Primary Topic Channel: School Administration
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In 2000, Maricopa County, Arizona, began looking for a new finance and human-resource information system for its 26 school districts. The county’s CIMS legacy system was showing its age and causing more headaches for the business office with every passing payroll period.
“The system was outdated, slow, not well supported, and restricted to very select, pre-defined functions,” recalls Jean Bandes, information technology operations manager for the Maricopa County School Superintendent’s Office. “Training new people on it was difficult, and we were getting an increasing number of requests from our customers that the system couldn’t address. Unless you were a programmer, it was very hard to get anything out of the database besides a few reports.”
Maricopa County schools have more than 600,000 K-12 students and 13,000 school employees. The process by which this school system solved its problems is well worth studying, especially for school districts facing similar technology issues or for those considering the purchase of a new finance/HR business information system.
Start with good people and a plan
In 2000, the county formed a 10-person committee to spearhead the process of purchasing a new Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. The committee, which included representatives from the county and each school system, was charged with the following goals and objectives:
IT knowledge and people skills
Having the right people on the committee was essential. The committee’s IT talent quotient was quite high, but people skills were equally important. Those qualities included teamwork, motivation, and the ability to communicate effectively--within the committee, naturally, but also in the larger context of Maricopa County and the entire school system.
“Our business and administrative offices have always had great employees over the years,” says Bandes. “That makes a huge difference. They’re smart, nice to our customers, motivated, and very capable when it comes to training other people, which is essential.”
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