It is quite common for K-12 technology staff members to be tasked with doing more with less. In this featured commentary published by EdScoop, Andrew Graf, Chief Product Strategist at TeamDynamix, discusses three lessons K-12 can learn from IT leaders in higher education.
By Andrew Graf, Chief Product Strategist, TeamDynamix
K-12 technology staff are some of the most heroic employees I know. Very rarely have I seen teams that are asked to do more with fewer resources. As a group, they tend to be extremely talented and proficient. They have to be, in order to survive.
But in many K-12 school systems, especially smaller-sized districts with limited funding, IT staff spend the majority of their time reacting to technical problems: A teacher has a projector bulb that needs to be replaced, or a piece of technology isn’t working correctly. Much of this time spent putting out fires could be reduced if K-12 IT departments took a more mature and proactive approach to IT management.
Of course, I am generalizing here. But as K-12 is increasingly focused on “future ready” initiatives and preparation for higher ed learning, there are IT lessons to be learned from higher education. Many of these institutions have already gone through a maturation process with respect to their IT departments as spending on edtech has sharply increased over the past few years.
Here are three important insights that K-12 technology teams can extract from the experience of colleges and universities:
Move from incident to problem management
Most colleges and universities have moved beyond simply managing IT service requests and instead they focus on solving problems. In other words, they analyze the root cause of an issue and try to fix it, so they don’t have the same kind of incidents occurring again and again.
On the whole, I think higher education is more advanced with regard to problem management than many K-12 technology departments. Making this shift requires more of an investment of time and resources up front, but it certainly pays dividends down the road. Don’t get me wrong: There are plenty of K-12 organizations, especially larger districts, that already do this well. But smaller, more cash-strapped school systems ought to think about adopting this approach, too.
It can be hard to think long-term when you feel like you’re buried in immediate service requests, but there is training available to help IT leaders in making this shift. For instance, I would highly recommend ITIL certification. The Help Desk Institute (HDI) has some tremendous resources to assist with problem management as well.