What every board should ask before approving an SIS

Boards approve school information systems on the strength of a demonstration and a price. Both are the wrong things to weigh heavily. A demonstration shows the software working on the vendor's data, and the price shown is rarely the price paid in year three.

These are the questions worth the agenda time. We sell an SIS, so treat this as interested advice — but a vendor who cannot answer these plainly is telling you something.

1. Who owns the data, and how do we get it out?

The institution should own its records outright, and should be able to export them in full — including historical results and financial history — at any time, without a fee and without asking. Ask specifically what happens on the day you leave. An answer involving a support ticket and a quotation is a warning.

2. What happens at the end of term?

Term end is when a school system either earns its keep or costs three weeks of evenings. Ask to see reporting done on a full cohort, in the school's own report card format, from mark entry through to release — not a single sample record.

3. Which of our current systems does this replace?

Name them. If the answer is “none, it sits alongside”, the school is buying a new system and keeping the old ones, and the reconciliation work between them stays. Consolidation is where the return on an SIS comes from; a system that adds a database rather than removing several rarely pays for itself.

4. Who does the migration, and what happens to history?

Migration is the single most underestimated line in any implementation. Establish who does the work, whether historical results and outstanding balances come across or only current-year data, and who signs off that the migrated figures reconcile. The bursar should be the one to confirm the opening balances, before go-live, in writing.

5. What does this cost in year three?

Ask for the full three-year figure, including implementation, training, hosting, support and the cost of adding learners as the school grows. Then ask what is not included. Modules licensed separately, per-message charges and paid upgrades are legitimate — but they belong in the board paper, not in a later invoice.

6. Who answers the phone in examination week?

Support quality is invisible during procurement and decisive afterwards. Ask whether the institution gets a named contact, what the hours are during term start and examinations, and who is on the other end — the people who built the system, or a tier that will forward the question to them.

7. Does it work when the connection does not?

A system that assumes reliable connectivity will fail in the places and at the moments that matter — a register in a classroom, mark entry during a power cut. Ask what is usable offline, what happens to work done while disconnected, and how conflicts are resolved when the connection returns.

8. What does the board itself see?

Governors need enrolment, attainment, attendance and fee collection, current and comparable term to term, without asking a member of staff to prepare it. If producing the board pack is a manual job, the board will keep receiving numbers that are a fortnight old and impossible to interrogate in the meeting.

The decisive question is not what the system can do. It is what the school will stop doing once it is in place.

One last test

Ask for two institutions of comparable size and type, and speak to them without the vendor present. Ask those schools what the implementation was like, what broke, and what they would do differently. Vendors choose their references carefully, but the conversation is still worth more than the demonstration.