ViKiwi finds irrational data infrastructure is the root cause of many of the district’s data issues

The leaders of an urban Ohio school district were planning to implement an assessment and reporting system to enable teachers to gather student performance data more frequently.  But horrible data quality had led to a general mistrust of any data coming out of the district; the CIO worried that superimposing the new system over the existing data infrastructure would only make things worse, killing the new system before it even went live.

 

Poor data quality usually is caused both by humans and by technology. The district engaged ViKiwi to help get the technology fixed.  ViKiwi found that the infrastructure consisted of several ageing standalone silos that had been built piecemeal over time, often without integration with the existing systems, and without regard for future needs.  Most of the data errors were caused by operator error, but many likely would not have occurred had the systems been more user friendly.  Furthermore, the complexity of the infrastructure increased maintenance costs.

 

ViKiwi followed up the analysis with a roadmap for the district to convert the infrastructure to a simpler, more scalable configuration that utilized more up-to-date technologies.