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Schools Are Taking Steps to Manage Costs of Tech Support, CoSN-NSBA Survey Shows
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For Release November 11, 1999
A survey of some of the nation’s most technologically advanced school districts
indicates that nine out of ten have adopted strategies to try to control the
costs of supporting their computer networks. However, only about a third of
them say they have actually adopted benchmarks or standards to measure how well
they are doing.
Those findings emerged from a recent online survey conducted by the Consortium
for School Networking and the National School Boards Association’s ITTE: Education
Technology Programs. The survey was developed as part of "Taking TCO to
the Classroom," a CoSN initiative designed to help school administrators
understand the concept of Total Cost of Ownership so they can budget adequately
for the long-term operation of their computers and networks. Intel Corp. provided
support for this phase of the project.
More than 120 schools or districts that are members of the NSBA’s Technology
Leadership Network voluntarily participated in the survey during the first week
of October. The districts represented more than one-fourth of the TLN membership.
More than 90 percent of the respondents said all of the schools in their district
were connected to a Wide Area Network and 83 percent said every school had its
own Local Area Network. The respondent group included districts of all sizes,
but larger districts were over-represented when compared with their relative
proportion nationwide.
While the study was not a scientific one, it does provide a useful snapshot
of how some of the country’s most technologically advanced districts are supporting
their computer users and maintaining their networks. Among the findings:
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Roughly 90 percent of respondents said they had pursued strategies to try to control the cost of tech support. The
most frequently cited strategy from a list of nine was to "rely on teachers,
librarians and other non-technology staff to provide support." Close behind
were "limited the ability of teachers and students to modify the way computers
are configured" and "taken steps to standardize the model of computer
used throughout the district."
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More than half of the responding districts said they also relied on students to provide support as a way of controlling costs.
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Only 38.7 percent of the respondents said they had adopted standards or benchmarks to measure the effectiveness of
their computer support. Among those who have adopted a benchmark, "the length of time it takes to respond to a call for help"
and "the amount of time the network is down" were the most frequently used standards from a list of five.
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Only 6.5 percent of respondents said they had managed to standardize on a single operating system. However, about
57 percent support only two or three operating systems. Among the largest school
districts (those with 20,000 students or more), 39 percent of respondents said
they had to support more than five different operating systems.
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Sixty-four percent of respondents said they provide a "help desk" that computer users can call for help.
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About 55 percent of respondents said they outsource at least some of their support.
"When businesses realized they had to control the rising costs of providing support to their networked computers, they began
to understand Total Cost of Ownership and make decisions based on how much it would cost to operate
their computers over the long term," said Keith Krueger, executive director
of CoSN. "The goal of our TCO project is to help school administrators
and technology directors understand all of the costs associated with operating
their computers and networks so they can be used in the most cost-efficient
way to improve the education of our children."
"The NSBA’s Technology Leadership Network includes many of the districts
that pioneered the use of technology in the nation’s classroom," added
Cheryl Williams, director of education technology programs for the NSBA. "We
hope that the survey will help districts share experiences and learn from each
other as they cope with the challenge of providing adequate support."
The results of the survey will be discussed in further detail at a workshop
on Total Cost of Ownership that will be held Thursday, Nov. 11 as part of the
NSBA’s 1999 Technology & Learning Conference in Dallas. The session will
be held at 8:45 a.m. in Room D-268 of the Dallas Convention Center. Sara Fitzgerald,
director of the TCO project for CoSN, who analyzed the survey results, will
lead the workshop.
Further details of the study will be posted on the Web sites of CoSN (www.classroomtco.org) and
the NSBA (www.nsba.org) following the conclusion of the Technology & Learning Conference.
For more information, contact:
Rich Kaestner
Project Director
Taking TCO to the Classroom
Consortium for School Networking
E-mail: richk@alyrica.net
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