Enterprise Architecture Related to My District

Today, I woke up feeling under the weather and had to take a sick day.  To prepare and document my absence, I need to request a substitute using AESOP, create assignments for my students in Google Drive using Slides and Docs, post assignments to Haiku, email my lesson plans to the administrative assistant using Outlook, and then log in to Common Ground to log in to PeopleSoft to formally document my absence. As you can see, my district uses many systems and applications, but many, like the ones previously mentioned, seem to be repetitive tools that do not “talk to each other”--such as AESOP and PeopleSoft. I have recently learned that this is due to weak Enterprise Architecture.

Three years ago, my district decided to merge our educational and informational technology departments with those of our county office. Since this time, there has not been a specific individual or team responsible for the management of technology specifically in my district. Fortunately, a few individuals who work with both district and the county office have supported the growth of technology for our students.  However, for those of us working at the site level, these changes are often confusing.  

According to Bernard, “Enterprise Architecture is a management and technology practice that is devoted to improving the performance of enterprises by enabling them to see themselves in terms of a holistic and integrated view of their strategic direction, business practices, information flows, and technology resources” (2012). The lack of this is evidenced by current challenges faced by teachers in our district:

• Strategic direction - We have one-to-one Chromebooks with a Google Apps for Education access to Google Sites, but the English language arts curriculum leaders currently expect teachers to create paper composition reader's notebook to collect evidence of students’ learning.
• Business practices - We pay for PROMIS to serve as our student information system, but it cannot provide simple features such as usable daily period attendance data reports or automated parent communication.
• Information flow - We recently transitioned to PeopleSoft as our employee self-service tool, but teachers at our site are expected to use it even though no one has trained us or even provided a simple helicopter view.
• Technology resources - We almost have an abundance of this. As previously mentioned, we have Chromebooks in our classrooms and more than ten learning/online monitoring applications, but resources are not allocated to provide professional development and coaching help teachers understand utilize these tools.

As evident in my current district, understanding and application of Enterprise Architecture are necessary in order to increase support for teaching and learning.

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Bernard, S. A. (2012). An introduction to enterprise architecture. Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse.