The Plano, Texas, Independent School District (ISD) enterprise resource planning (ERP) project delivers value beyond the use of data to complete reports and fulfill accountability mandates. The addition of analytic software turns data into information that can be acted on.

• A true ERP solution — one that combines the functions and features of student information system (SIS) and finance/human resources (HR) suites — can be coupled with analytic tools to provide a platform for predictive modeling and evaluation of academic interventions.
• Strong school district leadership that expresses a vision for, and a commitment to, information-driven decision-making aligned with the attainment of key strategic goals is critical to the success of administrative suite projects.
• School districts should view integrated data systems as more than forensic reporting tools. They should look for analytic tools that turn data into information that contributes to identifying where, how and why they are (or are not) making progress in attaining strategic goals and objectives.

• Keep in mind project goals, rather than the artificial barriers presented by deadlines.
• Enter into administrative suite projects from an enterprise perspective. Avoid an IT-centric approach — or the perception thereof — by means of rigorous involvement on the part of school district business units and a change process that creates and maintains strong lines of communication between stakeholders.
• Challenge commercial providers to demonstrate the capacity to understand the scope and scale of the solutions required for your needs. Bear in mind that not all vendors understand that the number of knowledge workers in the K-12 environment exceeds that of most other industries.

School districts should look at integrating data systems and using data analysis to go beyond forensic data reporting and into providing teachers and other staff with information that can guide instruction.

Information-driven decision making has been a largely unrealized goal of K-12 education. Spurred by accountability measures such as the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) in the United States, school agencies routinely collect and store data to be used in the completion of reports for stakeholders or governing bodies. But their efforts are typically forensic — describing what has happened, rather than analyzing what is happening. Using data to guide instruction proactively is more valuable and facilitates interventions that can lead to higher student achievement.

Data systems in K-12 education, even if integrated through an interoperability framework or as part of a data warehouse strategy, usually consist of a SIS (for student demographics, achievement records, scheduling and so on) that is separate from other business unit solutions (finance, HR, transportation, food services, for example), rather than part of a true ERP solution. As long as accountability measures mainly require reporting on student achievement, K-12 senior managers do not see this as a problem. Gartner, however, advises schools to prepare for accountability measures that require the use of information from both academic and financial systems to show the relative amount of dollars provided for the education of each subgroup of students — in essence, an equity profile (see "Accountability Mandates and the Case for ERP Review in K-12 Education"). Eliminating silos of data will allow school districts to pinpoint the best use of resources and meet any accountability reporting requirements that may arise. It will also facilitate analysis of key educational inputs relative to expected or realized outputs.

Plano ISD recognized information-driven decision-making was crucial to its central goal of maximizing student achievement. Dissatisfied with current IT market offerings for handling student information and ERP, the district decided to partner with Prologic Technology Systems of Austin, Texas, to create a true ERP system that integrated student information, HR and finance systems into a single database model. The district leadership also saw an opportunity to use such an integrated system as a solid platform for an analytical and prescriptive tool — in short, as a means of turning data into information available to proactively guide instruction, student learning and administrative decision-making.

Plano ISD saw this challenge as an opportunity to create and use a true ERP system for education — a single system that would integrate data that had previously been collected by point solutions, including a SIS. The ISD recognized that any system developed would have to be Web-based and scalable to address the requirements of thousands of users/stakeholders. In addition, the ISD was (and remains) determined to develop a solution that was affordable and that could be offered to other school districts. Table 1 summarizes the planned progression of activities leading to the system now in place.

TEAMS, along with the SAS business intelligence platform, gives teachers, counselors, administrators and staff access to analysis of multiple views of student achievement that relate efforts at the district, school and classroom level to Plano ISD's strategic goals. Plano ISD uses three assessments — an adaptive achievement test, a cognitive abilities test and the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS) — as key indicators of student performance, and through the TEAMS solution (including the SAS analytics package) these indicators can be tied to fiscal effort as well as to specific curricular and support interventions.

A significant result is the use of TEAMS's consolidated data structure and the deployment of SAS analytical tools to explore areas such as the effectiveness of interventions with different NCLB subgroups, and perhaps predicting on the basis of information — not intuition — where those interventions might best be used.

The TEAMS initiative and the attention paid to providing a highly capable infrastructure has resulted in:

• A three-level solution that:
  • Provides a dashboard with selected performance indicators.
  • Analytics that provide the data behind the performance indicators.
  • Intelligence that provides a recommendation or algorithm for improving progress on strategic goals.
• An integrated, one-database solution for instruction, business and administration — essentially a true ERP system for K-12 education.
• 24/7 access to a portal that is accessible to users, based on their role.
• An economical solution built on the Linux operating system.
• A platform for incorporating additional business unit needs. For example, transportation and food services — not currently included — can be added as the solution matures.

• The school district's vision of, and commitment to, data-driven decision-making, starting with the superintendent of schools and all senior managers.
• Attention to laying a sound foundation with infrastructure, training and support.
• The confidence and process maturity to remain true to project goals and overcome technical or political setbacks. Plano ISD's commitment to a solution that addressed strategic goals was fortified by the belief that this was the right thing to do.
• A strong change process strategy of engendering ownership among school district business units (instruction and support services, for example). Plano ISD maintained strong lines of communication and clearly articulated that TEAMS was an enterprise priority, not an IT project.
• Stakeholders became even more supportive as their involvement with the production model proved to them that the more data they provided, and the more they used the solution, the more they got out of it. Essentially, they see that it turns their data into information that keeps them on track to satisfy Plano ISD's key objectives.

• Don't underestimate the scale of the solution required in terms of the number of users and the stress on the system at peak usage times.
• Remain skeptical of vendors' claims to truly understand the scope and scale of solutions required in the K-12 environment. This applies to all vendors, whether they are new to the K-12 market or have been selling to the education sector for years.
• Be generous in estimating the length of the project — various stakeholders (the CFO, for instance) are likely to become anxious if projected timelines have to be extended.
• In the same vein, don't make meeting deadlines the key objective. Keep the product in mind and resist the temptation to forge ahead without confirming that you are ready.
• Avoid mid-project addition of features or modules to the initial rollout. In Plano ISD's case, it took nearly a year to get the project back on track after such changes.