Creating collaboration: these forward thinking districts are making their vendors work together.

Creating collaboration: these forward thinking districts are making their vendors work together. After two on-campus shootings within two weeks in 2001. it was quite clear that Grossmont Union School District near San Diego San Diego(săn dēā`gō), city (1990 pop. 1,110,549), seat of San Diego co., S Calif., on San Diego Bay; inc. 1850. San Diego includes the unincorporated communities of La Jolla and Spring Valley. Coronado is across the bay. had to dramatically improve its security infrastructure. As the high school district vetted its options, it also received a major grant to connect all its schools with Cisco System's fiber optic IP infrastructure. Assistant Superintendent Assistant Superintendent, or Assistant Superintendent of Police (ASP), was a rank used by police forces in the British Empire. It was usually the lowest rank that could be held by a European officer, most of whom joined the police at this rank. Warren Williams For the retired hockey player, see .Warren Williams (born July 29, 1965 in Fort Myers, Florida) was an American professional football running back.Williams played in NFL for the Pittsburgh Steelers and Indianapolis Colts from 1988 to 1993. , who handles information and technology services, began to consider whether the high-speed network could become part of the security solution. "We had a need, and Cisco had the network equipment and Sony had a camera that would fit on top of the network," Williams says. But neither Cisco nor Sony had an out-of-the-box solution that allowed their products to work together to create the kind of video monitoring that Williams had in mind. "We got the three of us together and said, 'Here's how we might mitigate mit��i��gatev.To moderate in force or intensity.miti��gation n. those kind of events in the future.' " What evolved over the next several years was a new K-12 product for Cisco and Sony, and a state-of-the-art video monitoring system on the 11 Grossmont campuses. The teamwork (product, software, tool) Teamwork - A SASD tool from Sterling Software, formerly CADRE Technologies, which supports the Shlaer/Mellor Object-Oriented method and the Yourdon-DeMarco, Hatley-Pirbhai, Constantine and Buhr notations. , meetings and countless conference calls between the district, Sony and Cisco are part of a nascent nascent/nas��cent/ (nas��ent) (na��sent)1. being born; just coming into existence.2. just liberated from a chemical combination, and hence more reactive because uncombined. trend among the most forward-thinking districts that goes several steps beyond vendor partnerships and creates a model best described as vendor collaboration. "Administrative folks in schools need to rethink re��think?tr. & intr.v. re��thought , re��think��ing, re��thinksTo reconsider (something) or to involve oneself in reconsideration.re the whole concept of educational partnerships from a school district point of view," Williams says. "Partnership usually means or" implies, 'Give me what you've got at the lowest price point possible.' Well, if every vendor did that, they'd all be broke, and there'd be no partners left to have." Instead, Williams pushes for an environment where the district collaborates with partners, getting vendors to work together to create a product precisely suited to his district's needs. "Instead of just taking something off the shell, we look at what can be engineered to put on the shelf," he says. This kind of deep collaboration has many and lasting benefits for all parties involved. By positioning itself as a guinea pig guinea pig(gĭn`ē), domesticated form of the cavy, Cavia porcellus, a South American rodent. It is unrelated to the pig; the name may refer to its shrill squeal. of sorts, and putting up with all the implications of new product development, Grossmont got a system that was a precise fit for its security needs, and offered many ancillary benefits. The vendors got a chance to create a new product--Sony calls it its e-Surveillance System" and now offers the product nationally. Competitors as Teammates If you take William's feat in getting Cisco and Sony to cooperate in the creation of a new security system, multiply mul��ti��plyv.1. To increase the amount, number, or degree of.2. To breed or propagate. times 10, you'll have a good sense of what George Araya, technology administrator, has accomplished at Desert Sands (Calif.) Unified School District A unified school district is a school district which includes both primary school (kindergarten through middle school or junior high) and high school (grades 9-12). In Illinois, these districts are called unit school districts. . While vendor collaboration surely isn't new to business, it's somewhat unique among school districts. And, "it's safe to say no one does it better than Desert Sands," says Bill Robinson, a regional director of the California Technology 'Assistance Program which provides technology training and grant assistance to California schools. For the last two years, Araya has employed vision and charisma An earlier presentation graphics program for Windows from Micrografx that included a comprehensive media manager for managing large libraries of image, sound and video clips. , and the lure lurethe skin-covered object which runs on a monorail on a Greyhound racing track and which the dogs are schooled to chase. The lure must be kept 30 to 40 ft ahead of the leading dog so that the field is stretched out. of sizeable spending, to get even hard-core competitors like Sony, Hewlett-Packard, Cisco, Anixter and Digital Networks, to liter/ally gather at the stone table every few months to discuss how they can work together to keep the district at the leading edge of education technology. "I invite them all to come, and I share what we plan to do and how we expect everyone to work together on this new technology," says Araya, director of educational technology and information services See Information Systems. at Desert Sands. After a while, "They know each other, they know how our district works, and they can present ideas as a package." Araya's accomplishments in his 26-school, 26,000-student district are substantial. The district is midway through a $500 million building and renovation program. By 2010, Desert Sands expects to educate up to 40,000 students in 35 schools. To keep pace with growth the district will build a new school each year through 2010 and refurbish re��fur��bish?tr.v. re��fur��bished, re��fur��bish��ing, re��fur��bish��esTo make clean, bright, or fresh again; renovate.re��fur every other school during the same period. Desert Sands has partnered with Time-Warner Cable to build a gigabit fiber optic infrastructure connecting each school to the district office. By 2010, the district plans for every desktop to have gigabit connection capability. (Araya has asked Cisco to sell the district a l0-gigabit switch for the price of a 1GIG switch, making the district one of the first in the country to have a 10GIG network. The verdict is not yet in on that request.) Video conferencing See videoconferencing. (communications) video conferencing - A discussion between two or more groups of people who are in different places but can see and hear each other using electronic communications. is also available at each school and Araya recently invested $400,000 in Sony network projectors. From a vendor perspective, collaboration meetings that might be viewed as a strain on a salesperson's schedule actually lead to saved time as technology is installed in a school. "What you typically run into [in schools] are projects are delayed, or when they're implemented they're not as smooth because each vendor has come in and done their piece and walked away," says Felicia Seranti, major account manager for Cisco Systems “Cisco” redirects here. For other uses, see Cisco (disambiguation).Cisco System,Inc. (NASDAQ:CSCO, HKSE: 4333 ) is an American multinational corporation with 54,000 employees and annual revenue of US $28.48 billion as of 2006. who works with Desert Sands. With the vendor collaboration model, "The solution we put together is a combination of our products. We understand the implementation schedule better, and we're held accountable to the customer and the other vendors," she says. To keep the vendors from trying to cannibalize can��ni��bal��ize?v. can��ni��bal��ized, can��ni��bal��iz��ing, can��ni��bal��iz��esv.tr.1. To remove serviceable parts from (damaged airplanes, for example) for use in the repair of other equipment of the same each other's portion of the account, Araya establishes which pieces he'll purchase from each company, and doesn't entertain sales pitches outside this framework. He standardizes on a technology to be implemented across the district, then invites the vendors to the table. "He makes the commitment to us that we're going to get the business, but sets a limit," says Theresa Hadler, account manager for Digital Networks Group, which handles the streaming video A one-way video transmission over a data network. It is widely used on the Web as well as company networks to play video clips and video broadcasts. Computers in home networks stream video to digital media hubs connected to a home theater. and video on demand applications at Desert Sands. "He gives us the option, 'Get on board, or don't.' " In exchange for this deep collaboration, and the restraints he imposes on selling, Araya offers his district as a showcase account for the technology vendors. In February he held an open house where all the tech vendors invited their potential customers to Desert Sands to get a peek at a 'best practices' implementation of their technology. He allows them to freely use Desert Sands in their marketing materials and public relations public relations,activities and policies used to create public interest in a person, idea, product, institution, or business establishment. By its nature, public relations is devoted to serving particular interests by presenting them to the public in the most pitches. Araya has even made presentations during seminars that Digital Networks has held for its potential customers. "They use US as a marketing entity," Araya says. "But that helps us; if they're willing to showcase us it means they have the best invested in us." It's the Students, Silly Getting vendors to the same table and taming their competitive natures is a fine aim, but it's a small piece of the puzzle of using technology to improve student achievement. At Lemon Grove Lemon Grove,uninc. town (1990 pop. 23,984), San Diego co., S Calif. Primarily residential, there is also agriculture and the manufacture of wire products, motor vehicle parts, and bricks. (Calif.) School District, an elementary district with 4,600 students, the district's primary mission of improving student achievement via technology is always the first item on the agenda when vendors get together. "We kept our focus and shared that focus with every person we did business with," says Darryl LaGace, director of information systems at Lemon Grove. "We asked, 'How can you help us meet our needs?' By getting them more involved with the culture of your business they have a stake in what the goats are within the district." That commitment to improving student achievement resulted ill an unusual technology solution that involved collaboration between a host of technology vendors, including Microsoft, Wyse Technology, Cox Communications Cox Communications is a privately owned subsidiary of Cox Enterprises providing digital cable television and telecommunications services in the United States. It is the third-largest[2] cable television provider in the United States, serving more than 6. and Citrix Systems Citrix Systems' (NASDAQ:CTXS) is an American technology company, based in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, with subsidiary operations in California and Massachusetts, with additional development centers in Australia, India and the UK. . Lemon Grove now has a 1:2 computing computing - computer ratio in its classrooms, with Wyse's thin-client machines running Citmix and Microsoft applications. And now, more than 15 percent of the district's students in grades 3-8 have the same technology installed at home, with a high-speed cable modern connection to the district. (Students who perform below a certain level on reading and math tests receive the equipment for free, others pay about $29 per month to rant the hardware and pay for the high-speed connection.) "We had been working in isolation with each of these partners, and they each understood our" mission, but we realized we had to bring them together," LaGace says. The results? Three of the four Title 1 schools in Lemon Grove were declared "High Achieving Title 1 Schools" by the state of California in a year that only 15 out of 590 schools in San Diego County received the recognition. DA Rebecca Sausner is a freelance writer based in Brooklyn, N. Y. Education Inc. The districts that are most adept at inducing vendors to collaborate all offer a similar refrain: educators need to think like business executives. "Education really doesn't have the provisions for entrepreneurial kinds of events like this," says Warren Williams, assistant superintendent of information and technology services at Grossmont Union School District near San Diego. "But given the budget crises we have everywhere, we need to start working in this manner." Creating vendor collaboration is going to be different in every school district, based on the projects and needs in each environment. But the principle is the same: "The lesson to be learned here is developing relationships, and moving beyond business partnerships that are often symbolic at best," says Bill Robinson, a regional director of the California Technology Assistance Program, which provides technology training and grant assistance to California schools. Another piece of advice--don't just deal with the vendor's sales force. George Araya, technology administrator at Desert Sands (Calif.) School District, recently held a meeting and invited all of the technology sales people that sell to Desert Sands, and their bosses. His plan was to promote the district and its plans, ask for greater commitments on the part of the partners, and ensure vendor buy-in at the management level as a hedge against changes at the sales level. "Once we got the sense that a partner was going to be a key player, we made sure we had visibility at the cabinet level," agrees LaGace. "That way if there's a change in personnel on the sales force we don't have to resell re��sell?tr.v. re��sold , re��sell��ing, re��sells1. To sell again.2. To sell (a product or service) to the public or to an end user, especially as an authorized dealer. the story all over again." Rebecca Sausner is a freelance writer Based in Brooklyn, N. Y.