Helping K-12 public education schools become more efficient - Antivia

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In addition to developing and implementing business intelligence ... studies and software selections. ... they can provi
Helping K-12 public education schools become more efficient

Gibson Consulting Group is a consulting firm that solves complex efficiency problems within the K-12 public education sector throughout the US.

Gibson Consulting Group is a consulting firm that solves complex efficiency problems within the K-12 public education sector throughout the US. Gibson works hard to help school systems save money both in educational and non-educational areas, including transportation, cafeterias, technology, facilities, grounds maintenance, plumbing, contractors, etc. Gibson takes pride in these efforts, because when school districts save money in non-educational areas, they can spend more of their budget on educating their students. Ali Taylan, Chief Information Officer at Gibson, heads up the Data Visualization Practice Area. He is a man who wears many hats. In addition to developing and implementing business intelligence solutions to support educational decision making, he also serves as the lead technology consultant for efficiency studies and software selections. When discussing school systems’ organization, he said: “The main purpose of the school system is to educate kids but they also run services that have nothing to do with teaching. We’re talking human resources, help desk, food delivery – it’s mind-boggling the amount of operations running!”

Large operations create large amounts of information, and the school systems are no exception. All functions in a school system generate data, including its educational functions. This is due in part to the ‘No Child Left Behind’ Act of Congress from 2001, which aimed to set high standards and to establish measurable goals for improving individual outcomes in education. This means districts and schools throughout the nation must collect and report information on their educational performance, so that federal, state and local stakeholders can compare them to the national goals. Since the ‘No Child Left Behind’ Act of Congress was passed, school systems have gathered large amounts of educational and non-educational data, begging the question: what to do with it? School boards, communities and educators want results. They want information to tell them how to better run their schools, how to improve outcomes, how to make sense of their budgeting data and how they can improve, so that they can provide the best education for their students. To do this, Gibson uses DecisionPoint™ For Excel to create and deliver interactive dashboards to stakeholders.

“DecisionPoint™ For Excel is a very easy-touse tool and I find it extremely easy to build dashboards. Through DecisionPoint™ For Excel, with the addition of our consulting services, we help school systems and districts find what data to track, and, once they have it in front of them in a dashboard, what to do with it. We paint a picture of what’s going on and they can use this for their analysis.” Choosing the perfect tool for information delivery to non-technical users was a long process at Gibson. They didn’t want to write scripts and code and they wanted to focus on telling the story behind the numbers, not just on building and shipping out dashboards. They needed to be able to build quickly without spending too much of their clients’ time and money. It was also crucial for Gibson to be able to deliver dashboards seamlessly on mobile devices: “Almost overnight, the school systems started getting an influx of iPads and the boards went from having laptops to investigate their reports on, to having iPads. Dashboards have to be based on HTML5 so they can be viewed on mobile devices. Everyone has an iPad now, and if your dashboard isn’t on an iPad – forget it, nobody wants to look at it!”

Ali needed Gibson’s dashboards to be flexible enough to answer questions that couldn’t be anticipated, or, if the questions couldn’t be answered, he needed to be able to quickly adapt the dashboards, which is why he chose DecisionPoint™ For Excel.

The use of DecisionPoint™ For Excel to drive school system improvements in efficiency and cost-effectiveness has narrowed the information gap between school boards and school administrators.

“I usually manipulate the data very little before I put it into DecisionPoint™ For Excel. From there I build a graph, table or a full dashboard to show the data and provide value quickly. It’s like a dough – I keep looking at the data, massaging it, look at it in different ways and when I find something new I feed it into the tool and I put it out there again for non-techies to consume and use.”

“What I love most about DecisionPoint™ For Excel is that it hits that sweet spot where I can build dashboards fast, I can distribute them to many people without worrying about spiralling costs and they can be viewed on the iPad. These, to me, are the three things I couldn’t find anywhere else.”

With DecisionPoint™ For Excel, Ali is able to deliver information and results to anyone who needs it, on the desktop and mobile devices, knowing they will be able to understand and use the information to drive better decisions. He said DecisionPoint™ For Excel is “perfect for the school system without breaking the bank”.

Ali Taylan, CIO, Gibson Consulting Group

Since they started using DecisionPoint™ For Excel in 2014, Gibson Consulting Group has delivered several projects to a number of school districts across the US. Amongst these projects, Ali has built a budget analysis tool for a Texas school district which can easily be replicated for other school systems.

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About Antivia We are a business intelligence (BI) software company that helps organizations realize more value from their data by getting information into the hands of front-line decision-makers. We believe that BI needs to be designed for the people who run the business on a day-to-day basis. This vision is realized through DecisionPoint™. DecisionPoint™ is a fast dashboard creation tool that lets non-programmers turn data into beautiful interactive dashboards that can be shared with anyone on a web browser, tablet or smart phone, giving business people fingertip access to the information they need to make informed decisions.

“DecisionPoint For Excel is perfect for the school system without breaking the bank.” Ali Taylan, CIO, Gibson Consulting Group

Download a fully functional 15-day free trial and create a dashboard against your Excel data in minutes start.antivia.com/decisionpoint-for-excel

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