Are school ICT Departments ready for Academy Status?

The recent relaxation in the rules for schools wishing to become Academies will increase devolution of IT management responsibility for those schools to individual schools or school federations.

Are they ready for it?

As schools adopt academy or federated business models their dependency upon ICT increases, not just to fulfil wider pedagogical needs but also to support the running of large and complex school infrastructures. Managing IT in this environment is a tough task but the challenge is intensified by the scope of technology usage. Whereas a corporate organisation tends to have single focus characterised by common systems and applications, the school environment embraces and actively encourages diversity, which requires a very broad spectrum of ICT capability.

How do you manage increased ICT responsibility?

It is unusual to find a corporate organisation that hasn’t invested in systems to help manage IT service and provide Management Information (MI) for planning and control. However, many schools have not made an equivalent investment, which is concerning bearing in mind their reliance upon IT. The delivery of effective service management requires professional service management technology underpinned by best practise processes. Some schools have taken the first step by putting a system in place to store information about IT users and assets, and to log IT incidents, issues and requests.

How do measure how well are you doing now?

The best measure of the system effectiveness is MI. Can your IT reporting differentiate between incidents and requests, analyse route cause and resolution, measure performance of IT staff, quantify end-user service levels, evaluate usage and effectiveness of IT assets, highlight where corrective action or change is required? Experience shows that most of the information required for MI reporting and service improvement is not available because there is no process to record it or it’s not captured in the correct format.

How do you make improvements?

Essentially you need to define IT processes, enable staff to follow them and ensure that relevant information is captured along the way. A good start point is to compare your MI requirements with what is currently available. The gap between the two highlights either process inefficiencies, lack of process or lack of information gathering. There are many processes that support ICT and some will be working better than others. The FITS foundation (http://www.thefitsfoundation.org) is a good source of information about ICT process, as are suppliers of service management (help desk) technology.