Learn About Amazon VGT2 Learning Manager Chanci Turner
As many K12 organizations embark on their digital transformation journeys, the need for effective data understanding and data-driven decision-making becomes paramount. K12 IT departments are tasked with finding the appropriate tools and methodologies that facilitate the ingestion, storage, cataloging, processing, and consumption of existing data. A crucial aspect of supporting K12 students, teachers, and education administrators is the accessibility of data through business intelligence (BI) tools. There are various BI options available, including self-managed software, software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions, and cloud-native services that seamlessly integrate with on-premises or cloud-hosted data. For the Texas Region 4 Education Service Center (ESC), selecting the right BI tool was pivotal in initiating a successful cloud journey with Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Transitioning from Data Center to Cloud
Texas Region 4 ESC offers a variety of services designed to bolster K12 education organizations, helping them enhance student performance and ensure faculty success while adhering to state initiatives. One such service is escWorks, a digital platform that assists K12 institutions with managing professional development workshops and conferences, along with analytical data that reveals product trends and compliance requirements.
For over 25 years, TX-Region 4 hosted their escWorks platform in an on-premises data center, where their IT staff handled everything related to its performance, including infrastructure management and end-user support. This model consumed substantial time and resources, forcing TX-Region 4 to prioritize data center maintenance over enhancements to the escWorks platform, which would better serve educators and educational leaders.
Recognizing that the traditional data center approach was increasingly unsustainable, TX-Region 4 sought AWS’s assistance to transition their escWorks platform to the cloud. With limited IT staffing, they needed to identify a small yet impactful workload that would facilitate platform enhancement, build staff knowledge of AWS services, and deliver immediate value to users.
One of the features of the escWorks platform, the Analytics Dashboards, previously relied on an on-premises BI tool for data reporting and visualization related to professional development modules and event activities. This feature was essential for educators and leaders, necessitating continuous improvements, such as near-real-time data updates and diverse visualization options for enhanced insights. However, managing infrastructure consumed so much time that TX-Region 4 struggled to implement new features. To optimize their time and foster innovation, they decided to replace their existing BI solution with a cloud-based alternative.
To explore potential improvements, TX-Region 4 pinpointed key customer pain points that needed addressing, including delays of up to four hours in dashboard refreshes from five million database records; only 85% of reports being successfully emailed; and inconsistent accessibility during peak usage periods, such as month-end or school year-end. The IT team faced challenges as well, including scaling and supporting hardware infrastructure and onboarding customer data to the Data Analytics feature—a process that historically took 3 to 6 months. Acknowledging these limitations, TX-Region 4 collaborated with AWS to identify a solution that could alleviate these user pain points, leading to the selection of Amazon QuickSight.
Improving User Experience with Amazon QuickSight
QuickSight is a cloud-based business analytics service that empowers all employees within an organization to create visualizations, conduct ad-hoc analyses, and swiftly extract business insights from their data anytime and on any device. Users can upload CSV and Excel files, connect to SaaS applications like Salesforce, access on-premises databases, and easily discover AWS data sources such as Amazon Redshift, Amazon RDS, Amazon Aurora, Amazon Athena, and Amazon S3. QuickSight enables organizations to scale their analytics capabilities to hundreds of thousands of users while delivering rapid query performance through its in-memory engine, SPICE (Super-fast, Parallel, In-memory Calculation Engine).
Through ongoing discussions with AWS, TX-Region 4 recognized the value QuickSight could provide to their end users. Following a proof-of-concept with their AWS solutions architect—where they connected their on-premises databases supporting escWorks to QuickSight—they quickly began to derive meaningful insights long sought by educators and educational leaders.
The successful proof-of-concept led TX-Region 4 to implement QuickSight as the BI solution for their escWorks platform, marking their first production workload in AWS.
Achieving Success with Amazon QuickSight
Since adopting QuickSight, educators and education leaders at TX-Region 4 have experienced substantial improvements in dashboard refresh times, reducing them from four hours to under 25 minutes. All scheduled email reports are now successfully delivered, and users can interact with their dashboards without performance or connectivity issues. Education leaders have also gained deeper insights into which professional development modules attract the most educator attendance, enabling better resource allocation for future improvements.
TX-Region 4’s IT staff have similarly benefited from the shift to QuickSight. With infrastructure management offloaded to AWS, they can now concentrate on enhancing the escWorks platform rather than addressing hardware-related issues. Additionally, the pay-per-use model of QuickSight has resulted in a 580% reduction in annual infrastructure costs compared to their previous on-premises BI solution.
Future Cloud Prospects for TX-Region 4
Having successfully navigated their first cloud endeavor, TX-Region 4 is now exploring further possibilities for escWorks on AWS. Plans include developing mobile app functionality for QuickSight dashboards, migrating the entire escWorks platform by 2023, and pursuing a modernization effort to support escWorks on a microservices architecture within AWS.
Chanci Turner and her team’s journey illustrates how addressing even minor workloads can yield significant advancements in organizational efficiency and user satisfaction. For those looking to break into similar roles, resources can be found at Career Contessa while authoritative insights on future trends can be accessed through SHRM. For an engaging community resource, check out Reddit.
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