IT Services & Education
Aug 15th, 2008 by Nick
We recently won back a contract to provide IT Services to a local school, two years ago we lost the contract and I’ve missed it ever since. While many people thing that I was upset at loosing the contract because of who we lost it too this isn’t really the case. I was more upset becuase I believe that everyone needs to give back a little in life and while we did not make any money on the contract(we basically break even). There are very few customers that I enjoy consulting for more than the school, mostly becuase when working with the school I feel like every ounce of extra performance that we can get out of the network, servers, client machines, helps the students learn that much more and the teachers job just a little easier.
I know a lot of educational IT admins, and it amazes me the things that schools can accomplish with the limited budgets that they have. While the business sector plans on 3-5 years out of a server I currently have 2 servers on year 8 and another 2 just hitting year 5 and no plans of upgrading in sight. It’s not just this though, it’s all of the equipment. I ask why they run such old hardware and the answer is simple…money. In business we can justify spending money on a new computer, faster computers equate to a more productive worker which equates to higher profits for the company. In the educational sector this isn’t the case, everything is based on tax dollars, when state/local tax incomes are good then you’re budget stays the same, when it’s bad it get’s cut so you learn to make every cent count.
One other thing that I have noticed, not as much with the local IT admins but in the ESU’s and in the software companies that many schools use is the utter lack of business procedures. Now part of this may be that my background is in telecom which is known for its very strict business procedures. The school just switched to a new software platform to take care of their grade books, class schedules, student rosters..etc. The company had the school on a hosted platform for training and was working to migrate them to an in-house server that was still owned/operated by the software company. The company migrated all of the data over and finished at 5:15 PM. The next morning users came in and started using the new site/software, within about 10 minutes of using the web based software my phone rang. Users were having issues adding new students into the system. I called and opened a ticket with the software company (their name is Infinite Campus), they pulled some diags and then told me that I migrated the data wrong. I then had to argue that I hadn’t actually migrated the data, that Infinite Campus had in fact done this and that it was their issue to fix. They escalated the ticket and right at 24 hours after I had first opened the ticket finally were able to make the software work. I don’t think I would have cared except that they never once called me out of the blue to give me an update. I had to call them every 3-4 hours to have my ticket updated so a technician could call me back with an update. In a business this simply wouldn’t fly, especially if the company had JUST migrated the data over not even 24 hours prior, their excuse was that they were really busy and they were quick to point out that they had pushed my ticket ahead of two others in the queue to make sure itw as fixed before noon the following day!!! Unfortuantely this is not the only vendor that this has happened with, in the past month alone I’ve lost count of vendors who simply don’t call for 2-3 days and when they do finally call tell me that 2-3 days is their standard interval to resolve trouble. Could you imagine that in the business world? Microsoft Word or Excel break and it takes Microsoft 2-3 days to call you back, your computer just dies and Dell pushes you into a voicemail box and might call you back in 2-3 days….it’s horrible!!! What get’s me is how upset these companies get at you when you do call them out, tell them 2-3 days is unacceptable, middle of the day equipment upgrades are unacceptable…etc, they get very deffensive, insist that nobody else has a problem with it blah, blah, blah. I’m staying the course, K-12’s need the exact or better support than the business sector, I may not change much but I’m sure somebody will give a damn and maybe push back the next time a vendor is an ass.
