March 2008 — Features
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Mix Master
"Because we build the agents that connect other people's software, we're often seen as a third-party solutions provider," Moravec says. "We think of ourselves as Switzerland, because we're decidedly vendor-neutral."
According to one industry analyst, the world is choking on data. A typical enterprise stored 10 times more data in 2007 than in 2000.
Among other reasons, Moravec likes the SIF methodology because it exposes business processes-those procedures or activities that support the objectives of a company or school. That's one of the great things about SIF, he says. "And I think that's going to be more important in the schools in the future. In the private sector, business processes have been well defined over the years. Now we're seeing an increase in the number of administrators entering the school systems from corporations, and those managers are looking at processes."
This is Unit 4's first SIF implementation, so Integrity will have to implement the SIF infrastructure as part of the first phase of the project. That implementation will require the district to define its own business processes, as SIFA puts it, "for and around data." Describing its processes will help Unit 4 to define so-called data-quality best practices for the district, and enforce the implementation of those practices as they are automated by Integrity's solution.
That said, Fruth hastens to add that SIF is not a business specification being used in education, but rather a data integration spec designed specifically to meet the needs of schools, districts, and their governing agencies.
SIF also allows Integrity to bring best-of-breed technologies to this project, Moravec says, including components from Microsoft, Edustructures, and technology integration services provider CPSI. The result will be a complete data warehouse and business intelligence solution designed to help Unit 4 improve its teaching, learning, and administrative processes.
"This project is definitely a collaborative effort between our staff and the staff at Champaign," says Moravec. "They want to be able to own the solution and not be locked in with a vendor. Using the Microsoft SQL platform and the reporting services associated with it, we will be able to maintain that neutrality. And they'll own the tools after we walk away."
One of the reasons Champaign's Unit 4 chose Integrity, Harden says, is the amount of customization the district will require to connect the disparate data in its systems. "We have a lot of homegrown systems," he says, "and Integrity understood that. They offered the best customization package, which, given our particular reporting challenge, made it pretty clear which vendor we should go with."
