Another great question came up from one of our clients. They asked us what degree of willingness we see from district systems vendors (e.g., student information systems, meal service systems, transportation systems) to integrate with Ed-Fi. The way we look at it, this is a question of who has custody of school district data.
Vendor Willingness to Interoperate at All: It Depends
It's a great question, and I have to give the standard consultant answer of "it depends". Some meal service vendors, for example, don't have other products (e.g., student information system, dashboard solution). Overall, these vendors seem to be more willing to interoperate in general and allow free and easy access by the school district to their data. Other meal service products may be part of a larger company that also has a student information system, a dashboard, etc. In the latter case, you can run into resistance as the request moves up the food chain in the business, even if rank-and-file folks are on board with doing the right thing.
Data Custody: School District or Vendor?
Our perspective is: the fact that a vendor can say "no thanks" to allowing a district to send its data to its other vendor is the problem! It's the district's data, after all. Big picture, it's crazy that a vendor can make it hard for a district to do with its data as it pleases, in order to protect the company's strategy and push the district to buy more of the company's products.
And then in the Ed-Fi implementation space there is a bit of philosophical argument (a very friendly one). One company has a view that Ed-Fi should be productized, as they believe many districts don't have the internal capacity/capability to do the ongoing maintenance and support. And we acknowledge these challenges, but believe the point of Ed-Fi is to enable districts — not vendors — to hold custody of the district's data. So we view these challenges as things that need to be overcome through easier-to-install/upgrade technology, and that's where we focus our energy.
I have seen mid- to large-size school districts tend to agree with us that they want to maintain custody of their data, and smaller districts tend toward turn-key solutions at the expense of losing custody.
Interoperability with Standards vs. Products
As far as the reaction from vendors of sending data to an Ed-Fi ODS vs. sending data to another vendor's product, it's certainly an easier conversation to say "please provide your customer's data in this standard Ed-Fi format so it can be stored in this standard data store owned by your customer" than to say "please send your customer's data to this other company that has a competing product." In addition to the reasons already stated, there's also just a very real practicality concern that the permutations of point-to-point integrations with a bunch of different products is very large vs. maintaining one integration to an open standard used nationally.
The cost-benefit business case is easier to make for Ed-Fi.