I was always told that the three biggest costs for a school are staff, buildings/estates, and your IT/technology costs.    The last year and a half, and the pandemic have shown us that some schools weren’t ready in terms of technology, in terms of their infrastructure and the client end devices or at least there was a need for improvement.   I have already posted on several occasions that there is a clear need for investment.   The issue though is should this investment be in the form of outright capital-based purchasing or leasing revenue-based purchasing?

Capital

I used to believe, for big spends such as device replacement or significant infrastructure upgrades, the only way was capital.   If you own the equipment you might be able to squeeze extra years out of the kit plus a capital purchase has no leasing charges associated.  Capital purchasing was simply cheaper in the longer term, but painful in the short term due to the upfront costs.

I came to learn though that its not quite that simple.   All too often I have seen capital purchases for devices or infrastructure approved but without thinking longer term about future replacement costs.   In other words, the immediate cost was approved but without planning a replacement cycle, leading to difficult questions in the future.   Additionally, capital purchases lend themselves to scope creep.   So, the school has replaced 25 PCs; Someone will ask to keep 5, of the old machines being replaced, at the back of the maths class or 5 for English and suddenly you now have 35 PCs.    That’s 10 additional PCs which will require software and licensing costs, which will require support, and which will require eventual replacement.    The quiet years, maybe 3 or 4 years after you have replaced most of your PC fleet, are also an opportunity for spending on other projects, etc, without considered the high capital replacement cost which will recur when the fleet once again needs replacement.   This can then lead to overspend.    Now this can be avoided if you are disciplined in your capital purchasing and in your approval processes, but this requires care and discipline.

Leasing

Leasing shifts the costs to a revenue model and a “cost of doing business”.    The costs associated with your technology are therefore much more visible as these costs are spread equally across the leasing cycle.   It is therefore easier to avoid scope creep or overspending, as the technology costs are clear to see.    Sadly though, like everything, leasing does have its downsides.   These are the leasing costs, which I note continue to decline, and also the fixed nature of the cycle.   This means the option of squeezing an extra couple of years out of your devices, etc, isnt available as once the lease finishes you need to enter a new lease.   I am becoming less and less concerned by this.   Technology usage is on the increase, which increases wear are tear, plus cyber security is requiring more frequent updates leading to quicker device obsolesce.   As such I feel the days of managing to squeeze a couple of extra years out of things are quickly disappearing meaning fixed replacement cycles such as that enforced through leasing are becoming more acceptable.

Leasing is also often seen as less flexible than capital purchases as you are locking in for the lease period whereas capital spends feel more “one-off” and individual allowing for change in a year or so’s time.   This might be true up to a point, but once your requirements are beyond a significant cost level, you must be considering the hardware as being usable for 4 or more years at which point even with capital spends, once the money is spent, you need to make the purchase work and therefore don’t have the flexibility you might feel you do.  

Given the long term nature of a leasing arrangement and the resultant long term nature of the relationship with the leasing vendor, it is also important to find the right company for your leasing requirements.    That said, this is likewise important with a capital purchase, at least during any warranty and support period, albeit these periods may be less than your leasing period.

Lease-Purchase

Now there are other options in terms of leasing, such as lease-purchase whereby you pay the leasing costs spread across the period of the lease, but with a final option to purchase at the end.   I havent covered this in any detail as for me it brings the worst of both worlds.  Leasing costs and the opportunity for scope creep, etc, once the devices or hardware have been bought out at the end of the lease.

Conclusion

I don’t think there is a perfect solution.  It will depend on the items being purchased, the anticipated lifespan, school finances, organisational risk assessment and several other factors.  Sometimes you will want to purchase outright and sometimes I suspect leasing will be better.   All I can say for sure is that I am now much more likely to at least consider leasing and an opex spend.

In relation to one of my previous posts looking at Technology infrastructure I received a comment regarding schools having the relevant expertise to make appropriate technology purchasing and setup/configuration decisions.

“I think one of the biggest barriers is many schools do not have the expertise to truly understand what infrastructure they need. “

This comment got me thinking about the challenge of making technology infrastructure decisions.

I don’t know what I don’t know

The first challenge when looking at infrastructure relates to not knowing what we don’t know.   Technology advances quickly and technology companies love to invent new terminology and acronyms.    As such it is very difficult to keep up to date.   Additionally, in considering technology we have to look at its usability, reliability, technical functionality, cost effectiveness, cyber security and many other aspects.   When looking at new technology or technology which you don’t have experience with, it is almost impossible to know all you ideally need to know.

Vendors and Salespeople

Technology salespeople will often indicate that they have your best interests in mind and that their product is superior to others.   They will also play up what is “possible” and play down any particular difficulties or limitations of their solution.   This is all to be expected, after all as salespeople their job is to sell a product or service.   Sadly, however, it means you might come out of calls with different competing vendors without truly knowing which solution is best for your context.

Change management

No matter how good your planning is, if your technology infrastructure project is sufficiently complex, which is becoming increasingly the case with all technology projects, there is a high likelihood that there will be things you could not or did not predict.   As such the management of change will not be as simple as anticipated and any plan you had, is unlikely to capture the complexities of the real world.

So, what can we do about it?

My first piece of advice is to read and consult widely.   Talk to different companies, read case studies, watch webinars and generally try to keep up to date as much as you can.   It is unlikely this will give you all the relevant information for infrastructure decision making, but it’s a good place to start.  This does take time, however its time well spent.

Make use of groups or forums involving other educational establishments.   There are plenty of forums available including the Association of Network Managers in Education (ANME) for one.   These groups allow you to seek support and advice from others who have undertaken infrastructure and other projects.   You can ask for advice as to possible solutions or seek the experiences of others in relation to particular vendors or services.   As such they are a valuable source of help and can allow you to gather expertise with little cost other than time.

Consider the use of a technology integrator.  Using such third parties allows you to make use of their expertise to help you with your technology projects.   This includes their experience of project management of infrastructure projects in the education sector. Obviously the one thing to take care of here is that they too are looking to sell you their expertise and time, and therefore it is well worth talking to other schools for their experiences, in selecting a possible integrator.    Now I note that this will generally increase project cost however in hopefully reduces the likelihood of mis-steps along the way, where trying to take on projects in-house, so is often well worth the cost.   It is also increasingly becoming difficult, with increasing complexity of projects, to have sufficient expertise in house meaning the requirement for external support is becoming more common.

Start small.   Avoid going all in on a project as no matter what planning has been done, it is unlikely you will have been able to predict all eventualities.   So, try to start with a trial or pilot of new infrastructure to see how it works within your context and to allow you to identify any issues which you wouldn’t have been able to identify in advance.   Some vendors will be happy to accommodate free or discounted cost trials, so it never hurts to ask.

Conclusion

As we seek to use more technology and as the technology, and integration of different technologies gets more complex, it is becoming increasingly common not to have the relevant technology expertise available in a school or school group.   In fact, I think it is almost becoming the norm now.   It may be that those that think they have 95% – 100% of the expertise needed, outside of simple projects, are being overconfident.

As such we now need to focus on developing expertise and on leveraging the collective expertise available within the education sector, and even beyond.   I believe we also need to embrace that technology in schools, including the associated infrastructure, is part of a journey.   Given this, we will seldom start out with everything we need.

One of the things I have found is that building successful use of technology isnt easy.  It takes planning, time, effort and much more.    The only thing more difficult, is trying to build technology use where your users, your students, staff and parents, are not confident in the technology’s reliability.   If while developing the use of technology, the technology proves itself to be unreliable, you will have a hard time getting users to buy back into its use.   As such the key is to try and get it right first time.

Infrastructure

Using technology now largely involves devices of some sort being connected to the internet.   Devices access the resultant bandwidth through the network infrastructure with the initial connectivity through Wi-Fi or it can be through network cabling.  This infrastructure is critically important to technology use.   In deciding on the infrastructure needed consideration needs to be given to the number and type of devices which will be in use, how technology will be used as well as the need to futureproof any solutions.    Cyber security and safeguarding are also a significant consideration to ensure users are kept safe and that users, systems and data are secure.   In my experience good infrastructure isnt cheap, but the costs of a poor infrastructure in terms of lost time, loss of user confidence and lost effort significantly outweighs the financial cost.    In relation to cost it is also worth noting that infrastructure costs are not a one-off.   Any investment to improve infrastructure requires continued investment to keep everything maintained, supported, secure and also up to date with new technology as it arises.  The above applies to both infrastructure in schools to support technology on-site but also the broader need for infrastructure at a national level to support students and teachers at home, as they have been through the recent significant period of lockdown.

I do however wonder in relation to the above whether 5G may start to change things at least inside schools.    As we currently look at BYOD and students bringing their own devices, will we eventually be looking at BYON and students bringing their own network, their own infrastructure, in the form of 5G enabled devices.    In doing so might this allow schools and other educational establishments to move the funding currently focussed on infrastructure to other areas.    On the reverse of this though, this will likely also result in new challenges such as providing support and also safeguarding where each student and teacher is effectively using their own network.     It will also be a challenge in terms of access to 5G across countries as a whole;   I note some areas in the UK which are currently lucky to get 3G or 4G never mind a 5G signal, and that’s after many years of 3G and 4G being in operation.

Pilots and trials

In developing new infrastructure, pilot projects are key.    Through smaller pilot projects you can limit potential loss of confidence, plus users involved are also more likely to accept a level of unreliability or trial and error based on the trial nature of the project.    This is all about limiting the scope to limit the risk while allowing new things to be tried, whether this is a Wi-Fi solution or new network switching, etc.   Going big from the outset may seem like the way to get things done quickly, however it also represents greater risk, and sometimes the issues that arise mean that it actually takes longer.   It also tends to be more costly unless you are lucky and everything goes exactly as is planned, which in my experience is seldom the case with IT projects above a very small scale.

The wider need

The global pandemic has proven that schools across the world were at vastly different places in terms of being ready to use technology to address the challenges which arose.   The same is true in relation to technology use in general in schools.    The foundational infrastructure is equally varied across schools, however, in my view, requires significant investment both in the short term but also continually in the longer term.    

We cannot hope to consider the pedagogy, training of teachers and students, sharing best practice, etc, in relation to technology use in education before we get basic fundamental and reliable infrastructure in place.    There is a lot to do in the immediate term to address this and ensure the basic infrastructure exists in all schools.    There will then need to be an ongoing effort to maintain this.  

The pandemic for me have clearly identified the need for the technology infrastructure to be addressed;   Now we just need to do something about it!

The Huawei case is very much about internet security.     The implication is that Huawei could be influenced by the Chinese government who could then leverage the Huawei equipment installed in foreign countries telco infrastructure to gather intelligence, modify or filter communications or otherwise impact on the operation of a country through control of its communications systems.    This all seems quite logical.   Who would want a foreign government to be able to exercise power of their infrastructure?

The issue for me here, is that the technologies, either hardware or software, have to be created and then developed and deployed from somewhere in the world.     Apple devices, Microsoft Windows, Facebook, Google, all have to come from somewhere and in doing so could be influenced by governments or political powers within that given location.   So, the Huawei argument from the perspective of a UK citizen, may equally be matched by Chinese concerns over Apple from the perspective of a Chinese citizen.     Looking to the US, there is even some precedence for being suspicious with Kaspersky, which I note are a Russian firm, highlighting in 2015 that the NSA, a US intelligence agency, could “implant spyware of hard drives to conduct surveillance on computers around the world”.

Technology and technology services are used internationally whether that is a Dell laptop, Dropbox cloud file storage or newspaper website.    Often, these products or services may use components from other organisations, such as Seagate hard drives in a laptop, or Google Analytics or Facebooks share and like buttons on a companies website.   This further complicates things.   The devices, services and components are all used without consideration for international borders.     Yet we live in a world where international borders exist, where governments may have a stake in technology companies or may have influence.  The risk of influence exists.

One solution to this is to block and to ban.   China block Google and YouTube for example, and now it looks like the US and UK are banning Huawei.    Meanwhile in Russia they are testing their own national internet system separate to the “real” internet.    This may be the direction governments increasingly pursue, to block, ban or to create in-country copies, but for me I don’t see how this will work.    In China VPNs provide a solution to circumvent blocks while I am sure Chinese semiconductors/microchip are already in so many of our devices in the office and at home.   If the service or device works for users, it will find its way into use no matter what governments choose to do.

The answer for me is an acceptance of the complexity of this predicament and that countries will have their own personal motives or ends that they wish to encourage.    It is, in my view, a lose-lose situation.     Leave Huawei in place and allow for the risk of Chinese influence or remove Huawei which will likely result in counter moves by the Chinese plus, assuming they are seeking to exert influence via technology, them targeting other parts of the world wide internet infrastructure and services.

All we are left with is a risk-based judgement, which is what I believe must have been taken here.    The risk of counter action, Chinese influence over other parts of the internet and additional cost of changing supplier including removing existing Huawei technology must have been judged to be less than the risk created by Huawei technology within the UKs core or edge network.  My worry here is the potential for bias in the decision making.   As Pinker(2018) points out, “people are poor at assessing probabilities” so “if two scenarios are equally imaginable, they may be considered equally probable”.   Potentially the probability of destructive Chinese action against the UK may have been over estimated.   As such the preventative action taken in blocking Huawei may be excessive.   Or maybe it isn’t!

And if you want to take this whole discussion a stage further let’s consider how companies might now influence the world.   Take for example Facebook which, if it were a country, based on users it would be biggest in the world.    What if we accept that it to may have motives and ends to its is actions, beyond simply providing the Facebook platform?    Google, Microsoft, Apple, Twitter, etc, may all be the same.   But that is possibly for another post.

References:

BBC News. 2020. Huawei 5G kit must be removed from UK by 2027. [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-53403793. [Accessed 16 July 2020].

CNet. 2015. NSA planted surveillance software on hard drives, report says. [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.cnet.com/news/nsa-planted-surveillance-software-on-hard-drives-report/. [Accessed 16 July 2020].

Pinker, S., 2018. Enlightenment Now. 1st ed. UK: Penguin House.

TechCrunch. 2019. Russia starts testing its own internal internet. [ONLINE] Available at: https://techcrunch.com/2019/12/26/russia-starts-testing-its-own-internal-internet/?guccounter=1. [Accessed 16 July 2020].

World Economic Forum. 2016. If social networks were countries, which would they be?. [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/04/facebook-is-bigger-than-the-worlds-largest-country/#:~:text=If%20Facebook%20were%20a%20country%2C%20it%20would%20be,it%20each%20month%20-%20around%201.9%20billion%20people.. [Accessed 16 July 2020].

The perfect example of the above, for me, was a recent test of our own backup solutions which included a service which indicated that recovery to a redundant system would be complete in 4 hours plus would be based on data backup taken regularly.    Upon testing the solution we found that the 4 hours recovery period was exceeded due to issues with the backup and the data was 3 days old.   We also found that there were implications for other systems when the test failure occurred.

It might be tempting to look on the above in a wholly negative fashion focussing on why the solution didn’t work however I want to avoid this and intend to focus more on the positive side of things.    We now at least know the solution didn’t perform as anticipated, we know more about the implications of the tested failure area, we are basically now more knowledgeable than we were before the test.    We will therefore now work internally and with the backup solution vendor to arrive at solutions that better meet our needs and are hopefully more robust and reliable.

The moral of the story;  Nothing works until you test it to confirm so test your backup provision and test it often.

Now the reconsideration of my position came about as a result of reading a post from @s_bearden and the included presentation.  You can see her presentation here.    In her presentation titled “Disruptive Education Technology” she makes a number of interesting statements however the particular facts that I found interesting were related to the State Education Technology Directors Associate (SETDA) recommendations with regards the infrastructure requirement of K-12 schools or Foundations Stages through to Secondary for those of us here in the UK.    SETDAs recommendations for internal and external data transmission speeds indicate that they predict a 10 fold increase in requirements in the 3 years between the 2014-15 and 2017-18 academic years.   As far as I am concerned that is quite a significant increase.

This reminded me of an infographic I once saw however can’t quite find at the moment.   The graphic indicated the time taken for radio to reach 1 million users, the time for TV to do the same, the internet, Facebook and finally Angry Birds Space.    The trend which was evident when following the progress of each of the above technologies was the increasing speed of adoption of each new technology.   It took TV 10s of years to do what Facebook did in years and what Angry Birds Space did in days.

So in my earlier posting I was partially wrong.    Although we cannot predict the specific technologies we will be using in the classroom and in the world in general, we can be certain that there will need to be significant spending on the infrastructure required to support the new technologies which may exist.   Our internal network bandwidth including wifi capabilities plus the bandwidth associated with our external connectivity to ISPs will need to increase plus will need to increase at a significant rate if it is to effectively support the increasing use of technology, the increasing consumption of online content and the use of new and emerging technologies as and when they become available.