The Ed-Fi journey for technology providers usually follows the steps below. Understanding the steps will help you contextualize the stages and activities that will lead you from engaging to delivering real value in the Ed-Fi Community.
We encourage you to participate in the following ways to get the most out of your Ed-Fi integration:
Engage with your users about Ed-Fi. You probably came to Ed-Fi because your customers asked you to support the Ed-Fi Data Standard. The first stage for your teams – generally your product management teams – is to understand these requests and determine if and when support for Ed-Fi is right for your product roadmap and will deliver value to your customers. There are several critical activities in this stage of the vendor’s journey. These includes:
- Meeting with the Ed-Fi vendor team to share your goals and pain points, as well as what your customers have asked you to support
- Identifying priorities and potential entry points into this work
- Joining the Ed-Fi community
- Attending Community events such as the Ed-Fi Summit and Technical Congress
- And completing the Ed-Fi Academy training modules
Develop your initial implementation, perhaps using prototypes developed in the learn phase. We strongly advise building with an iterative methodology and having a customer use the software as your teams build it.
During this “Develop” stage:
- You will make a plan with the support of the Ed-Fi vendor team, establishing your first goal as a vendor participating in the community.
- You will join the partner program, which is a set of community participation commitments, organized around best practices of engagement in the community.
- You will establish and resource key roles, such as your Ed-Fi Product Owner, Implementation Lead, and Partnerships Lead. A
- And you will become acquainted with the support and resources of the Ed-Fi vendor team available to you.
Credential. The Ed-Fi Alliance operates the Ed-Fi Certification and Ed-Fi Badge programs that can test that your work is ready for broad usage in the Ed-Fi Community.
Key expectations and activities in this stage are:
- Keeping your credentialed offering current with Ed-Fi versions. Note that certifications remain active for one year and badges remain active for two years.
- And expanding your support across products if you have multiple products. It greatly increases the value of the data in your systems and drives ROI and customer retention—as well as community member success.
Productize. As a vendor, once you have met the credentialing requirements, it’s time to publish your offering to the community and drive adoption of it and your own ROI benefits from the work.
You will provide product offering availability information, configuration and support information, and other self-service resources needed for community members to use those integrations successfully in their implementations.
As you productize your offering, we hope you will contribute your expertise to the Ed-Fi community. What “productizing Ed-Fi" means to the Ed-Fi community is making your product’s API clients:
- Self-serve by agencies to enable and configure and use
- Free to enable a universal/base LEA profile that conforms to the certification or badge specification
- Resourced by key roles in your vendor organization (Ed-Fi Product Owner, Implementation Lead, Partnerships/Adoption Lead are the core roles we recommend)
- Available to any LEA regardless of region or context
- Supported by enablement, configuration, and support documentation and resources (including mappings of optional data/resources are provided in the integration)
- And credentialed to Ed-Fi community-wide defined, priority use cases, and those offerings/credentials are kept current to support community member’s success in using them