I've been working with my kids' school to help advise them on technology needs on and off over the past two years. Two years ago I got involved helping to guide a significant initiative to upgrade the network and server architecture and engage a company for ongoing support of that infrastructure. There was a server crash shortly before school started rendering the entire network unusable. We learned that backups had stopped working and the last good backup was 18 months old. The company engaged in helping us maintain this system offered very little help and ended up quoting us new hardware to solve the problems that we have. The principal reached out to other firms to get bids on helping us, not feeling that the original firm was reliable.
This is the point in time that I became re-engaged with things. The pastor and principal reached out to me to ask for my advice about the proposals. After reviewing them, we got together to discuss the proposals, along with another parent who does system support. The bids were wildly different and didn't convey how the firms were going to get us from our current state to a stable, functioning system. Coming out of this meeting, we put together a request for proposal that we sent out to the vendors in an attempt to get consistent bids from them. The new bids that have been received are more consistent, but still have some major variances. We are facing more time spent aligning the vendors before we can move forward.
Why is this so hard? I've been thinking about this quite a bit since I became re-involved in this. The school staff is struggling to understand what the issues are and what the proposed solutions are. Complicating matters is the fact that trying to explain all of this to the pastor and principal is difficult because they are not trained technology experts, and many trained technology experts (myself included) struggle to express themselves in understandable ways.
Technology should be easy at this point, but it isn't. There are too many choices that are difficult to understand. Keeping basic server and networking infrastructures running requires dedicated IT staff that represents an ongoing cost to organizations. The current trends to move the infrastructure to the cloud represent a step in the right direction, but are cost-prohibitive for organizations like my kids' school.
Unfortunately I don't yet have any solutions to these problems, but it feels like there should be solutions that are approachable to organizations like my kids' school.
