4 Key Factors to Consider When Making K-12 Edtech Investment Decisions

Written by

Shivani Stumpf

•Chief Product and Innovation Officer, PowerSchool

This blog outlines key considerations when deciding between building in-house technology solutions versus purchasing from external vendors. Get insight into how this choice impacts cost, complexity, security, and technical management in K-12 districts.

Key Considerations for Build vs. Buy Decision

Four key considerations can influence a district’s or organization’s decision-making process for edtech investments.

1. Total Cost of Ownership

Let’s explore the broader financial implications beyond initial expenses, highlighting the unseen costs and how they affect long-term budgeting and resource allocation.

First, it’s important to consider time and resource investment to manage multiple vendor contracts, including those required for managing and maintaining servers, security, networking, observability, monitoring, alerts, data management and processing, and data movement. This investment includes the cost to hire and retain a team of data engineers, product managers, network engineers, security engineers, data analysts, data scientists, and Business Intelligence (BI) developers.

The challenge of talent attrition and the loss of skilled employees with valuable knowledge and expertise can also significantly impact the district’s ability to use its data to maximize student performance effectively.

The complexity of data infrastructure, scaling, and maintenance provides challenges to keep up with evolving technologies and best practices. There are also no economies of scale. Conversely, PowerSchool services many customers and can distribute the costs of software operations and maintenance evenly across our clients. These economies of scale allow us to charge less for a product or service than you can achieve by building it yourself.

We had started a process to build a data warehouse about two years before Connected Intelligence K-12. As we were trying to identify long-term costs, we found that while we had the upfront capacity—because of ESSER dollars to make the investment in the actual creation of it—the estimated long-term cost and even the monthly cost when you’re trying to do all of that internally was beyond what we had the capacity for.
Josie Sturgis Director of Assessment Data
Des Moines Public Schools

2. Complexity and Interoperability

Seamless data flow and system compatibility are paramount, which can bring significant technical hurdles and integration challenges, including:

Data acquisition: Key source data (SIS, LMS, HR, finance, special programs, etc.) are housed in a wide variety of database technologies such as Oracle, SQL Server, Postgres, Dynamo, MySQL, Progress, Mongo, DB2, and legacy databases, including AS400. The complexity increases with every new data source or breadth of data required. 
High latency and poor performance of data transfers: Traditional methods of data integration over virtual private networks and network bandwidth limitations can create unacceptable delays and low performance. Performance hits are also seen against the source database, adversely impacting daily operations.  
Data reliability: Broken and unreliable data pipelines cause end-user frustration and loss of confidence in data. The most common and pervasive issues include down or unreachable servers, network failures, spikes in CPU and memory, task errors, latency issues, anomalies in data freshness, distribution, volume, and schema changes.

3. Security Concerns

Robust security measures are imperative to protect sensitive K-12 data and appropriate user access controls. K-12 districts are a prime target in an increasingly hostile digital environment, making securing and safeguarding data progressively more difficult. Education ransomware attacks have already cost over $53B in downtime over five years. Ransomware attacks and data breaches are on the rise.

The dichotomy between increased data security and the growing importance of democratizing data access requires significant ongoing investment in securing applications, networks, infrastructure, systems, and databases with 24x7x365 eyes-on-glass monitoring.

In looking at the type of full-time employee we needed to hire—either internally or contracting for cloud-based architects with programming and project management skills needed—we wondered if we could even get people with those specialized skillsets to come to a K-12 district when they could probably go to the private sector and make a lot more than working for us, even with great benefits. And looking at costs of consulting out that work got astronomical quickly. Even the cost of cloud storage and hosting was larger than anticipated just to make it run.
Emma Knapp Continuous Improvement Coordinator
Des Moines Public Schools

4. Technical Debt and Deficit

There are risks of technical debt and deficit with investment in edtech.

Technical debt is the obligation to fix inherently flawed software in the future. Technical debt can be taken on intentionally when a quick fix is not the ideal solution, but it is necessary, given the timeline and budget. Other times, technical debt is the result of poor planning and architecture. 
Technical deficit is the lack of talent and finances needed to see a project through to completion. When technical debt becomes a technical deficit, the build quality can suffer, leading to lost time and money.

Does Your District Have the Time? And Budget?

PowerSchool estimates that building and maintaining a data platform will typically result in projects that take two to three years with three times higher total cost of ownership than Connected Intelligence K-12, which starts delivering results in 48 hours with PowerSchool data.

How PowerSchool Can Help

PowerSchool offers a modernized, sustainable approach. Connected Intelligence K-12 is a fully managed turnkey solution. Take advantage of K-12’s first Data as a Service platform with industry-leading capabilities for data lakes, data engineering, data science, data application development, and secure data sharing—all in one platform.