Barriers

As a senior member of staff of an educational institution, you may feel that, despite regularly spending spending large sums on ICT systems, equipment and staff, you have not seen the expected benefits. You may feel uneasy that the various Government Agencies, the IT industry or your IT staff are steering decision making, rather than investments being made to meet the educational and administrative needs of the organisation. You see other institutions apparently making progress with their ICT, but feel that your own is not moving forwards.

There can be many reasons for this, but usually one or more of the factors listed below apply and are barriers to progress. In our experience, many institutions:

• Do not have an overall ICT plan or strategy, linked to the learning and teaching plans of the institution. 

• Have IT support staff who do not appreciate the overall ICT needs of an institution, because they are focussed on technology.
   
• Rely on costly ICT decisions being made by IT or administrative staff who may not have sufficient experience of the wider picture of current educational IT developments.
   
• Have teaching, support or research staff who spend valuable time and effort repeatedly developing ad-hoc and undocumented solutions to problems.
   
• Have fragmented development with isolated pockets of excellent practice unconnected to other developments.
   
• Have IT staff whose management and IT skills are no longer adequate for the complex network systems now required to support ICT in education.
   
• Have not attempted to link administrative and teaching systems leading to much staff frustration, duplication of effort and trying to integrate data from incompatible technologies.
   
• Have spent money on systems which are not fully utilised because of the lack of the right resources, lack of integration with other systems, lack of training or other organisational problems.
   
• Not be aware of the many excellent systems specifically available for the education marketplace, and struggle to use those developed for the business user.
   
• Spend more than they need to, on hardware, systems and software, because they are not aware of the large discounts or special software licenses available to the education sector.
   
• Use suppliers who are not focused on the education sector and are unaware of the special requirements of ICT in the classroom.

If any of these scenarios sound familiar, then please contact us for an informal discussion on how we can help you overcome these barriers. With our assistance, you can develop your ICT infrastructure to obtain maximum benefit and improved performance from your investment in IT.

Feeling frustrated by ICT?