IT
Looking for soft options
A variety of software packages may appear to resolve your bursarial IT issues. However, as Chris Donlan argues, it is important to establish that they integrate fully with each other to help you fulfil your core aims
You may have noticed how today’s car manufacturers source not just common components, but now integrate the same chassis, engines and gearboxes from another company’s portfolio and run them across their own range.
Apart from saving vast amounts of money, the key advantage is that a “best of breed” approach ensures that they can produce a solidly reliable vehicle which will appeal to the car-buying public.
In terms of software, this concept serves to remind us that there is safety and reassurance in using tried and tested products that are perceived to be reliable, comprehensive and efficient. However, they must integrate with each other.
Coming together
Integrating leading software packages gives users the versatility and power of independence, while allowing high level management and transparency.
It also minimises the risk of data obsolescence caused by the islands of departmental databases that are a common feature within a number of schools.
One solution?
Using a single-system solution may prove to be the answer. Software houses that claim to offer everything in one package often force users to create their own database systems to address the needs of their department. This is because the software house is not specialist enough to provide powerful, yet versatile, software which has the focus of the primary user at the heart of its design.
A problem facing independent schools, in particular, is finding effective software that is designed for the sector, as opposed to systems that have been modelled primarily on state sector needs. These products invariably address administrative needs, have often been extended to service some of the unique needs of the independent sector, but appear clumsy and inarticulate, notwithstanding the fact that they often require significant IT resources to manage them.
Financial forces
Take the need to integrate administration with finance. The typical administration system has been designed to meet the needs of the school office and the academic departments, so it’s hard to imagine why anybody in the bursary would need to navigate their way through this immense system, purely to get to a limited part of the product that affects them.
However, when you consider that there are only a handful of items that staff in the bursary really need to know, such as pupil name, age, year group, form and house, and possibly who pays the bill, which could be a completely different person to whom the child lives with, then these are details that could easily be processed via a purpose-designed billing product, which leads on to relating financially-sensitive data on fees, remissions and extras, all of which should have no place in the office or academic domain.
In another example, estates and catering are both big consumers of cash, yet there are only a handful of specialist systems that will provide users with the comprehensive functionality geared to their specific needs.
Keep it into account
With an even greater emphasis on independent schools to account for themselves to the Charity Commission and with governors realising what their liabilities actually are, it is incumbent on all departmental users to understand that large tracts of data contained within their database or software packages form key parts of this critical analysis. For the school to deliver its ethos according to its objectives, then information flow is the only way to achieve empowerment and control.
The key to solving the jigsaw puzzle of integration is to seek specialist software companies that address the needs of the department they support and can demonstrate a link between their system to your underlying platform product or database.
Chris Donlan is the managing director of Academic Business Solutions. Chris can be contacted on chris@academicbs.co.uk
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