knowledgeable about how to troubleshoot issues, and able to perform periodic audits of the data to make sure that the systems are operating correctly.
• LDAP and its cousins Apple Open Directory and Active Directory, can serve as a central repository of  demographic information about employees, students, and parents. Not all databases work with LDAP, or if they do require a significant amount of work to map LDAP fields to the fields in the various databases they are relating to. This is a significant challenge, and requires highly skilled support staff to create and maintain.

Security. Federal Reserve Board of Governor Randall Kroszner said “There is often a basic trade-off between security and convenience: the easier a system is to use and access, the less secure it tends to be.” Greater security = harder to use = more support staff.

• A recent post in What’s the Latest identified 34 different types of computer security threats. Variants of these threats or entirely new ones are constantly emerging. More threats means a greater load on the support staff.
• Insecure password practices are, in my view, the greatest internal threat to school security. (see Passéwords) Obtaining employee and student compliance with secure password practices is extremely difficult for support staff to do without really pissing people off.
• While strong and relatively easy to use measures exist to defend networks and individual users from threats, they require constant attention. Automated systems help. Using a platform with a smaller threat profile (such as Macintosh) also helps. But your support staff needs to have at least one person who is keeping an eye on this at all times.

The greater the complexity of your systems, the greater the need for more support staff.

Next up, Academic and Operational Goals.