AsifMangera

What LA is it? I'm happy to have a conversation with them and point them to the following guidance from the DfE - https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/moving-your-school-to-the-cloud/moving-your-school-to-the-cloud As someone who has worked in multiple LAs in London in senior roles, I can say that you just need to get to the right people who see sense!

We had a similar issue and wouldn't want to switch the MIS if there wasn't an integrated finance system that allowed statutory reporting back to the LA. We have now cracked this with a group of Nurseries going live with Bromcom MIS/Finance in April - the plan is to offer it to Primary and Secondary as an option for go live April 2020 (decisions to be made by October 2019). The key is to involve all parties (LA, Bursars, SBMs etc.) during the planning phase. Ultimately the LA just want to ensure financial controls and transparency is in place. In fact the our LA was very excited about the change and Bursars can now login from anywhere rather than visit each school.

Barriers seem to be common in the education sector as companies seek look after their own interests. We looked for partners who listened to needs and the requirement for simplicity in transition. Key item was integrated a cloud finance system with the MIS that was as functional or better (and cheaper TCO) than the existing model. Thankfully we hurdled the barrier and can move forward now with our schools.

Ah...we had this same issue for schools who wanted to move to a cloud-based MIS but the finance system was the blocker. I have two former school business managers in my team who know FMS back to front. I asked Bromcom to work with them to co-develop a finance system that integrates with their MIS and just had them do a demo to a group of heads,SBMs, governors - were very impressed and soon to be rolled out. Some key advantages over traditional FMS too (one database, one web portal etc.). Happy to discuss further...

We work with Bromcom but our vision for BI is not technology led but outcome led. BI is a powerful tool but in our opinion, we consider the reporting framework the most important. Power BI just happens to complement the framework very nicely. With anything to do with Data - we are using a framework, it's the ITIL Knowledge Management approach - data to information to knowledge and application of wisdom to make decisions. So the taxonomy for reporting we are considering (just an example) - Validation - Validation against a particular strategy (e.g strategy for all schools in MAT to obtain 90% plus attendance). Has this been met after the initiative was introduced? Direction - Using baseline data to inform decision making and potentially influence a particular course of action (currently 30% of schools within MAT have less than 90% attendance - we need to do something) Intervention - Corrective and preventative action (Weekly reports on attendance and comparing against actions/initiatives and then allowing further corrective action) Applying a nested model (Meta - Aggregated MAT, Macro - Aggregated Cluster and Micro- Individual School) In terms of cost, I would debate that if you get your reporting suite right, it should make life a lot easier and potentially save money due to past inefficient processes/lack of timely information. The beauty of having a single data warehouse and reporting suite is the accuracy and consistency of data which almost certainly helps with good decision making.