Is Outsourcing a Good Idea for Instructional Technology?
by: Peter Reilly

Today's School Culture

Schools have a history of ownership that makes the outsourcing of services a cultural anathema. Most schools hire transportation workers, mechanics, maintenance men, electricians, cafeteria workers, and security guards. Although they work in school districts, none of these individuals or the functions they perform is remotely related to education. Just as many business have looked for cost savings by outsourcing non-mission critical services some schools have begun to ask the same question, "Could this be done as well or better for less money by an outside service agency? "It is not surprising given, the "culture of control," that schools have approached technology services by focusing on internal resources rather than the wide range of external resources available to them.

Technology and the Myth of the "Free Lunch"

Complicating the issue of outsourcing technology for schools is the myth of the "Free Lunch". The myth is embodied in the belief that technology can be done on the cheap. Schools can accept donated computers, have the Boy Scouts wire the building on a Saturday, and support the technology with teachers during free periods. Before one can make a fair assessment regarding the efficacy of outsourcing technology services it is important that the "Free Lunch" myth be discredited.

While it may be good public relations to accept donated computers it can be a long-term disaster. At the highest level, it keeps technology as a marginal item in the school community's consciousness. If it were a core item, it would not be left to donations. Can you imagine a school district that left its textbook usage to whatever used textbooks happened to be donated by community members?

On the practical side, accepting donations can be quite expensive with low satisfaction levels on the part of students and teachers. How can a free machine be expensive? Most industry Total Cost of Ownership studies show the capital cost of a computer as less than one quarter of the real cost of ownership. Not included in the cost of a donated computer are any upgrades necessary to get the machine on your network, the cost of supporting software for many different donated machine types, and the maintenance of networks composed of a variety of donated machines.

What about non-technical volunteer groups wiring a building? Can you imagine a new heating, ventilation and air cooling system being installed by a group of Boy Scouts on the weekend? How about the same group wiring the building for electricity or providing the plumbing for the school bathrooms? Yet in the minds of many educators, it's perfectly OK to have a volunteer group design and cable a complex data network. Once again, this attitude reveals the position that technology holds on the fringes of the educator's understanding.

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Technology Support "Shadow Costs"

It is difficult to analyze a proposal for outsourcing technology support when there is minimal accounting for the real costs of supporting technology in-house. "Shadow costs" are those technology support costs which are performed by non-support personnel and therefore do not show up in the technology support budget.

In a small survey of 124 school districts done by the National School Boards Association last fall, 94 percent of schools reported that they rely on teachers, librarians and other non-technology staff to help provide technical support, and 57 percent said they relied on students to help provide support. (Rebecca Weiner, NY Times, April 26, 2000.)

If a computer teacher spends 75% of his time resolving technical issues for his building, it shows up as a "shadow cost" because his salary is budgeted from the teaching staff line. Computer aids may be spending 50% of their time on technical support issues but they are budgeted from the instructional support line and become "shadow costs". In some buildings it is not unusual to have teachers who have become technology gurus in their colleagues eyes spend 20% of their time resolving technical issues for teachers in nearby classrooms.

Before a district can fairly consider performing a cost analysis of outsourcing technology support, it must come to terms with the true cost of in-house support.

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Technology Expertise

Finally, there is the issue of supporting technology with teacher volunteers and part-time student technical staff. Re-purposing teaching staff and students as technical support personnel can work in small and uncomplicated technology environments. Such an approach does not work well in a large, complicated, mission critical, enterprise network consisting of hundreds of networked computers, and printers, administrative and instructional applications, CD-ROM towers, e-mail servers, web servers, and Internet access.

As IP telephony, streaming video, on-line learning, wireless, and other new technologies begin to proliferate the environment, part-time staff expertise and competency will become even a greater issue.

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Why Outsource?

Once a school district has reached a point where it understands the real value of technology, its inherent complexity, and has a general idea of the issues involved in the total cost of ownership, it can then begin to weigh the pro's and con's of outsourcing.

Before making outsourcing decisions, schools and businesses must ask the same question, "What are our core competencies?" For most schools these core competencies are not cable engineering, networking architecture, telecommunications engineering, systems integration, hardware repair, network engineering, and software development.

The decision to outsource areas that are non-core competencies can allow schools to provide high levels of technology service while maintaining a strong focus on educating its staff and students to fully utilize technology; an area of core competency.

Unfortunately, many schools have been caught up in the "cable and chips" of technology initiatives and paid only lip service to the professional development initiatives necessary for a full adoption of technology by the staff; a reverse core competency strategy. The results can be devastating:

• A school has its network wired by the custodian. The network has continual problems throughout the years. The problems become so bad that the teachers write a memo to the school administration requesting that the network be shut down until it is fixed. When the administration brings in a cabling engineer to test the cabling he finds that nearly 90% of the cabling has been cabled incorrectly and does not meet basic industry standards.
  
  
• After weeks of a systems integrator trying to get a school network running a cabling engineer is called in to test the cabling. He finds 75% of the cables in the building do not meet cable standards.
  
  
• The teaching staff at the high school is upset because even though there is a T1 connection getting on the Internet and getting to software can be unreliable and slow. Network engineers find that the network has daisy chained stackable, shared hubs. There is no concern for segmentation of the network and there is no high-speed backbone for the servers and other network resources.
  
  
• A district installs a network with in-house personnel. They do not "lock down" the applications or the workstations. They have no mechanism for teachers to distribute files to students or for students to drop off files for teachers. There is no Internet filtering or virus protection. The network becomes a source of frustration for staff and students because access to the C: drive allows local configurations to be inadvertently destroyed by students and teachers rendering the workstation unusable until rebuilt. Viruses regularly disrupt the system. Students have a number of troubling Internet incidents. The internal staff who are supporting the network are in a constant crisis mode.
  
  
• A district hires its own networking support staff. After a year or two members of the technical staff leave for new positions in private industry. The school goes months without the proper support it needs.
  
  
• A district cables every classroom in every building for data networking and does not wire for electric power for the computers.
  
  
• A school district has its custodians run Category 5 cable throughout the entire elementary school to form the infrastructure for the local area network. Several months after the network is installed it is still not working correctly. When a professional cabling engineer is brought in to diagnose the problem he finds the custodians stapled each Category 5 cable to a piece of plywood in the wiring closet instead of using a patch panel.

Each of these case studies should and could have been avoided by outsourcing key elements of the technology project to competent professionals. It is unfair to ask educators to fill complex technical roles in non-core competency areas. It invites mistakes. A general knowledge is no substitute for a full time professional's expertise. The day is far passed where such complicated enterprise-wide, networks can be designed and installed by part-time volunteers.

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Maintaining Competent In-House Technology Staff

It is important for schools to note that maintaining in-house technical expertise is difficult in a marketplace that offers many lucrative technical opportunities and career paths. Some in-house technicians leave because of salary, some because they need to work with newer and more challenging technology, some because they look at the educational environment and do not see a long-term career path.

It is important to note that META Group Research in an article published in CIO Magazine (1999) found that 80% of the companies surveyed are providing some sort of cash bonus or incentive plan for their IT workers.  In addition, 70% of surveyed companies are paying premiums for hot IT skills.

The cash bonuses and incentives that these companies provide their IT employees fall in the following ranges:

Source: CIO Magazine

The fact that schools are in the public sector, educational agencies eliminate the use of traditional bonuses as a tool for attracting and retaining hot IT talent. However, the lack of such a tool places schools at a disadvantage in the IT human resource marketplace.

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Annual IT Salary Increases

InfoWeek's 1999 Salary Survey provides a look at the average salary increase that IT employees in (18) different job titles could expect:

Source: InfoWeek

The lack of employee incentive plans/bonuses and consistently sub-standard salary increases, raise significant obstacles to attracting and maintaining qualified staff.

Outsourcing technical staff addresses many of these issues.

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Outsourcing Pitfalls

The greatest problem with technology outsourcing lies in finding competent partners. Many schools who outsource their technology initiatives find themselves no better off than their neighbors who keep things in-house.  The following is a list of tips for educators considering outsourcing:

1. Develop an outsourcing strategy that minimizes the number of vendors you work with. The more vendors involved the more complex it is for you to manage and the more difficult it is for you to demand accountability.
   
   
2. Diligently check every reference that is supplied by the vendor. Be sure they have enthusiastic referrals from other schools. Vendors tend to overstate their roles in technology projects. Never outsource to someone without verifying successful prior experience.
   
   
3. Before beginning a partnership with a vendor, jointly develop and approve a list of functional outcomes and a timeline. These outcomes are the items that if completed in the period of time agreed upon will allow you to accept the work and say, "thank you". Many novices to outsourcing get caught up in creating detailed task lists. ( i.e. TCP/IP will be configured on every workstation, rather than stating every workstation will have high speed access to the Internet.) You should provide clearly stated outcomes and leave it to the vendor to worry about the tasks and resources necessary to achieve them.
   
   
4. Be sure to develop a detailed service level agreement (SLA). This agreement needs to specify all the commitments the vendor is making to you and what will happen if the vendor does not live up to these commitments.
   
   
5. If in doubt get a second opinion. Sometimes unreliable vendors are driven by their own self-interest and not by your best interest. They may have special relationships with particular software or hardware manufacturers and steer the project in directions to maximize their profit. They may try to get your project into their "cookie cutter" approach. Checking with another vendor can be a healthy step in the decision making process.

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Summary

Schools are facing rapidly changing and increasingly complex educational and technological challenges. The complexity of learning in today's classrooms, the need for constant improvement in student achievement, and the steady advance of technology are conditions that require core competence in too many functional areas. The educational climate today demands that schools adapt to keep up with these changes.

Outsourcing is a tool that has helped schools improve their educational focus, has freed administration from day-to-day technology operations oversight, and has implemented significant improvements in the level of professional technology service.

The day of the well-meaning novice serving as the primary technology information source for a multi-million dollar technology initiative is over. We do not allow well meaning novices to substitute for competent architects and engineers when we construct the brick and mortar of a school and we should not allow it when we design and build the information technology infrastructure of the school.

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