Guest Column: Focus On Managing Students…Not Their Records

By HK Bain, CEO Digitech Systems, Inc.

When economic times get tough, school district budgets feel the pinch. In 2009, we are all doing more with fewer resources, but the amount of data every school needs to manage continues to grow. IDC indicates that the digital universe will increase more than six-fold from 161 exabytes to 988 exabytes between 2006 and 2010.

Students, teachers, and the government are asking schools to do a better job of managing records. An effective student records system reaches beyond the classroom and administrators to also benefit parents and the community. Through regulations like the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) and FERPA, the U.S. Department of Education is urging schools to manage information electronically.

Enterprise Content Management, or ECM, offers the security and data management features critical to a successful compliance program. Most applications include data management for electronic files and images from scanned paper documents. Retrieval is facilitated through the use of index values that identify the records (i.e. student name), allowing school personnel to search the system by keyword and receive a listing of all records associated to that value. Many products also include sophisticated security features that lock down record access to only authorized personnel and that can block out the personal information from a given record for those who are not allowed to see it.