I work in IT for a K-12 School District as well, under much the same conditions. What we have found is that standardization is the key to getting a handle on cost. We had to sell this however, and did so through the use of an analysis of the cost of standardization versus the cost of non-standardization. To do this, you must be able to explain the total cost of ownership over the lifespan of the computer. Often times what seems like a great bargain ends up costing far more in the end, because people take the internal cost for maintenance for granted and don't include it in the overall cost of the computing resource.
Total Cost of Ownership
A 2008 study by the Gartner Group determined that a $1,200 dollar PC could have a 4-year TCO as high as $5,867 per year. However properly locking down and managing the computer could cut that by as much as 42% or $3,413.
Rick Kaestner of the Consortium of School Networking (CoSN) has a wonderful presentation about TCO as well as a great tool to help determine what your TCO is. I would suggest running several current case scenarios and a best case scenario for comparison.
While cookie cutters work in the school lunch room, it has been my experience that many school districts fail to draw a distinction between the needs of instructional and business portions of operations. There is really no "one size fits all" solutions. The single platform approach tends to fail in the face of specialized requirements so it is important from a cost-effectiveness standpoint to analyze these areas and group their requirements accordingly, then focus standardized environments that meet the needs of these groups.
The Importance of Partnerships
Districts are also somewhat myopic in how they construct purchasing agreements, often confusing the terms price and value. Inexpensive doesn't always mean valuable. As an example, one district I worked for determined that it wanted to lower the initial aquisition costs, and to that end produced and evaluated an RFP containing evaluation criteria focused primarily on initial cost. After awarding the contract and receiving the first batch of computers, the district became rapidly aware that they had an issue when 50% or more of the machines were dead-on-arrival, requiring additional time and expense to return. This affected the value over time portion of the TCO of this equipment and after much consernation, the district was forced at additional cost to rebid the equipment, modify the evaluation criteria and waste implementation time overturning the original decision.
The lack of insight with initial aquisition costs led the district in the long run to changes its way of thinking and to embrace longer-term contracts, but even more importantly it became aware of the advantages of long term partnerships. Long term partnerships bring some intangible items into the equation such as the availability of higher end resources such as access to engineers, as well as assistance with integration and other things that are important to business. On the instructional side, many of the larger computer companies maintain divisions who specialize in working with K-12 environments. The bottom line is that it is important to get a handle on the big picture and to make as many people as possible aware of the current picture and give them of a vision of how things could improve. School districts tend to pay attention when someone says "I can save us money, get better service and have data to prove it."
I must take exception with your line of reasoning. Merriam-Webster's Dictionary defines the term streotype as follows: "a standardized mental picture that is held in common by members of a group and that represents an oversimplified opinion, prejudiced attitude, or uncritical judgment". Your argument exhibits several of the characteristics of a stereotype.
OVERSIMPLIFICATION
First your comments represent an oversimplified opinion. Your argument is a hasty generalization in that it lacks sufficient supporting evidence to the contrary. The term "Most" is unquantified. Does most represent 90%, 80%, 51% or is it simply a nebulous attribute? The assumption that "most" Texans have done "X" means that you either have data from which your conclusion was drawn, or that you know the entire population, in this case "Texans." Since I am a Texan, a member of the population in question and don't know you, I must assume you are working from some source of data that you have chosen not to share with us. I have personally spent time in over 25 states in the United States as well as Mexico and Europe. Texas is home to a great many large technology companies and as such many of those employees travel outside of the state as part of their work. It amuses me to think of an employee refusing to travel because he is scare of the stereotypical "liberal."
CRITICALITY
Second, your argument lacks criticality in that it doesn't present examples from both sides of the argument and it fails to establish a logical set of facts that lead to a conclusion. For instance, your argument doesn't offer comparisons with other states. The barbeque example fails to make an adequate comparision among differing states barbeque or for that matter against Carribean, Central or South American or other world-wide fire-based braising traditions. My personal experience in sampling barbeque culture throughout the United States and Mexico ultimately has lead me to the conclusion that food quality is primarily dependent on each individual purveyor of food, and not on the abstract geographical boundaries in which it resides. As to the term Barbeque, you are correct that etymologically speaking, the word is derived from the Indigenous Carribean Taino's word barabicu, but that doesn't mean that cultures were ignorant of the slow cooking of meat over coals in a fire-pit before Europeans encountered the Tainu. This method of cooking has historical analogs in cultures as diverse as Moroccan Berbers in antiquity, Polynesian and Hawaiian Islanders prior to the arrival of Europeans, as well as Meso-Amercian, African and Asian cultures. The presupposition that it was spread by Europeans is in my opinion a common Eurocentrist view. While this is a nice historical aside, it has little to do with the quality of barbeque. This type of reasoning falsely assumes that knowledge of the origin of an item is necessary to fully enjoy or properly prepare barbeque. Indeed if we prepared it using the Taino method, most of us would have a huge hole in our backyard and would spend the weekends hunting wild bore.
STEREOTYPE vs INDIVIDUAL
Next, as neither a proponent of liberal nor conserve dogma, but the employer of common sense in decision-making, your comment that we Texans don't want to leave the state because we think everywhere else is a "liberul [sic] hellhole" misses the point. Just as in every other corner of the United States, Texans are busy working to earn a living and like other Americans lack the disposable income for leisure travel. Now please understand that this does not absolve the denizens of the arbitrarly geographically bounded, cultural heterogenous stereotype that you call "Texans" from having among its ranks numerous ignorant "clods". However individual interactions during my travels, has made me aware that ignorant clods exist as a portion of the population in the places I have visited. I would note that they occur across such artificial bounds as race, culture, geography, nation or religion. The other thing
This Texan calls the Canadian fallacy an argumentum ad hominem.
I no more want the government pouring through my data than I want my neighbor peering through my windows as I dry myself off after a shower. The desire for privacy does not necessarily entail wrongdoing. If we assume that those in the government employees, who would have access to look at the proposed information, were 100% unbiased while interpreting our intentions from a minimum of information, it might be marginally acceptable. However, the people observing the results of this type of inforamtion gathering are humans, given to wild flights of imagination, prejudice, arrogance, as well as deductive and inductive reasoning failures among many other faults.
--
The desire to have access to this type of information is not seated in trying to weed out child pornographers, terrorists, criminals or other online thuggery, it is a control tactic, steeped in the knowledge that power is derived from having a greater amount of information and being able to act on it. William Pitt The Elder once said, "Unlimited power is apt to corrupt the minds of those who possess it." Individual freedoms lost are freedoms regained at a price too high for most of us to bear.
Slashdot Mirror
I work in IT for a K-12 School District as well, under much the same conditions. What we have found is that standardization is the key to getting a handle on cost. We had to sell this however, and did so through the use of an analysis of the cost of standardization versus the cost of non-standardization. To do this, you must be able to explain the total cost of ownership over the lifespan of the computer. Often times what seems like a great bargain ends up costing far more in the end, because people take the internal cost for maintenance for granted and don't include it in the overall cost of the computing resource.
Total Cost of Ownership
A 2008 study by the Gartner Group determined that a $1,200 dollar PC could have a 4-year TCO as high as $5,867 per year. However properly locking down and managing the computer could cut that by as much as 42% or $3,413.
Rick Kaestner of the Consortium of School Networking (CoSN) has a wonderful presentation about TCO as well as a great tool to help determine what your TCO is. I would suggest running several current case scenarios and a best case scenario for comparison.
While cookie cutters work in the school lunch room, it has been my experience that many school districts fail to draw a distinction between the needs of instructional and business portions of operations. There is really no "one size fits all" solutions. The single platform approach tends to fail in the face of specialized requirements so it is important from a cost-effectiveness standpoint to analyze these areas and group their requirements accordingly, then focus standardized environments that meet the needs of these groups.
The Importance of Partnerships
Districts are also somewhat myopic in how they construct purchasing agreements, often confusing the terms price and value. Inexpensive doesn't always mean valuable. As an example, one district I worked for determined that it wanted to lower the initial aquisition costs, and to that end produced and evaluated an RFP containing evaluation criteria focused primarily on initial cost. After awarding the contract and receiving the first batch of computers, the district became rapidly aware that they had an issue when 50% or more of the machines were dead-on-arrival, requiring additional time and expense to return. This affected the value over time portion of the TCO of this equipment and after much consernation, the district was forced at additional cost to rebid the equipment, modify the evaluation criteria and waste implementation time overturning the original decision.
The lack of insight with initial aquisition costs led the district in the long run to changes its way of thinking and to embrace longer-term contracts, but even more importantly it became aware of the advantages of long term partnerships. Long term partnerships bring some intangible items into the equation such as the availability of higher end resources such as access to engineers, as well as assistance with integration and other things that are important to business. On the instructional side, many of the larger computer companies maintain divisions who specialize in working with K-12 environments. The bottom line is that it is important to get a handle on the big picture and to make as many people as possible aware of the current picture and give them of a vision of how things could improve. School districts tend to pay attention when someone says "I can save us money, get better service and have data to prove it."
I must take exception with your line of reasoning. Merriam-Webster's Dictionary defines the term streotype as follows: "a standardized mental picture that is held in common by members of a group and that represents an oversimplified opinion, prejudiced attitude, or uncritical judgment". Your argument exhibits several of the characteristics of a stereotype.
OVERSIMPLIFICATION
First your comments represent an oversimplified opinion. Your argument is a hasty generalization in that it lacks sufficient supporting evidence to the contrary. The term "Most" is unquantified. Does most represent 90%, 80%, 51% or is it simply a nebulous attribute? The assumption that "most" Texans have done "X" means that you either have data from which your conclusion was drawn, or that you know the entire population, in this case "Texans." Since I am a Texan, a member of the population in question and don't know you, I must assume you are working from some source of data that you have chosen not to share with us. I have personally spent time in over 25 states in the United States as well as Mexico and Europe. Texas is home to a great many large technology companies and as such many of those employees travel outside of the state as part of their work. It amuses me to think of an employee refusing to travel because he is scare of the stereotypical "liberal."
CRITICALITY
Second, your argument lacks criticality in that it doesn't present examples from both sides of the argument and it fails to establish a logical set of facts that lead to a conclusion. For instance, your argument doesn't offer comparisons with other states. The barbeque example fails to make an adequate comparision among differing states barbeque or for that matter against Carribean, Central or South American or other world-wide fire-based braising traditions. My personal experience in sampling barbeque culture throughout the United States and Mexico ultimately has lead me to the conclusion that food quality is primarily dependent on each individual purveyor of food, and not on the abstract geographical boundaries in which it resides. As to the term Barbeque, you are correct that etymologically speaking, the word is derived from the Indigenous Carribean Taino's word barabicu, but that doesn't mean that cultures were ignorant of the slow cooking of meat over coals in a fire-pit before Europeans encountered the Tainu. This method of cooking has historical analogs in cultures as diverse as Moroccan Berbers in antiquity, Polynesian and Hawaiian Islanders prior to the arrival of Europeans, as well as Meso-Amercian, African and Asian cultures. The presupposition that it was spread by Europeans is in my opinion a common Eurocentrist view. While this is a nice historical aside, it has little to do with the quality of barbeque. This type of reasoning falsely assumes that knowledge of the origin of an item is necessary to fully enjoy or properly prepare barbeque. Indeed if we prepared it using the Taino method, most of us would have a huge hole in our backyard and would spend the weekends hunting wild bore.
STEREOTYPE vs INDIVIDUAL
Next, as neither a proponent of liberal nor conserve dogma, but the employer of common sense in decision-making, your comment that we Texans don't want to leave the state because we think everywhere else is a "liberul [sic] hellhole" misses the point. Just as in every other corner of the United States, Texans are busy working to earn a living and like other Americans lack the disposable income for leisure travel. Now please understand that this does not absolve the denizens of the arbitrarly geographically bounded, cultural heterogenous stereotype that you call "Texans" from having among its ranks numerous ignorant "clods". However individual interactions during my travels, has made me aware that ignorant clods exist as a portion of the population in the places I have visited. I would note that they occur across such artificial bounds as race, culture, geography, nation or religion. The other thing
This Texan calls the Canadian fallacy an argumentum ad hominem. I no more want the government pouring through my data than I want my neighbor peering through my windows as I dry myself off after a shower. The desire for privacy does not necessarily entail wrongdoing. If we assume that those in the government employees, who would have access to look at the proposed information, were 100% unbiased while interpreting our intentions from a minimum of information, it might be marginally acceptable. However, the people observing the results of this type of inforamtion gathering are humans, given to wild flights of imagination, prejudice, arrogance, as well as deductive and inductive reasoning failures among many other faults. -- The desire to have access to this type of information is not seated in trying to weed out child pornographers, terrorists, criminals or other online thuggery, it is a control tactic, steeped in the knowledge that power is derived from having a greater amount of information and being able to act on it. William Pitt The Elder once said, "Unlimited power is apt to corrupt the minds of those who possess it." Individual freedoms lost are freedoms regained at a price too high for most of us to bear.