Getting to grips with leadership and governance of IT

Of all the functions in a school – IT remains the most clouded in mystery for many. This is partly because it has so many facets, but also because the technical and virtual aspects make it less tangible to get a handle on. Neil Limbrick, partner and IT consultant at Limbrick Consultancy LLP, explains the basics of IT leadership and governance

In practice, the oversight of your digital estate should not vary hugely from how you ensure the physical fabric of the school is fit for purpose. The reality is usually somewhat different, with layers of complexity and jargon to muddy the waters.

For many, the assumption is that this jargon is there for no other reason than to provide a smoke screen to help keep oversight at a distance and confuse those not of a technical nature. The reality is that the rapid development of technology has resulted in new problems and new techniques that need new names, however, the confusion is a welcome benefit for some who want to push an agenda or use it for camouflage.

With IT being so important for both administration and teaching and learning, how do you ensure that there is robust leadership, oversight and governance of IT in your organisation if you haven’t yet managed to add software development or systems architecture to the “essentials skills of an SBL” to your CV?

Fortunately, one thing the education sector is not short of is people telling you how to do things! The trick is spotting where guidance can be a help rather than just another weight around your neck.

The DfE Digital Leadership and Governance Standards highlight the need to assign a member of the SLT to be responsible for digital technology within the organisation. On the surface, a very sensible and straight forward suggestion, however deciding who that person is can be difficult.

Whether your IT Support is provided by an in-house team, by a one-man band or by a managed service provider, many of the needs are the same. The ability to confidently challenge and support the service being provided, but also the ability to pull together a vision and direction for how you want your digital estate to serve you. The desire for them to be a member of SLT is so that they then have the authority and visibility to be able to put that vision into practice.

The biggest challenge the nominated strategic lead will face is one already familiar to school business professionals. It will be difficult to know where to get impartial advice as everyone around you potentially has a vested interest. Cyber security is perhaps the most extreme version of this, where there are plenty of people telling you what you need to do, and how their product or solution will solve it. Because of this it can be very isolating as a role because you must question almost everything you are being told and the key to success is often knowing who to listen to on any given subject on any given day.

However, or whoever you decide to take the reigns in leading on your Digital Strategy, and I will go into more detail on that in future articles, the next challenge is deciding which of the many different areas of IT to start.

My usual advice is to first focus on what you need to do to sustain what you already have. Big changes may be on the way, but you cannot possibly know the cost and implications or have a solid fallback position without being confident you understand what you have now.

This includes making sure you have an up-to-date asset register. From that you should easily be able to build a multi-year budget that tells you what you need to spend to stay as you are assuming you replace PC’s every 5/6/7 years and upgrade the Wi-Fi every decade etc.

You should also make sure you understand and have confidence in your backup and recovery capability, and understand the skills, capacity and limitations of the people resources you will be counting on to keep things on the road.

All this information is critical whether you are looking to sustain what you have or bring about significant change, but also to ensure you are in as good a position as you can be if there is a significant event such as a cyber-attack or building trauma.

A digital strategy can then take many forms, but it is important not to confuse it with changes that will be forced upon you such as upgrades to operating systems, replacing old equipment. The strategy should be things you are choosing to do to improve how technology can server you. The document it should be most closely related to is your school improvement / development plan with clear rationale of the impact it will have and the various deadlines and staff input that will be required.

Remember, it is about how the technology is going to serve the school, not the other way around.