Purchasing and Implementing a Student Management System at Jefferson County School System

Jefferson County School System (JCSS) is one of the largest school systems in the US. It provides education for about 10,000 students and consists of fourteen elementary schools, two middle schools, and two high schools. In 1976, the school system purchased and implemented the DEC PDP 11/34 computer that helped to develop the student management applications, financial applications, and other student management applications. Today, the JCSS owns four Dell servers running on UNIX and everything is connected via a high-speed TCP/IP network. All the applications were developed by David Meyer, a director of data processing, and his two programmers. Once the current JCSS superintended of school retired, Dr. Harvey Greene was hired. Dr. Greene wanted to replace the existing build in-house software with a purchased system. Meyer, who didn`t agree with this decision leaves the JCSS and being replaced by Carol Andrews, the new Director for Data Processing (Brown, Dehayes, Hoffer, Martin, & Perkins, 2012). Carol Andrews started with the selection of vendors. She selected fourteen members from different school departments to select a vendor. Together, they created a Request for proposal (RFP) that was sent out to twenty three vendors. Specifically, the RFP consisted based on current system`s equipment capabilities and the needs of school. Out of 23 vendors, only 7 sent back their RFP response. After reviewing the responses, the committee selected three vendors that were in line with the original RFP. The three vendors were asked to provide demonstrations to the committee. After visiting the schools where the current systems were in use, the decision was made to purchase the software from Data Systems Inc. (DSI) in June 1995 (Brown at al., 2012). Even though eventually the software was successfully implemented, the analysis of the implementation process is needed to point out several issues and recommendations. First of all, the decision of building in-house JCSS system

References: Brown, C. V., Dehayes, D. W., Hoffer, J. A., Martin , E. W., & Perkins, W. C. (2012). Managing information technology for devry university. (Seventh ed., p. 7). Prentice Hall: Upper Saddle River, New Jersey.