November 2006 — Features

Print this article

Click here to receive your FREE subscription to T.H.E. Journal

Special Section: Resource Management :: Value Judgments

by Neal Starkman

ARE YOUR TECHNOLOGY EXPENDITURES PROVING TO BE MONEY WELL SPENT? A NEW ONLINE TCO TOOL WILL LET YOU KNOW.

Resource Management CONGRATULATIONS! You’ve just been hired as the superintendent of Unnamed Unified School District No. 4! Everyone’s looking to you as a leader, an innovator, someone who can bring the district’s students and staff the technologies of the 21st century with a minimum of fuss and money. Be modern, but be smart, say the members of the school board, eyeing their budget. Get our children what they need, but don’t go crazy, say the parents, anticipating a tax hike. Make it fun, but make it easy, say the teachers, fearing humiliation in front of their tech-savvy students. Look at these colorful brochures, say the vendors, knocking on your office door. Suddenly, this job doesn’t quite look like the plum it did before.

Rich Kaestner feels your pain.

Kaestner is the TCO (total cost of ownership) project director for the Consortium for School Networking, a national nonprofit group that helps K-12 schools effectively use technology to improve both teaching and learning.

CoSN, in tandem with Gartner, a research and advisory firm, has developed a free, vendorneutral, online tool—in the words of its website, “to help schools and school districts make sound budgetary decisions, conduct technology planning in an organized way, establish a baseline for future analysis, and maximize benefits from their investments in technology.” The tool is available here; so far, 1,700 school districts have signed up to use it.

How does it work? First, district (or school) technology staff read background about the tool online. Then they gather information that will form the basis for their analysis. The tool includes the following components:

  • a web-based interactive survey instrument
  • a set of definitions to guide districts in their data collection
  • a discussion of methodology, suggesting best practices for undertaking a TCO assessment
  • an introductory section, discussing the benefits of monitoring TCO
  • case studies that describe how school districts of varying sizes used the TCO tool’s metrics to assess their own technology implementations

Next, the district feeds its information into the tool, which calculates metrics that can be measured against the high and low numbers computed for the case-study districts. A report is generated, revealing how much of your money is going where, and how that compares to other districts.