Fairfax County, Va. Schools Learn From Informatica

12/09/2003

Informatica Corporation, the provider of data integration and business intelligence software, says Virginia’s 164,000-student Fairfax County Public Schools district has successfully implemented the Informatica data integration platform as the lynchpin of its award-winning Education Decision Support Library (EDSL). An institution-wide “one-stop shop” for information used in planning, executing and assessing education programs and strategies, the EDSL “leverages Informatica’s high-performance data integration platform to provide over 1,800 district administrators, principals and staff with the up-to-date consolidated information required to help drive enhanced operational effectiveness and educational achievement,” Informatica says.

“EDSL would not be the large-scale success it is today without the Informatica platform, which lets us expand and maintain our information infrastructure with minimal effort and cost,” said Gary Policastro, data services coordinator at Fairfax County Public Schools. “We’re dealing with huge volumes of data, including nine years of complex student information that had to be cleansed and integrated right off the bat. Informatica enabled us to do that, just as it is enabling us to evolve the system quickly and continually, while helping to drive clear and immediate economic and educational successes in our department and the community overall.”

Fairfax County Public Schools was awarded the 2003 Virginia Governor’s Technology Award for the EDSL program this fall. Informatica explains that its data integration platform “helps the school district to better allocate its limited funds and resources during a time of budget reductions through increased visibility into program effectiveness, as well as the ability to develop school-improvement plans based on analysis of district-wide student performance and progress. In addition, the schools use EDSL to more quickly identify students that need help, to provide school-performance data to Parent Teacher Associations and other community organizations, and to submit detailed proposals and grant requests in a matter of days versus weeks based on ready access to comprehensive information. While EDSL is based on essentially off-the-shelf technology components, including the Informatica platform, the program application is so unique that a U.S. Patent is pending approval.”

“As the data integration platform for EDSL, Informatica sources, transforms and consolidates data from student systems, special education systems, the state testing system and other data sources. With EDSL, fifteen years of student data and four years of standardized-test data is now validated, integrated and available for use by authorized personnel. The consolidated data supports a range of analysis activities and propagates more than 250 standard reports in such key areas as No Child Left Behind (NCLB), Standards of Learning (SOL), Advanced Placement (AP), enrollment and attendance, discipline, and special service programs including Better Languages, Title 1 and International Baccalaureate. Financial, human resource, facility and other operational systems will soon be tapped for data as well.”

“It is gratifying to see how technology like ours can be used to help make a difference in people’s lives – by providing the infrastructure foundation for educational excellence, as in the case of Fairfax County,” said Sanjay Poonen, senior vice president for worldwide marketing at Informatica. “Educational organizations often have more resource and time constraints than large enterprises, so the school district’s EDSL best-practice implementation is extremely commendable. This use of the Informatica data integration platform is a compelling example of an organization delivering true value and enhanced productivity by implementing a robust integration infrastructure to help enable more effective decisions.”

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