Okay, imagine this. It's 8 Lir AM Tuesday, you
walk into a school, the bell rings, and for the
next, I don't know, seven hours, thousands, and
I mean literally thousands of tiny, invisible
digital things have to happen perfectly. Right.
Teachers logging in, the cafeteria system scanning
lunch cards, a student in the library clicking
a research link. And if it works, it's just...
It's magic. It feels completely seamless. It's
invisible. But we all know that's not always
the reality, right? When that invisible machinery
breaks, you know, the Wi -Fi drops in the middle
of state testing or the smart board just won't
connect, it stops being invisible. Oh, it becomes
a crisis. A big one. A very loud, very panicked
crisis. Exactly. And suddenly the IT director
isn't some wizard behind the curtain. They're
the ones standing in the principal's office trying
to explain why calculus isn't happening today.
And that explanation, it usually sounds like
complete gibberish to the administration, which
is I think the core tension we're getting into
today. That's exactly where we're going. We're
doing a deep dive into this really fascinating
article called Key Performance Indicators and
IT. It's by Gary Ackerman, published on hackscience
.education back in January of 2026. And I'll
be honest, when I first saw the title Key Performance
Indicators, KPIs, I almost just scrolled right
past it. It sounds like the driest, most corporate
thing you could imagine. It really does. It sounds
like a spreadsheet that absolutely nobody wants
to open. The more I read Ackerman's piece, the
more I realized this isn't about spreadsheets.
It's about survival. It's about how IT leaders
can use these numbers as like a defensive shield
and a translation tool. That's the perfect way
to put it. It's a power move that's just disguised
as boring paperwork. So our mission for this
deep dive is to unpack all of this. We're going
to look at why schools even need these metrics,
what numbers actually matter, you know, beyond
just is the internet on. And this is the important
part, how those same numbers can be used to hide
a total disaster. The dark side of data. Exactly.
So let's start with the big picture, the strategic
need. Why does Ackerman say a school IT director
needs to even bother with KPIs? Can't they just,
you know, fix computers and call it a day? You
think so, right? But Ackerman points to this
fundamental translation problem inside schools.
I mean, think about who's running a school district.
You've got superintendents, principals, the school
board. What's their background? It's usually
education, you know, curriculum, pedagogy, maybe
some finance or policy. They are not network
engineers. They have no idea what the difference
is between a DDoS attack. and you know a cheap
router that just failed so when something breaks
and the IT person starts talking about packet
loss or server load the administration just hears
noise they hear excuses they hear computers broken
and you don't know why precisely so the KPI the
key performance indicator becomes the translator
it takes all that complex technical stuff and
turns it into a simple metric that a non -technical
leader can actually understand Okay, but here's
the part from the source I found really interesting.
Ackerman says IT leaders have to define their
own KPIs. Doesn't that seem a little, I don't
know, convenient, like grading your own homework?
It does sound a bit suspicious, but it's really
a defensive move. It's a necessity. Because if
the IT department doesn't define what success
looks like, then the administration's going to
define it for them. And their definition might
be totally unrealistic. Afford just. completely
irrelevant. An administrator might say, success
is zero complaints. Well, that's impossible.
Or success is we spend zero dollars. Also impossible.
So by setting the KPIs themselves, the IT leader
is really setting the terms of the conversation.
They get to control the narrative. So instead
of the story being the Wi -Fi is always broken,
the story is we achieved 99 .9 % network uptime
this month, which actually exceeds our goal.
Exactly. It moves the conversation away from
just feelings like I feel like the Internet is
slow and into facts. Well, the data shows our
latency is under 20 milliseconds. It stops what
Ackerman calls distraction. It keeps the bosses
from obsessing over a tiny glitch when you can
prove the whole system is healthy. I love that
phrase, data as self -defense. OK, let's get
into the weeds then. If I'm an IT director, or
maybe I'm a principal trying to figure out what
my IT team is doing, what should I actually be
measuring? Ackerman breaks this down pretty neatly.
He does. And the first category is what I kind
of think of as the plumbing. you know, speed
and reliability. The absolute basics. Right.
Most obvious one is system uptime. It's just
the percentage of time that your critical systems
are actually working. That's the classic five
nines thing we always hear about, right? Like
99 .999 percent uptime. That's the gold standard,
yeah. And in the school, if the student information
system goes down, you can't take attendance,
you can't see a kid's medical records, you can't
call a parent. The school is basically paralyzed.
So tracking uptime is step one. But, and this
is a really big, but uptime can be super deceiving.
How so? I mean, if it's on, it's on. Not really.
And that brings us to the second metric he mentions,
network performance. The lights can be on in
the house. but it's how it's usable. This is
where you measure bandwidth, latency, packet
loss. OK, hold on. Can we define those? Because
I feel like latency is a word I only hear when
my video game is lagging. What does it mean in
a classroom? So think of it this way. Bandwidth
is how wide the highway is. Latency is how long
it takes to actually drive from one end to the
other. You'd have a 10 -lane highway. That's
huge bandwidth. But if there's a traffic jam
and you're moving an inch a minute, your latency
is terrible. So for a student, high latency would
be? The spinning wheel of death. You click a
link, and you wait. And you wait. The video keeps
buffering. A Zoom call freezes. So technically
the system is up. The server is working. But
for all practical purposes, the lesson is completely
ruined. That is a huge distinction. So uptime
just means the machine is running, but performance
means a human can actually get their work done.
Exactly. And if you're only measuring uptime,
You could be sitting there patting yourself on
the back, while every single teacher in the building
absolutely hates your guts. Which is a perfect
lead -in to his second category, the support
experience. Because, you know, things do break,
and people have to call someone. Yeah, this is
where IT gets very, very human. Ackerman points
to two really important metrics here, help desk
response time and ticket resolution time. And
you have to be so careful not to mix those two
up. Response versus resolution, OK. Response
time is just, hey, we got your ticket. It's just
acknowledging the problem exists. Does an automated
email count for that? In a bad organization,
yes. In a good one, it means a real person has
looked at it and figured out how urgent it is.
A fast response time lowers anxiety. It tells
that teacher, okay, help is on the way. But it
doesn't mean the problem is actually fixed. Not
at all. That's resolution time. How long did
it take from that first frantic email until the
printer is actually printing again? I can already
see a problem there. If I'm the tech, I want
to close tickets as fast as possible, so my resolution
time looks great. But some problems are really
hard. That's the tension. And we'll get to manipulation
later. But yeah, if you only reward speed, you'll
get technicians putting a digital Band -Aid on
everything just to close the ticket, which is
why Ackerman says you also have to measure user
satisfaction. The survey data. Right. You have
to go ask the humans, are you actually happy?
Because you can have Amazing metrics on paper,
fast response, great uptime. But if your IT staff
is rude or condescending, or if the fix doesn't
actually help the teacher teach, your satisfaction
score is going to be in the basement. It's like
taking the emotional temperature of the building.
OK, so we have plumbing and support. What's the
third bucket? Security and maintenance. This
is all the stuff that, if you do it right, keeps
you out of the headlines. Scary stuff. The biggest
one here is security incidents. You are literally
just counting the bad things that happened. Malware
infections, successful phishing attacks, data
breaches. And the goal is zero, I'm guessing.
The goal is always zero. But the reality is looking
at the trends. Are we seeing more attacks? Are
we catching them faster? But what's really tied
to this is device management. Just counting all
the laptops. It's way more than counting. It's
about their health. How many devices out there
haven't been updated in six months? How many
iPads haven't checked in with the main server?
In the security world, we call these zombie devices.
Zombie device, I like that. Because if they're
not getting updates, they've got like holes in
their armor. Exactly. An unpatched laptop from
last year. connecting to your network today is
just, it's a ticking time bomb. It's an open
door for an attacker. So a high percentage of
managed and updated devices is a massive security
win. And the source mentions software deployment
time in this section too. Why is that a KPI?
Okay, so imagine a huge security flaw is found
in Windows. You've got 5 ,000 laptops spread
across 10 different buildings. How long does
it take you to push that critical patch to every
single one of them a day? a week, that deployment
time is your window of vulnerability. So the
speed is literally about safety? It is. Plus,
deploying things efficiently means you're not
disrupting class. You don't want an update to
start installing when a kid is halfway through
a standardized test. Oh, that's the nightmare
scenario. Please weigh while Windows updates
10 % complete. And the student is failing the
exam, just watching that progress bar. That is
how an IT director gets fired. OK, so that's
all defense. Is there a more strategic side to
these metrics? Yeah, that's the last category
he calls future proofing in finance. This has
things like cost management, staying on budget.
But the really interesting one to me is training
and professional development. So just tracking
how many training sessions you run for teachers.
Yes. And this is what's called a leading indicator.
Most of the KPIs we've talked about are lagging
indicators. They tell you what already happened,
the server went down, the ticket was closed.
But training, that predicts the future. In a
way, yes. If you see high engagement in professional
development, teachers are learning how to use
the new software, staff are learning how to spot
phishing emails, you can actually predict that
your help desk tickets will go down. and your
security incidents will drop in the future. That's
a great point. You're investing in the brainware,
not just the hardware. It shifts the IT department
from being just fixers to being educators. So
this all sounds incredibly logical. You know,
you build this dashboard, you track your uptime,
your tickets, security, training, you show it
to the school board, everyone's happy. But it's
never that simple. And Ackerman spends a lot
of time in the article on this. He warns that
metrics can lie. Or, as he puts it, They can
be myopic, nearsighted. This is maybe the most
dangerous trap of all. Myopia is when you focus
so hard on hitting a specific number that you
completely miss the big picture. You hit the
target, but you miss the entire point. He gives
this amazing example for this, the Chromebook
paradox. Can we break that one down? Yeah, this
is such a classic scenario. So let's say a school
bird has a goal. We want more devices for students,
more digital equity. So the IT director makes
a KPI for it. total number of student devices.
Seems reasonable. More computers, better access.
Right. So to hit that number, the IT director
goes out and buys 2 ,000 of the cheapest, most
basic Chromebooks they can find. The numbers
on the chart go through the roof. The dashboard
is bright green. Look, we increased devices by
300%. But what if that school has a really strong
program in, say, graphic design or video editing
or engineering? You can't run AutoCAD or Adobe
Premiere on a $150 Chromebook. So the students
have a device, but they can't actually do their
schoolwork on it. Exactly. The quantity metric
was met, but the capacity need was totally ignored.
The educational value of that spending is basically
zero. You could even argue it's negative because
you just blew the whole budget on useless hardware.
That's a failure completely disguised as a success.
And the dashboard would never tell you that.
The dashboard would say, mission accomplished.
That's the danger of myopia. It's why Ackerman
warns so much about focusing on counts over capabilities.
And this kind of bleeds into the darker side
of things, doesn't it? Just outright manipulation.
There's something called Campbell's Law, which
basically says that the more you use a number
to make important decisions, the more likely
people are to start corrupting that number. In
plain English? If my bonus depends on a number...
I'm going to do whatever it takes to make that
number look good, even if it hurts the whole
organization. OK, give me an IT example. Let's
go back to that ticket resolution time metric.
Yeah. The boss says all tickets have to be resolved
in 24 hours. Right. And I get a really hard problem.
I know I can't fix it in 24 hours. So what do
you do? You mark the ticket resolved, then send
an email saying, hey, I think this is fixed.
Let me know if it happens again. Or. Even worse,
you close the ticket and then immediately open
a new ticket for the exact same problem. You
reset the clock. You reset the clock. Your stats
look fantastic. Wow. Our average resolution time
is only four hours. But the teacher is absolutely
losing their mind because they have to keep reporting
the same issue over and over. This is sometimes
called a watermelon effect. Oh, watermelon. Green
on the outside on the dashboard, but bright red
on the inside. which is the reality. That is
a very vivid image, and I guess this makes user
satisfaction really tricky too. If I send a teacher
a survey that says, are you happy, and it just
had a terrible class, they might say no just
because they're in a bad mood. And Ackerman points
that out. Satisfaction is subjective. You can't
just have a smiley face button on an email. You
need to use proper instruments, validated surveys
that measure technology acceptance, and ask questions
like, did this tech actually help you teach better?
Not just, do you like us today? So we're really
walking a tightrope here. We need the data to
defend our work and to get funding. But if we
trust it blindly, we could be driving the entire
school right off a cliff. So what's the solution?
How do we use these tools without, you know,
getting hurt by them? Ackerman really boils it
all down to one word. Alignment. Alignment. Your
KPIs can't just exist in some IT bubble. They
have to be directly aligned with the overarching
goals of the school itself. So before you even
decide to start counting Chromebooks, you have
to ask a much bigger question. You have to ask,
what are we actually trying to teach here? If
the school's big mission is excellence in the
digital arts, then your KPI isn't number of devices.
It's number of workstations capable of rendering
4K video. That's such a subtle change, but it
changes absolutely everything. It forces the
IT goals to be in service of the educational
goals. Exactly. Ackerman says KPI should be seen
as stepping stones, not the final destination.
They're just markers on the path. And crucially,
You have to be willing to change them. Adaptability.
I mean, tech changes so fast. A KPI that was
brilliant in 2024 might be totally useless by
2026. If you're still measuring DVD player uptime,
you're fighting the wrong war. You have to constantly
look at your metrics and ask, does this number
still matter? It sounds like the job of an IT
director has changed. It's less about being a
mechanic and more about being a strategist. That's
the ultimate takeaway from the piece. In a modern
school, the IT leader has to be a strategic partner.
They're not just the person you call when the
printer is jammed. They're the person who makes
sure the entire infrastructure can support the
way you want to teach. and keep you eyes on the
language they use to prove they're doing it.
You know, I think there's a lesson in here for
everybody, not just people in IT. Maybe you're
in marketing or HR or even just, I don't know,
managing your own household budget. What's the
parallel you're seeing? It's this idea of defining
your own success before somebody else does it
for you. If you don't set the metrics for your
own job, if you don't articulate, this is what
value looks like for my role, then you're just
leaving yourself vulnerable to being judged by
someone who might have no clue. what you actually
do. It's profound, yeah. Controlling the definition
of success gives you all the leverage. If you
point to the data you chose, you get to justify
your own existence. So before we wrap this deep
dive up, I want to leave you with one last thing
to think about. We talked about that watermelon
effect. We talked about how a dashboard can be
all green while the building is on fire. The
illusion of control. So if we know that KPIs
can be manipulated, if we know a clever person
can game the system to make a disaster look like
a victory, how do you measure the integrity of
the data itself? Now that is the provocative
question. In a system as complex as a school,
Nothing is ever perfect. There's always friction.
There's always some broken projector somewhere.
So if I see a dashboard, and it's 100 % green,
across the board, I actually get suspicious.
You think perfection is the red flag. I do. Is
it possible that the greenest, most perfect dashboard
is actually the one that's hiding the biggest
systemic problems? Because a healthy system has
noise. A healthy system reports its failures
so it can learn from them. If all your data says
everything is perfect, maybe the data is the
biggest lie of all. A little healthy paranoia
to end on. Don't trust the perfect spreadsheet.
Never. That's our deep dive on the invisible
machinery of school IT. Thanks for listening,
and we'll catch you on the next one. Stay curious.