Your school’s grading, reporting and communication tools may be disconnected from other school management software—like admission and enrollment or class management tools like Google Classroom. The cost? You’re spending time moving data between systems, inadvertently creating hours of more work for faculty and staff, while creating the risk of making misinformed decisions resulting from insufficient data and reporting. If you move to a student information system (SIS) that does all the tasks you need, suddenly you gain all sorts of benefits across your campus. Let’s explore how disconnected software contributes to inefficient workflows and how this can be solved with a centralized, integrated SIS.
Finances
When you’re using a variety of different systems from a variety of vendors, you’re often required to maintain a larger IT team to support those systems. When you multiply the number of systems you’re using by the amount of support needed from your IT staff, you’ve suddenly created the need for full-time staff just to be sure your systems are running properly.
The same is true for annual fees and costs associated with each software you run and own. While individually they may have a low cost, when you add together your various systems and all their associated implementation and service fees, you’re often paying more than if you used one consolidated student information system that could support all your day-to-day, on-campus functions.
Accuracy
Any time you export data to move in between systems, you’re creating the opportunity for errors or data loss. Whether there are duplicates in your data caused by software or human error, you’re opening your system up to inaccuracies that can create extra work for your team and uncertainties about which record is the source of truth.
In addition, there is an expectation from families that once they provide you with their family and student data, you’re going to keep it correct and secure. When data is constantly moving around campus, you’re sacrificing data security by involving multiple people and places where the data is stored. Ultimately, you’re not able to create that certainty for your families that you’re handling their data with care.
Time
If you’re using a multitude of systems for your daily student management tasks, it’s going to cost you, your staff and your faculty hours of precious time. Learning new systems is difficult and time consuming. Every time you introduce a new system to your faculty and staff—not to mention your families—you’re spending resources and time training and supporting them. Your faculty might not be as well equipped to use your student management tools as you think. Adopting an SIS that’s fully integrated with easy-to-use tools will help give them the confidence they need to successfully master and embrace new technologies.
Disconnected software can cause inefficiencies, extra work, illegitimate data and require additional resources. While the thought of implementing new technology can sound scary and daunting, a streamlined SIS will be well worth it in the long run.
Take the next step and contact us for a personalized, one-on-one demo to see how Educate can help mitigate these concerns and more.
