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Toronto District School Board
Transformation and Automation of Desktop Management Services
A School Board Provides a Lesson on How to Keep 60,000 Computers Maintained and Up to Date
Challenge
The Toronto District School Board (TDSB) is the largest school board in Canada and the fourth largest in North America. With an annual budget of $2.2 billion, it serves almost 300,000 students and 15,800 teachers in 558 schools. It was created in 1998, after the amalgamation of the City of Toronto and its neighbouring municipalities.
Thus, the new board found itself in possession of IT assets that had been accumulated by seven previous boards. There were tens of thousands of computers and an IT staff of 525. Most staff members were always on the road, installing, repairing and configuring computers, and even then, in every school, there were teachers who spent inordinate time doing software installations and other IT chores, rather than teaching.
The status quo could not be sustained or effectively modified. The answer was to start from scratch and create a comprehensive, cost-effective central IT delivery service that fully met everyone's needs. It took five years.
Solution
Post-amalgamation, the TDSB established the vision and strategies for its information and communication technologies (ICT). The ICT framework was designed to include asset management, software distribution and remote control as the cornerstones for delivering efficient desktop/laptop access services. Upon reorganizing the IT Department and redeploying IT specialists, the vision became reality.
The TDSB developed and implemented a cost-effective, integrated desktop management solution. It accommodates classroom and administrative needs and optimizes software deployment, usage, support, management and asset preservation.
The solution includes the real-time discovery of assets, distribution of packaged applications and remote control of the desktops through a central Data Centre.
Today, there are only 255 IT staff. About 80 work in the Data Centre. The rest are on the road, installing and repairing hardware. All the software needs of the system's 60,000 classroom and administrative computers in 600 locations are remotely fulfilled by the Data Centre's technology, which is linked to them via a 100-mbps optical virtual network.
The solution makes use of MSI Packaging and includes features such as Recovery After Crash, so the computers are largely self-healing. They are also configured so that teachers and others can't make changes, even though there is no longer any reason for them to handle software.
The Data Centre can simultaneously install new software and upgrades on every computer in the system, every one in a school or every one in a classroom. It can do the same for individual computers and also resolve a single computer's software or configuration problems. If need be, a teacher or administrator can give a Data Centre staff member permission to take control of a computer and experience a problem firsthand.
During exams, all the computers in a classroom can be locked down, to block access to the Web and other sources of outside information.
As well as dealing with problems, the seven-person help desk also handles teachers' individual software requests. The system knows exactly where to deliver them, because each computer has a unique serial number. Overnight software delivery is called the "Wake on LAN" service.
The solution is based on software products from CA Canada including Unicenter software delivery, asset management, remote control and network and server management.
Results
Although the IT staff is about half its former size, it is fully meeting the system's needs. That includes work that teachers used to do. In a nine-month period through mid-2006, 42,000 software installations were relieved from teaching staff. At 10 minutes for each installation, that's 7,000 hours of teacher technical support time freed up. In all, over those nine months, the system performed more than 100,000 installations.
Computer self-healing has saved countless of hours of minor tweaking and adjusting. If new software and upgrades have already been packaged for use by the system, it can deliver them within 24 hours. To date, the Data Centre has packaged 400 applications, which can be re-used indefinitely.
All TDSB employees now know who to call with their computer problems. In 2004-2005, more than 70 per cent of problems referred to the Data Centre's service desks received first-call resolution. Similarly, in 2005, 800 remote software training questions were resolved by a single call.
As well as the enormous salary savings realized by cutting 270 IT staff, the board is also saving the cost of buying, insuring, fueling and maintaining their vehicles.
Innovative Use of Technology
Such a widespread deployment of technology is remarkable in itself and especially notable because it was accomplished by people from seven organizations with different IT infrastructures and methodologies.
A 2006 CIPA Winner!
For its exceptional application of information technology to transform its processes and bring benefits to its stakeholders, the Toronto District School Board has been awarded a 2006 CIPA Silver Award of Excellence in the Organizational Transformation, Not For Profit category.
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