The proliferation of inexpensive (or expensive in some cases!) cloud-based solutions has allowed school data to roam freely across platforms, programs, and departments. This has created many great opportunities for communication and decision-making, but in many cases, it’s become the wild west of data management.
To keep this data consistent across systems, it’s important to take several steps to review where you’re at and come up with a plan and workflow to improve as a school. Once completed, you can feel confident that your data is consistent and stays consistent throughout the school year. For the purposes of this article, we are going to focus on maintaining demographic information. Demographics include personally identifiable information (PII) such as names, addresses, emails, ethnicity, etc. There are many other types of data a school has that are more module-specific, but demographics are the base information across nearly all school systems.
First, do a systems assessment. Take the time to list the solutions you have (paid or free) where school data is stored. Then look at how the data is getting into those systems and flowing between them, if at all. Finally evaluate security and determine who has access to manage or update information. It’s impossible to know how to manage data if you’re not sure how it’s getting there in the first place! Then take the time to get everything up to date between systems before you look to adjust things.
Next, set up integrations. Review what you have and determine if there are opportunities to link systems you already have. That might be within the same ecosystem, or it might be linking a third party solution with your SIS. Either way, if there are opportunities to move away from manual entry or spreadsheet uploads, pursue those.
After that, develop clear workflows. It’s time to decide how data will flow moving forward. Will parents be allowed to update their own information? If so, will there be a review or approval process before it writes? If everything isn’t integrated, how will that data be updated in siloed systems, and when?
Next, identify a core group of power users on campus that need to have write access to the system, and limit write access to that group. The less cooks in the kitchen, the cleaner your data will be. Then, train them. Spend time working through not only the hands-on processes of reviewing or inputting updated information, but also going over the workflows you created so that there is clear understanding of who does what and when. Also provide a repository with the written processes for everyone to follow.
Finally, schedule regular data audits. Identify two to three times in a school year where you and/or your group of power users reviews the data in the various systems to see if everything is in sync and evaluate if modifications to workflows are necessary.
Managing data is not hard concept, but having the right workflows in place along with properly identified and trained people will give you the results you are looking for. Your parents and fellow coworkers will appreciate knowing that their information is clean and consistent across each system they use at your school each day!