Has anyone considered creating their own in house MIS?

[cabezon1989]

Hi,

 

Really struggling to be wow'd by the options on the market. Well its not just me, as a process, we can't agree on the most suitable option.

 

My question is, has anyone ever considered working with a software company to develop their own MIS?

 

If so, then who? If not, then why?

 

Cheers!!!!

[mavhc]

Because it's way more complex than you expect, as with anything.

 

Also so much of it is country specific, you can't get the advantage of a global community

[cabezon1989]

Which MIS do you use? Could probably be swayed at this stage!

[aicrd]

As a software developer, I was considering it however there's far too much to it than to just develop a system that "Works". MIS systems honestly aren't that complex, they're basically just databases with some business logic on top. The complicated bit comes down to the fact that schools need to rely on this software on a day to day basis so there's immense pressure to ensure its all 100% patched and issues resolved quickly (Saying that, Capita seems to be getting on fine without this ). Not to mention you're going to need integrations with various services, something like what Salamander has for SIMS and Office 365/G Suite and services such as Schoolcomms and Cashless catering systems, etc. You're not really going to get these if its just for 1 school or if your MIS has tiny market share as these companies are only interested in the larger systems being used, so this would mean as well as maintaining an MIS you'd have to build integrations from the ground up as well.

 

Another huge one for us was data protection, as we were building a cloud system in Azure although I'm not sure this will be much of an issue if the school actually owns the data themselves and its properly secured.

 

Whilst it's not impossible, its not an easy task. In fact I believe popular leading software such as SIMS and Impero were both developed for 1 school at one point and then brought to the market, so it is possible for these things to take off.

[cabezon1989]

That's how iSams started, it was developed for Rugby School by an ex pupil (dont quote me on that) and then taken to market. I guess we'll wait and see but as of today, I/we havent been wow'd by anyone.

[3s-gtech]

We built an add-on for SIMS, which ended up taking many of the functions of SIMS on, but I suppose that’s really closer to many of the similar products on the market that add things like a parent app, homework and detentions to SIMS. It’s web based and gets its data, one-way, via scheduled Command Reporter tasks. In theory, with time, it could be built to become the entire MIS itself - but it’s a serious undertaking and the development has to be supported and ongoing. Not something that can be built in a year then left alone!

[Zammo]

I’m sure many people have considered it. But it’s a far bigger task than any school employee is likely to be able to take on. Arbor game onto the scene about 10 years ago for example and are still adding features found natively in SIMS.*

 

* not to put Arbor down

[mavhc]

The only currently worked on open source MIS are https://www.openemis.org/download-openemis-school-community/ (GPL, but you have to sign a form to download the code like it's 1990) Used by various small countries

 

And https://www.opensis.com/community slightly more open, at least it's on github, seems to be mostly USA based.

[Norphy]

That's how iSams started, it was developed for Rugby School by an ex pupil (dont quote me on that) and then taken to market. I guess we'll wait and see but as of today, I/we havent been wow'd by anyone.

 

Ultimately, that’s how SIMS started as well. It started off being developed by teachers at a school in Luton. A teacher who I used to work with was part of the original team who started development on it. It’s why Bedfordshire schools has (or may still have, I don’t know) special licensing terms and pricing for SIMS.

 

The sixth form college I used to work for sort of had its own MIS which the colleges IT director developed in Access, which ended up being a front end to a SQL database and to Correro. I’m still getting flashbacks about it, I’m sure @Roberto is as well.

[dhicks]

My question is, has anyone ever considered working with a software company to develop their own MIS?

 

There are some tools / systems available that give a common API across different several MIS systems, such as Clever (which is mainly US-based) or Wonde in the UK. You could aim to build the functionality you want on top of one of those systems. How much experience of software development do you have - is this something you're considering doing yourself, or something that you would hire someone to do? I would suggest that starting an entire new product, both server side and front-end, from scratch would be a sizeable undertaking.

 

If it's any help, I find iSAMS' API pretty reasonable, although it doesn't cover every part of their functionality and is generally read-only. If you could maybe elaborate a little bit on the kind of thing you need your MIS to include that might give a better idea of the kind of solution that might be appropriate.

[Roberto]

I’m still getting flashbacks about it, I’m sure @Roberto is as well.

 

Not had to even open Access since I left there and not a work day goes by without me being profoundly grateful.

[Ditto]

Hi,

 

Really struggling to be wow'd by the options on the market. Well its not just me, as a process, we can't agree on the most suitable option.

 

My question is, has anyone ever considered working with a software company to develop their own MIS?

 

If so, then who? If not, then why?

 

Cheers!!!!

 

As an ex Software Development manager with IBM for a product that had sales in the £millions, I think it's an interesting idea. I think developing a strong product is entirely achievable, but doing so in a way that provides a profitable return I think would be very, very tough. To be developing a product for 10 years for it to mature in the market sounds a long time, but I've seen that time frame many times. For a new school MIS, I think a similar timeframe is realistic and recent competitors to SIMS shows this to be realistic. From my perspective, developing the product isn't the biggest issue. I believe winning over the customers is a huge challenge. The on-going development costs is a concern - how many updates needed supporting DfE returns per year? On-going support is an massive expense - many schools are small and need a strong support system. A significant chunk of the market are reluctant or slow to move and what they have with SIMS, whether you love it, loath it or live with it, fundamentally does the job the customer base needs it to do. I feel the market is in a pretty good position right now, with some serious contenders (Arbor, Scholarpack and Bromcom to name a trio) to put pressure on SIMS to up their game or lose market share. Is there room for a newcomer - not sure, but I wouldn't risk my money on a venture! On top of all this, it' a sizeable but limited market - we are not going to see an explosion of English or UK schools. International markets are not going to be a re-labelling exercise. To summarise, it'll be great fun building one, but I probably couldn't bring a return on investment.

[TechMonkey]

It is one of those things that seems easy and logical on paper and in discussions but the practice is a lot different. SIMS do a major release every term (is it still?) and often that is to edit things to the latest government decree or census needs. Hiring a software company to do that just for you would be a massive cost. Add to that would you be their top priority? If the Government release on January 3rd the requirements that are needed for the census at the end of January, are the software company going to drop everything to get that done for you, a single customer? Maybe. You would also need someone up on their software development from a management side or it will end being the usual tale of every department or member of staff wanting their own little tweaks and thinking they are the most important in the world and if they all just get shoved over to the Software company then they are going to either bump up the cost of the contract or just back out.

 

Change that idea to an onsite development guy and it gets a bit more interesting as you could use them for other projects but you will still have the management burden and you also have the issue of if that person leaves getting someone else in and up to speed in a good time frame, thinking about those termly releases.

 

Unless you have a very niche need I can't see how creating your own would be cost effective or compare to one of the current players who have teams of developers working full time on it.

 

Now to your issue, not being able to agree sounds like a decision by committee. What you need to do is set out your criteria and judge each by that. Get a nice spreadsheet and get the results set out so everyone can see the top three that match your criteria closest, then take another look at those three and see which everyone is happiest with. You will probably need a core of 2-4 staff to have the final say but the result will be justified and transparent. The other issue is, these are management systems, databases, not being wowey is kind of their thing When we looked the greatest recommendation we had was someone saying "It's all right" which for a MIS is high praise indeed in my mind.

[chris11256]

My old school went down this route. Started historically and has been updated/mainted ever since in Classic ASP, they employ two full time developers to work on it and code new features as required. I do have a feeling that it'll go when the current Director of IT goes(as he started it back in the 90's).

 

Did make it very flexible though, a member of staff could email us and say 'I need something to do X, can this be done?' and the developers would do it for them.

[mavhc]

Any system with a good API and reporting system can be programmed to do 99% of what you want without the other 99% of costs involved

[TechSail]

The technical detail in designing your own system, for me, depends on the type of school and size that you are. I was involved in a bespoke college system many years ago. What started as a 3 month project kept growing and finally took 2 years.

[smarties11]

I think the biggest hurdle you have here is with the DfE statutory returns. School Census, and School Workforce Census. Any MIS would need this functionality built in, and exportable to an XML file to upload to Collect. The specification and format of these XML files changes every single return; so it's a lot of work to reprogram and update the MIS to meet these specifications each time for a single School.

[aicrd]

I think the biggest hurdle you have here is with the DfE statutory returns. School Census, and School Workforce Census. Any MIS would need this functionality built in, and exportable to an XML file to upload to Collect. The specification and format of these XML files changes every single return; so it's a lot of work to reprogram and update the MIS to meet these specifications each time for a single School.

 

All you'd need to do for that is download the new XSD schema and use that instead. It shouldn't require any software changes if you do it correctly. When doing XML operations in C# for example you provide it with an XSD to use and interpret. The amount of code changes should be minimal.

Edited August 11, 2020 by aicrd

[smarties11]

What about all of the checking and validation rules that go on in the background, when you actually generate the return itself? i.e. validating the return you have created against the DfE's specification. Or when the DfE add a new data collection item (that requires new fields, UI entry points etc). I am responsible in our School for generating and submitting the census; having completed many tens of statutory returns, I'd be extremely surprised if it is as straightforward as you say to be honest. Particularly with the Autumn census which includes learning aims for Sixth Form students. There are always patches and issues with SIMS at every statutory return, and that's from a company supplying and supporting thousands of Schools. It would be a lot of work and effort to do this for a single School IMO.

[aicrd]

True but it is possible to make it as simple as possible. For example, you can autogenerate certain UI elements based on the schema which actually isn't all too difficult using something like Blazor/WASM. It would require a great deal of knowledge however it's not impossible. It's actually something I'm working on for a different piece of software, where UI elements and validation gets auto generated based on a user defined map. You could do the same using the DfE's XSD schema.

 

It would require a ton of work but its not impossible.

[jthompson]

Any system with a good API and reporting system can be programmed to do 99% of what you want without the other 99% of costs involved

 

Agreed. Even if the MIS you buy is just providing the core 20% of features that take care of 80% of the work that the MIS needs to enable, if it has a decent API then you can fill in some of those niche requirements by rolling your own bits and bobs on the side, even if that's just to feed stuff into MS Power Automate or PowerBI or something.

[dhicks]

Any system with a good API and reporting system can be programmed to do 99% of what you want without the other 99% of costs involved

 

API compatibility might be an interesting place to start if you were looking at creating your own system - if you looked at something like Clever / Wonde and worked backwards to produce a minimal system capable of providing the data to those external systems, then only added features and data as need to support further external tools, the aim being to produce the minimum system needed to support a set of external tools that actually implement the features you want. We've found several tools / services that use the iSAMS API directly, too, so you could perhaps create something API compatible with that.

[RootsSchImp]

Definitely endorse the buy an MIS and build on top of it approach. There's also a lot of variation in API specs so check those out too. For example, Bromcom have very limited write back capability for which they charge an additional annual fee. With Arbor you can write back to any field (after they've approved your code obviously).

[dhicks]

For example, Bromcom have very limited write back capability for which they charge an additional annual fee. With Arbor you can write back to any field (after they've approved your code obviously).

 

Ah, that's interesting / useful to know - I've not had experience with either of those, it's interesting they have different approaches. I think I prefer the option to pay a (reasonable) extra fee for limited write-back functionality rather than have to wait for someone to approve any code I'm writing.

[RootsSchImp]

I think I prefer the option to pay a (reasonable) extra fee for limited write-back functionality rather than have to wait for someone to approve any code I'm writing.

 

Write back for Attendance marks only is £250 per primary and £500 per secondary per annum - not sure if that meets the reasonableness requirement!