How an ICT Organisational Review Can Support Your School’s Future

Despite rapid evolution within the ICT Industry, the ICT support environments in most schools remain largely unchanged. The old way is to stick with on-premise infrastructure, management, and support. Applications tend to be ’served‘ internally, and most security measures are also carried out by internal staff. There may also be a fully managed fleet of computers for the IT team to contend with.

Rethinking Outdated IT Practices

Industry trends are challenging educational institutions to rethink these outdated IT practices. These trends include a gradual movement to cloud services and bring your own devices (BYOD), evolution of core office systems, consideration of more sophisticated CRM/ERP systems to rationalise applications, rapid development of data analytics and AI, plus reallocation of spending toward upskilling staff to use new technologies.

New Roles to Support Changing Priorities

There is also a need for schools to look at the tasks existing IT-related roles carry out, and the new
roles that are in demand. Some examples are below.

• Operational Managers at the senior leadership level can take away peripheral management tasks often loaded on ICT support teams.
• Application managers who are the ‘owners’ of the core applications in a school can handle all integration, maintenance, and training issues.
• Pedagogical coaches (e-Learning facilitators) look to train and guide staff to get the most educational benefit from the expensive technology provided to them.
• Business and data analysts analyse increasingly complex school environments and in the case of data analytics, start realising the significant potential.
• Power Platform specialists are skilled at optimising Power BI, Power Apps, Power Pages, Power Automate, Microsoft Copilot Studio, AI Builder, as well as Microsoft Dataverse.
• Cloud specialists understand and can manage private or public cloud applications in the Azure, AWS, or Google environments.

Is it Time for a Restructure?

Considering all of the factors listed above, it may well be time for an analysis of your school’s current ICT support structure and design. If that’s on your agenda, Atturra can assist. Our consultants can work with your key stakeholders in three key areas.

1. Initial Workshop

2. Develop Structure

3. Develop Role Descriptions

Curious to find out more? If so, reach out to our K-12 Industry Lead, Brett Auton directly for a chat at brett.auton@atturra.com