Data Management

Because of the type of CMO our CMO was Data Management was deemed the most important bucket. We focus on on ample, intensive, traditional learning to get our students from behind the curve and close the achivement gap. Our CMO felt the best way to do this was to focus on data driven instruction and operation. However given the fact that we had an organically grown infrastructure ecosystem, limited human resources, and a grant to implement a specific Student Information Management System our options for that first summer were very limited in our approach to addressing Data Management.

Our newly hired Director of Operations and a summer fellow we had on Staff dealt with the brunt of implementing the new Student Information System for our CMO and all of our schools. On the positive side of what we had to address, technically, the SIS we were encouraged to utilize via the grant was backended by an enterprise class database and the system was recognized as one of the market leaders. The reality was neither of those factors really meant much.

I did some very brief research on the solution we were about to take on and some research on the SIS market on a whole. It became readily apparent that the market, especially for our scale (more than 1 school but not a large district), was very nacent. The solution we were implementing was also known to be problematic in working with the data, it seemed like a black hole that sucked the data in but didnt let it back out. However it was backended by a major player in the sql market (although it was only recently moved the that back end the year we started implementing) so i thought we could always build our own systems to query the data if needed.

When we started the technical provisioning for the servers we found out 2 strange things. The first being even though we were a young organization at the time and not serving too many students the requirements (at the time) were astronomical for a server to run the application, 4GB of RAM, Dual processor box with 2GHz or above processors in the slots and a minimum of 512k cache on each processor (what was listed on their office spec guide said 512MB), 200GB of free space, etc.

When i saw those specs i said to myself wow what are we going to do send our students to Mars with an SIS?

The outrageous specifications (including the typos on their official spec sheet) was compounded by the fact that they said we needed 2 servers, because our schools spanned 2 states...yeah...

Such began our long and contentious relationship with our SIS.