RE: School Board's $22.9 million IT Upgrade

Probably takes more than you think.

75-100 tables and 200-300 views with who knows what type of database and code base behind it today.

Requirements gathering, business logic building, tech specs, coding, qa testing, go live, support, new database, network and server infrastructure, etc...

That would take a LOT more than $300k in my opinion. Possibly even more than $22.9 million.

Regards,
Richard Schoen
Director of Document Management
e. richard.schoen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
p. 952.486.6802
w. helpsystems.com
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message: 3
date: Mon, 11 Feb 2019 11:18:03 -0700
from: Nathan Andelin <nandelin@xxxxxxxxx>
subject: School Board's $22.9 million IT Upgrade

This year the Utah State Board of Education is requesting $22.9 million for a modernization effort, to be implemented by employees and contractors.

The state school board is saying they want to collect student, teacher, and financial data from local school districts and charter schools, to upload it into their data warehouse, and provide summary reports for various purposes.

In regard to student data, they currently collect 16 XML objects that cover the basics (student records, school enrollments, attendance, courses, and major discipline incidents if any).

They haven't disclosed the number of tables or views that they plan on implementing in their data warehouse. My estimate would be 75-100 tables and 200-300 views.

We recently implemented a similarly scoped project for about $300K, including a web portal, interactive web applications, reports, interfaces with 3rd party student and finance systems. I'm having difficulty imagining why they're asking for $23 million?

What does it take to modernize a system of that size? Any thoughts?