For Denver Public Schools, IT maturity meant shifting the entire operation to a service and project management single platform. eSchool News breaks down their approach to improved IT maturity, system consolidation, and making data-driven decisions.
By Derek Newton
November 22, 2017
Denver Public Schools (DPS) has nearly 14,000 employees-just about as many as IKEA does in the US or Facebook does in total. DPS is among the 50 largest school districts in the country (and growing) with almost 200 schools and offices and an annual budget of more than $900 million.
Within DPS is the Business Information Systems (BIS) group, an organization which provides support of Financial and HR systems at the district. Like most large school districts, BIS spends a considerable amount of time investing in internal systems and technologies designed to automate manual work and increase efficiency for its customers, track compliance, and provide a consistent set of processes to form the foundation of operations at the District.
Not too long ago, BIS relied on a combination of Google spreadsheets, Google Slides, and Google forms to manage project requests and resources. They didn’t even have a central document tracking system.