K-12 Education Industry Reference Architecture
Capability maps, value streams, and strategy maps for K-12 education.
- Business leadership requires a unified and validated view of K-12 education business capabilities that helps CIOs and K-12 education leadership accelerate the strategy design process and that aligns initiatives, investments, and strategy.
- The district and IT often focus on a project, ignoring the holistic impact and value of an overarching value stream and business capability view.
Our Advice
Critical Insight
Using an industry-specific reference architecture is central, and has many benefits, to organizational priorities. It’s critical to understanding, modeling, and communicating the operating environment and the direction of the institution, but more significantly, to enabling measurable top-line institutional outcomes and the unlocking of direct value.
Impact and Result
- Demonstrate the value of IT’s role in supporting your institution’s capabilities while highlighting the importance of proper alignment between academic, administrative, and IT strategies.
- Apply business architecture techniques such as strategy maps, value streams, and capability maps to design usable and accurate blueprints of your institution’s operations.
- Assess your initiatives and priorities to determine if you are investing in the right capabilities. Conduct capability assessments to identify opportunities and to prioritize projects.
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Organizational Capability Maps, Value Streams, and Strategy Maps for the K-12 Education Industry
Analyst Perspective
In the age of disruption, IT must end misalignment and enable value realization.
An organizational reference architecture can be used for a variety of strategic planning initiatives. It connects strategies to execution in a manner that is accurate and traceable, and it promotes the efficient use of organizational resources.
An industry-specific organizational reference architecture helps accelerate the strategy design process and enhances IT's ability to align people, processes, and technology with key goals, outcomes, and initiatives.
Using an industry-specific reference architecture is central to, and has many benefits for, K-12 organizational priorities. It is critical for understanding, modeling, and communicating the operating environment and direction of a school district and, more significantly, for enabling measurable top-line organizational outcomes and unlocking direct value.
School boards that leverage a validated view of their organizational capabilities, which aligns initiatives, investments, and strategies, are able to realize measurable top-line board outcomes and unlock direct value.
Mark Maby, MA, PhD
Principal Research Director for Education, Industry Practice
Info-Tech Research Group
Executive Summary
Your Challenge
You are a CIO, head of enterprise architecture (EA), or chief architect who needs to improve your educational organization's understanding of its capabilities and how IT can support them.
Your organization wants to sharpen its alignment and focus on organizational outcomes and value by using architecture to better inform its innovation, stakeholder management, and IT strategy capabilities.
Before executing any strategic initiatives, use this blueprint to understand the ways that your organization creates value, as well as the underlying capabilities and processes of your organization.
Common Obstacles
You don't know where or how to begin, or how to engage the right people, model your organization, and drive the value of an architecture.
The administration, educators, and IT often speak in their own languages without a holistic and integrated view of mission, strategies, goals, processes, and projects.
Business and IT often focus on a project, ignoring the holistic value of an overarching value stream and organizational capability view.
Info-Tech's Approach
Build your organization's capability map by defining your organization's value stream and validating the industry reference architecture.
Use organizational capabilities to define strategic focus by defining your organization's key capabilities and developing a prioritized strategy map.
Assess key capabilities for planning priorities through a review of organizational processes, information, application, and technology support of key capabilities.
Consolidate and prioritize capability gaps for incorporation into priorities.
Info-Tech Insight
Using an industry-specific reference architecture is central to, and has many benefits for, organizational priorities. It is critical for understanding, modeling, and communicating the operating environment and the direction of your organization and, more significantly, for enabling measurable top-line organizational outcomes and unlocking direct value.
Industry Overview: K-12 Education
School districts are responsible for delivering primary and secondary education to the public. This education is provided to children regardless of their economic situation. Public schools are organized into school districts, which are governed by elected school boards. The school boards, in turn, are responsible to the government (usually at the state or provincial level).
While the development of curriculum is usually the responsibility of the government education authority, school districts are a key source of input during the development process. The government education authority may also influence the standards of assessment to ensure that curriculum is effectively delivered. However, the actual instruction is the responsibility of the schools and their teachers.
Because changes in demographics will have a direct effect on where schools are located, school districts are responsible for enrollment. They rely on multiple sources of public funding. These include grants and transfer payments from state/provincial and federal governments, as well as direct funding through local property taxes.
In addition to public schools, there are also private, religious, and charter schools. These schools, to a degree, are run with more autonomy.
Source: NAICS Association
Value Chain for the School District Industry
Organizational value realized must be the primary success factor
Organizational value in K-12 education defines the success criteria of an organization as manifested through organizational goals and outcomes. It can be interpreted from at least ten perspectives.
Perspective |
Description |
Metrics |
|
|---|---|---|---|
1 |
Community Impact and Engagement |
Impact on the local community, including safety, trust, |
Parent and community feedback, engagement rates, trust levels |
2 |
Expanded Use of Community Resources |
Leveraging of community resources, partnerships, and |
Community involvement, partnership outcomes, use of resources |
3 |
Efficiency and Effectiveness of Operations |
Effective use of school resources and implementation of strategies for educational excellence |
Operational costs, use of resources, time to resolution |
4 |
Financial Management |
Cost-effectiveness and budget management to maximize funding for educational priorities |
Budget adherence, cost savings, funding acquisition |
5 |
Legal and Regulatory Compliance |
Adherence to educational regulations, safety standards, and legal requirements |
Compliance audits, incident reports, policy adherence |
6 |
Risk Management and Crisis Response |
Preparedness and response to emergencies, ensuring student and staff safety |
Emergency drill effectiveness, response times, incident follow-up |
7 |
Technology Integration and Adaptation |
Use of technology to enhance learning and adapt to evolving educational needs |
Technology use metrics, integration in curriculum, adaptation to new tools |
8 |
Staff Satisfaction and Development |
Workforce satisfaction, growth opportunities, morale, |
Staff surveys, retention rates, professional development participation |
9 |
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) |
Promotion of diversity, equity, and inclusion among students and staff |
Diversity metrics, equity audits, inclusive programming |
10 |
External Collaboration |
Effectiveness in working with other educational organizations, nonprofits, and government agencies |
Joint program outcomes, collaborative initiatives |
Organizational Value Matrix
Values, goals, and outcomes cannot be achieved without organizational capabilities
Break down organizational goals into strategic, achievable initiatives focused on specific value streams and organizational capabilities.
K-12 Education Organizational Capability Map
Organizational capability map defined …
In organizational architecture, the primary view of an organization is known as its organizational capability map.
An organizational capability defines what an organization does to enable value creation, rather than how. Organizational capabilities:
- Represent stable organizational functions.
- Are unique and independent of each other.
- Typically have a defined organizational outcome.
An organizational capability map provides details that help an organizational architecture practitioner direct attention to a specific area of the organization for further assessment.
Glossary of Key Concepts
An organizational reference architecture consists of a set of models that provide clarity and actionable insight and value. Typical concepts that are used to develop these models are defined below.
Concept |
Definition |
|---|---|
Capability |
An ability that an organization, person, or system possesses; capabilities are typically expressed in general and high-level terms and usually require a combination of organization, people, processes, and technology to achieve |
Capability assessment |
A heat-mapping effort that analyzes the strength of each key capability based on people, processes, information, and technology |
Industry strategy map |
A visualization of the alignment between an organization's strategic direction and its key capabilities |
Industry value chain |
A high-level analysis of how an industry creates value for consumers as an overall end-to-end process |
Industry value streams |
The specific set of activities that an industry player undertakes to create and capture value for and from the end consumer |
Organizational capability map |
The primary visual representation of an organization's key capabilities; this representation forms the basis of strategic planning discussions |
Strategic objectives |
A set of standard strategic objectives that most industry players feature in their corporate plans |
Source: The Open Group, 2018
Tools and templates to compile and communicate your reference architecture work
The K-12 Education Industry Reference Architecture Template is a place for you to collect all the activity outputs and outcomes you have completed for use in the next steps.
Download the K-12 Education Industry Reference Architecture Template.
The K-12 Education Industry Reference Architecture Library lists all the value streams and capabilities in a spreadsheet, organized by hierarchy and capability category.
Download the K-12 Education Industry Reference Architecture Library.
K-12 Education Industry Reference Architecture Library
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Mark
Maby
Research Director
Mark
Roman
Managing Partner II
About Info-Tech
Info-Tech Research Group is the world’s fastest-growing information technology research and advisory company, proudly serving over 30,000 IT professionals.
We produce unbiased and highly relevant research to help CIOs and IT leaders make strategic, timely, and well-informed decisions. We partner closely with IT teams to provide everything they need, from actionable tools to analyst guidance, ensuring they deliver measurable results for their organizations.
What Is a Blueprint?
A blueprint is designed to be a roadmap, containing a methodology and the tools and templates you need to solve your IT problems.
Each blueprint can be accompanied by a Guided Implementation that provides you access to our world-class analysts to help you get through the project.
Need Extra Help?
Speak With An Analyst
Get the help you need in this 4-phase advisory process. You'll receive 9 touchpoints with our researchers, all included in your membership.
Guided Implementation 1: Build your organization’s capability map
- Call 1: Scope requirements, objectives, and your specific challenges.
Guided Implementation 2: Use organizational capabilities to define your strategic focus
- Call 1: Assess current maturity.
- Call 2: Identify target-state capabilities.
- Call 3: Identify the relationship between current initiatives and capabilities.
- Call 4: Create initiative profiles.
Guided Implementation 3: Assess key capabilities for planning priorities
- Call 1: Identify strategy risks.
- Call 2: Identify required budget.
Guided Implementation 4: Adopt capability-based strategy planning
- Call 1: Identify and prioritize improvements.
- Call 2: Summarize results and plan next steps.
Contributors
- Bruce Gazely, Project Manager - ERP/SIS Reference Architecture Project, ECNO
- Dana Constantinescu, Business Systems Analyst, Peel District School Board