Education

Value Proposition for Education Institutions:

Manage more locations with limited IT staff
Make your IT staff more effective while spending less
Enable-IT to detect issues before teachers/students do
Reduce the number of users opened incidents
Reduce time to resolution
Reduce the number of management tools

Education institutions today, more than ever before are in constant transformation. Most of the key tools enabling the educational process, content acquisition and delivery, lesson planning, testing and certification, grades, and artifacts management are now Cloud-based. This evolution highlights how critical IT infrastructures, wired and wireless are to the educational process. Education institutions will have to keep up with technology evolution and adapt to new management models dealing with these distributed service models.

School/College/University IT Challenges

We have limited IT resources covering a broad area, many technologies, and many users
It is difficult to address issues since users are not familiar with IT
Addressing Cloud-based services issues is difficult due to finger-pointing between various providers
Teachers/Instructors/educators/professors are very vocal in highlighting issues they experience
We are in constant technology adoption mode, have no time to operationalize it
We need to better understand what our teachers and students think about our services and become proactive in addressing their issues

Even enterprises are having issues managing their own infrastructures: 52% of medium-large enterprises use 16 Network Management Tools or more yet over 40% of the incidents reported by users go unnoticed by IT while IT staff spends 37% of their time troubleshooting issues. These numbers are even worst in schools, colleges, Universities due to a shortage of staff and resources.

School IT Must Change its Perspective on Operations

Educators and students demand access to more technologies and services while expecting utility-level availability. These users compare the offering on school premises with their experience with other commercial services and good, consistent quality of service is table stakes. There are no laurels for good operations yet definite shaming for major outages, whether they are in the purview of IT or not. IT service acquisition, technology deployments, and operations need to become more efficient. The only way to drive this continued improvement is to change perspectives:

From technologies to processes
From no service data to user experience-oriented data
From continuously putting out fires to being proactive
From busy work to automation

All these changes must happen around a unifying concept: Service Orientation. Because you provide services that are critical to your teachers and students, measuring the quality of the services you deliver based on User Experience helps sharpen your operational model. User experience-centric management is not just a technology discussion. It is a dramatic change in perspective from today’s silo approach. This change in perspective and priorities can be achieved with minimal technology investment and with purposeful operational integration. ITsonar from Nephos6 increases your real-time service intelligence 24X7 using sophisticated and tiered network effects, it enables a small IT staff to manage Cloud services effectively.

It’s built from the ground up to focus you and your processes on what really matters: User Experience. Administrators of educational institutions appreciate ITsonar’s ability to keep them; 1) informed about the quality of services delivered (SLAs), 2) proactive in identifying issues and reducing the support costs, 3) reducing downtime through faster fault domain isolation. Your schools and technical teams avoid the finger-pointing that comes when no one knows what happens to a service, particularly for SaaS-delivered services. These are the financial and emotional distractions IT operations teams cannot afford in a competitive environment. Keeping up is hard enough, and an automated solution is a welcome addition when it helps the teachers and students have a great educational experience. ITsonar integration with leading ITSMs brings ITOM automation closer to reality. When you contact us, we listen to your unique story, learn about your school’s profiles, your technologies, and your process profile. We can then work with you to understand how we can help you achieve the benefits of simplified IT operations.

Cloudy Applications Driving Change in School IT

We live in the cloud-enabled World, the application economy, the digital economy, and the customer experience economy – all at once. Cloud applications are becoming the foundation of the educational process. Whether you are ready or not, cloud adoption accelerates IT transformation. It’s troubling however that so many enterprises have been forced to operate with an unclear and uneven view of service performance. We have heard everything from the blame game of why a service failed to unsettling stories of bad application choices. If you were an air traffic controller, would you like a confused view of your airplanes? If you worked at Amazon, would you like a limited view of your inventory? Of course not since flight path intelligence sits at the heart of what air traffic controllers do and inventory intelligence is the lifeblood of Amazon. Services exist at the core of your operation, you cannot afford a cloudy view of services.

User Experience Drives the Credibility and Effectiveness of IT

When your teachers and students are happy, everything improves. You will see the trust in IT increase and conversation shift from break-fix to IT being the team player that enables the educational process. The stakeholders will no longer be angrily complaining, they will become your advocates. The opposite is true. When you cannot identify a problem origination in a service, delays are created and the UX suffers. Also, with the automated monitoring and triage capability, the limited IT staff can remain focused on higher-value activities. By using ITsonar, you will be able to simulate the user experience long before the application is put into operation. In other words, almost all risk is removed from software deployment prior to the actual User Experience. UX value using ITsonar:

UX data and proactive monitoring enables you to optimize network management and service management processes for both agility and quality
UX data provides business-relevant guidance on service purchasing, service performance, and technology enablement
UX monitoring is the key metric to successfully manage cloud-based services and their delivery over the existing network infrastructure
UX’s improvements can be measured and presented in the board room by your CIO