IT

Best of breed

Many independent schools waste both time and money swapping one MIS system for another. Jan Evans sets out a strategy to ensure that you find the most appropriate one for your school first time around

Apart from complaints about poor customer service, the other main reason for changing an MIS system is that one department is demanding a system that specifically works for them. And so they should. IT systems that specialise in each department’s requirements should be taken as read.

No one should have to put up with a system that was put together by a team of programmers who simply assumed they knew, rather than sought to find out, what the users were looking for.

What should you expect?
Suppliers may say that they have a system that will meet all of your needs. It is unlikely that any company can be an expert at everything. You would no more dream of asking your accountant to develop a marketing strategy than you would your headteacher to manage the catering.

The first question that you should ask any potential MIS provider is how they propose to “interface” with other
systems you are reviewing or intend to keep. What about hiring an expert who can talk to each department and
try to uncover exactly what it is that they need? There is certainly room in the sector for some of them.

A 10-point plan
1. Establish who the key stakeholders in the school are and ask them what they need a system to do. If it works for finance but not for admissions, it won’t do.
2. Talk to colleagues in other schools about what works (by department, not just bursar to bursar, or IT director
to IT director).
3. Research the marketplace: what is available and what does it do?
4. Call suppliers in to present their products and invite all key personnel (don’t forget the prep head’s PA) to
this meeting.
5. Ask all key personnel for their lists of must-haves, mustn’t-haves and nice-to-haves before initial meetings, and to be ready to put questions to presenting companies. Accept no excuses: if they don’t contribute, they have no right to complain about the final decision.
6. If ticks seem to be appearing in all the right boxes, that is the time to ask about training and implementation. How much training do they offer (which should be included in the price)? How often, where, for whom and in particular by whom (do the trainers understand the independent school environment? Some don’t)? Are you expected to transfer data yourself or will someone who understands your current system help you?
7. Ask about helplines. Are the people on the end of the telephone/email going to understand the question? Can they be reached when you need them (ie at weekends and after the usual working day)?
8. Ask for client lists and reference sites and visit them: speak to people and schools other than the ones you
have been directed towards.
9. Ask about their ongoing commitment to the sector and future developments. Do they have a five-year
plan they can share with you?
10. Ask for an individual client manager who will always be available to you.

Sold an eierlegendewollmilchsau
Some of the above points may appear obvious, but if you have purchased a system and are now looking for another
two or three years later, something went wrong in your initial procurement process. While you may try to justify this with some notion about technology having moved on, the problem may be that someone has sold you an
eierlegendewollmilchsau* and you have subsequently realised that it does not exist.

Perhaps, instead, you should have bought two or three different animals that, with a little bit of work, can live
together very happily.

* This is a German word that means, literally, eier (egg) legende (laying) woll (wool) milch (milk) sau (sow) or egg-laying, woollen, milking pig). It is an imaginary animal that offers an impossible combination of wanted attributes.

Jan Evans is the founder and managing director of RSAdmissions. Jan can be contacted on 01420 563547.

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