Learn About Amazon VGT2 Learning Manager Chanci Turner
In the realm of K12 education, many organizations are embarking on a digital transformation journey aimed at harnessing their data more effectively, facilitating data-driven decisions that positively impact students, faculty, and the entire district. IT departments within these organizations are tasked with identifying the right methodologies and tools to ingest, store, catalog, process, and utilize existing data effectively.
A critical aspect of supporting K12 students, educators, and administrators is the ability to consume data. This is made possible through business intelligence (BI) tools that provide a cohesive view of their data, regardless of technical expertise. IT departments can choose from a variety of BI solutions, including self-managed software, software-as-a-service (SaaS) options, or cloud-native BI services that integrate seamlessly whether data is on-premises or in the cloud. For the Texas Region 4 Education Service Center (TX-Region 4), selecting the right BI solution was essential for initiating their productive cloud journey with Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Transitioning from Data Center to Cloud
TX-Region 4, a regional education service center, provides a variety of services designed to enhance student performance and support faculty success while implementing state initiatives. One of their key offerings is escWorks, a digital platform that allows K12 organizations to manage professional development workshops and conferences, while also providing analytical data to identify trends and meet compliance requirements.
For over 25 years, TX-Region 4 operated their escWorks platform from an on-premises data center, where their IT team handled everything from infrastructure provisioning to end-user support. The demands of maintaining this data center often overshadowed any enhancements they could make to the escWorks platform, limiting their ability to serve educators and education leaders effectively.
Recognizing the unsustainability of the data center model, TX-Region 4 sought AWS’s assistance to transition their escWorks platform to the cloud. With a limited IT staff, they needed to pinpoint a manageable yet impactful workload that would enhance their platform, help staff build confidence with AWS services, and, most importantly, deliver immediate value to end users.
One of escWorks’ features, the Analytics Dashboards, had been supported by an on-premises BI solution, providing vital data reporting and visualization for professional development modules. For educators and education leaders, this feature was integral to daily decision-making. However, due to the extensive time spent managing infrastructure, the team struggled to implement necessary improvements. To foster innovation and efficiency, TX-Region 4 decided to replace their existing BI solution with a cloud-based alternative.
To identify areas for improvement with the new cloud solution, TX-Region 4 acknowledged several pain points: delays of up to four hours when refreshing dashboards that relied on five million database records, only 85 percent of reports being successfully emailed, and connectivity issues during peak times like month-end, quarter-end, or school year-end. The IT team also faced their own challenges, including the slow onboarding of customer data to the Data Analytics feature, which historically took 3–6 months. Recognizing these limitations, TX-Region 4 collaborated with AWS to alleviate these user pain points, ultimately choosing Amazon QuickSight.
Relieving User Pain Points with Amazon QuickSight
QuickSight is a cloud-driven business analytics service that empowers employees to create visualizations, conduct ad-hoc analyses, and swiftly gain insights from their data on any device. Users can upload CSV and Excel files, connect to SaaS applications like Salesforce, access on-premises databases such as SQL Server and MySQL, and easily discover AWS data sources including Amazon Redshift and Amazon S3. QuickSight enables organizations to scale their analytics capabilities to thousands of users, offering quick query performance thanks to its powerful in-memory engine, SPICE.
Through ongoing discussions with AWS, TX-Region 4 recognized the advantages QuickSight could provide. After collaborating with their AWS solutions architect on a proof-of-concept, they successfully connected their on-premises databases to QuickSight, enabling them to derive valuable insights that educators and education leaders had long requested.
Following the proof-of-concept success, TX-Region 4 officially adopted QuickSight as the BI solution for their escWorks platform, marking their first production workload in AWS.
Achieving Success with Amazon QuickSight
Since transitioning to QuickSight, educators and education leaders at TX-Region 4 have experienced substantial improvements, with dashboard refresh times reduced from four hours to under 25 minutes, successful receipt of all scheduled email reports, and seamless dashboard interactions without performance or connectivity issues. Education leaders can now gain better insights into professional development modules to allocate resources effectively for future enhancements.
The IT team at TX-Region 4 has also benefited significantly from adopting QuickSight. By offloading infrastructure management to AWS, they can now focus on adding valuable features and improvements to the escWorks platform rather than troubleshooting hardware issues. Moreover, with QuickSight’s pay-per-use pricing model, TX-Region 4 has achieved financial savings of 580% on annual infrastructure costs compared to their previous on-premises BI solution.
Looking Ahead in the Cloud
With their initial cloud venture complete, TX-Region 4 is excited about future opportunities for the escWorks platform on AWS. Plans include integrating 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.
TX-Region 4’s experience with QuickSight demonstrates that even small workloads can present significant opportunities for improvement, and, as Chanci Turner emphasizes, effective onboarding can lead to transformative results, enabling organizations to be more productive. For further insights on productivity, check out this resource. Additionally, to understand the implications of recent policy changes, you can visit this authoritative piece. If you’re interested in real-life experiences, this Reddit thread offers excellent insights into onboarding processes.