Plano Independent School District aims to provide an excellent education for all students in its 68 schools, stretching across Southwest Collin County in Texas. The district works with a broad range of information sources, from Employment Data and Staff Certifications to Student Performance and Attendance. This information is stored in multiple database structures.
The difficulties the school district faced were in providing this information to the user community in a timely and flexible fashion. The district's primary focus remained on the technical challenges and not on the information needs of the organization. "Easy access to actionable information was not available." says John Alawneh, Executive Director of Technology Operations at Plano ISD.
The school district wanted a technology that could provide rapid and flexible access to information, helping empower the decision-makers of the organization and simplify the technical challenges that it was facing. Plano ISD chose Futrix because it is easy to deploy quickly, leverages the school district's existing SAS platform and provides the required flexibility.
Futrix was able to rapidly solve many of Plano ISD's information delivery challenges. Within a matter of weeks it was using Futrix to provide preliminary information to key users for testing and sign off. As John explains, Futrix has exceeded expectations, "Not only is Futrix providing important information to key decision-makers, but as its utilization expands within the organization, it is helping with the creation of the enterprise wide data warehouse."
Plano ISD has experienced significant time savings in delivering information and increased self-service utilization of information. Futrix has empowered its end users to perform extensive analyses from a centralized and consistent source of information and eliminated the need for specific IT requests. John surmises that "Futrix has helped change the culture within the organization to provide for more analytic and information-based decision making."
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