Re: School Board's $22.9 million IT Upgrade

The state school board asked for $80-$300 million to modernize district and
school systems. But the school board got push-back from local agencies
about that. Large districts in Utah want local control over their IT. The
state school board IT department would like to gain control over local IT
operations, but they haven't managed to get enough support for that. Their
fall back was to request $22.9 million to modernize data warehouse and
reporting interfaces that they use internally.

The state school board says they don't want to issue any RFP's or evaluate
commercial off-the-shelf alternatives. The don't want to buy. They want to
build. They don't want to issue RFPs

RFP procedures these days only allow contact with the procurement officer.
Other administrators and evaluation committee members are strictly off
limits during the entire RFP process. You'd have to do wine and dine before
the process begins, these days.



On Mon, Feb 11, 2019 at 4:04 PM Peter Dow <petercdow@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

So local agencies are already reporting most (presumably) of this data
already? The state just wants to modernize or replace their own
system? Then I would expect a lot of (re-)training costs as well as
software modification/replacement costs. So if we guesstimate that your
estimate for software is reasonable, multiply by 10, add in twice as
much for training, $9M. That leaves $20M for wining & dining.

Don't underestimate that last. Back in the 1970's I was part of a
company that submitted a bid to provide hardware and software for all
school districts in NC. We had already installed our software on a
System 38 in Cumberland County (Fayetteville area) and a couple of
smaller districts. The committee evaluating software chose ours. The
people making the decision chose Burroughs hardware and software. Our
guess was that Burroughs had a bigger budget for entertainment.