When do people buy MISs?

[VPatel]

Just wondering when schools buy big-ticket items like MIS? Is it always around April when Heads are budgeting? Any help on this would be greatly appreciated.

[kmount]

I would certainly from my college's experience say that we've not bought a MIS in many years as it's not normally the kind of thing you chop and change each year. The actual support contract goes out around May-ish if that's what you're after...

Generally, most of my development plans are written by February, bid for in March and if i'm lucky awarded for the 1st of April to move forward.

[Sylv3r]

I would think they would probably be bought just before the 6 weeks holidays as they will be a lot of data input required as well as a lot of man hours from the technical team getting it rolled out, unless the old and new MIS is ran alongside each other in the short term.

[srochford]

I would have thought that just before the summer holiday is almost the worst time to do it! It means coming back to a new term (when it really matters that you can get class lists etc) and having a new system which may not work properly and, even if it does, will be different from what you're used to and possibly confusing!

[GrumbleDook]

A new MIS is usually planned at least 18 months in advance on implementation.

If you are looking at staff starting to use it in Sept 2008 you would have been looking in Jan 2007.

This would start getting costs in around April 2007 with the money being put to one side. It may be ordered at any point between april 2007 and Sept 2007 but from September you would be looking at what needs to be done for migration from the old to the new, probably running them both side by side. April 2008 would be a big date (new financial year) and from here you are likely to see the staff training going out to teaching and admin staff ... the final push is done during the summer, making sure exams stuff runs correctly on the new system whilst keeping the old one there just in case ... and Sept 2008 you are live!

[dave.81]

Agree with grumbledook, we took nearly 18 months of planning when we bought our new MIS nearly 5 years ago now. Although before this we didn't really have any kind of MIS in place and was starting from scratch with it all.