The UK Government and MIS Systems

[GrumbleDook]

Personally I think we should go back to paper files and trusting the school secretary to know all the gossip.

[jamesb]

Personally I think we should go back to paper files and trusting the school secretary to know all the gossip.

 

Isn't that just what your standard MIS system relies on anyway?

[SpuffMonkey]

I would rather the Government simply publish the specifications and standards (open and freely of course) detailing how the expect a School MIS to work. Then let free market economics do the rest.

 

To a large degree - I agree with you on that one - as an aside - I think the NHS IT project would've been a lot closer to completion by now if they'd taken that approach- they needed interoperability, not complete uniformity.

[MattMitchell]

There are published guidelines and a fairly precise data dictionary for CTF exchange, along with an xsd schema, etc. I've not looked too closely at the SIF stuff for data interchange as the configurability of sims, serco, etc renders a lot of it moot. There are plenty of published information standards though.

[dhicks]

We don't consider applications that can change children's lives for the better, to be dull.

 

Oh, of course not. But I, as a programmer, find applications that I can't work with without wading through a mass of bureaucracy first to be dull. If I have to sign NDAs, argue with support people to get access to APIs or figure out undocumented utilities myself I get fed up and start thinking about alternatives to the system I'm using - programming is complex enough without adding unnecessary complications. If you want an application to be considered interesting by your average programmer, emulate the best of what you can see around today - Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and so on all making well-documented APIs available so developers can work on applications at their own pace and to their (and their users') own requirements.

 

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David Hicks