A Case Study at Jefferson County School Systems

Jefferson County School System (JCSS) is one of the largest public school systems in US. It provides education to almost 80,000 students a year. It comprises of fourteen elementary, two middle and two high schools educating 10,000 students a year. In 1976, the corporation bought and installed the DEC PDP 11/34 computer which helped in developing student management computer applications and other financial applications over a period of time. Presently, they have four Dell servers running on UNIX and all the computers in JCSS are connected to the system through TCP/IP network. All the applications were developed by the director of Data processing, David Meyer and his two programmers. Dr. Harvey Greene was appointed as the new Superintendent of JCSS. He appointed a task force to analyze the data processing systems at JCSS to replace the existing built-in systems with purchased systems. David Myer was disappointed with Greene's decision of implementing purchase systems and removing his programmers without his concern. He resigned to his job and left JCSS. Carol Andrews was appointed as the new director for Data processing department.

The first task of Carol is the selection of vendor. She proposed a committee of fourteen members representing from different departments of the school to select a vendor. The committee prepared a RFP (Request for proposal) and was sent to 23 vendors. RFP was prepared based on existing system's capabilities and drawbacks and the needs of school, after discussing with people of different departments. Seven vendors responded to the RFP and the committee narrowed down to three vendors after serious evaluations. Then the committee extended their evaluation by asking the bidders to present demonstrations. They made telephone calls and visited the sites where the bidders system was in use and finally selected Data Systems Inc (DSI) in June 1995 as the final vendor for implementing their purchase system.

JCSS implemented the new system by installing new software of DSI. New problems started to encounter in the student management system during the scheduling process. Demographic data of the students was transferred successfully but scheduling became a disaster. JCSS was unable to complete the schedules by the end of spring semester. When the fall semester began, employees working on the systems didn't know what they are doing and encountered several problems. The systems took almost 20 minutes to schedule a class, resulting long waiting lines of students and parents. The grading system was not feasible for the teachers and JCSS had to hire clerks to enter the grade forms filled out by teachers. During this transformation process, several problems showed up which were responsible for the early obstacles. DSI did not train the employees in an efficient way. Many people are unaware of the new system and did not know how it functions. User resistance became main problem due to improper training