SIS SIG - Meeting 13 - 2025.03.18
- Nathan Gandomi
Participants
Agenda
Technical Congress April 21-23, Anaheim CA
Review of best practice required resources and data elements for SIS Certification
Where are these data collected?
How are they structured in SIS offerings?
Core, add-on, third-party collection
Are new certifications needed?
Notes & Discussion Highlights
Technical Congress April 21-23: SIS Community Conversation topics to consider
Reducing the burden on SIS providers by controlling extensions and business logic
Certification alignment to best practices (continued)
Discuss strategies for preemptively analyzing the complexity of data migration.
Identifying which types of data require significant vs. minimal effort to migrate.
When states have not implemented Ed-Fi, districts often take the initiative but encounter common issues.
Data stored in SIS fields not mapped to Ed-Fi creates additional migration work.
Proposal to discuss strategies for preemptively analyzing the complexity of data migration, and anticipating data storage issues
Implementation Readiness:
Defining the key steps for districts and states before going live with Ed-Fi.
Sharing best practices from vendors to support smoother transitions.
Performance
Key issues
Inefficiency of Record-by-Record API Calls – Sending individual records (60–200ms per record) makes large data syncs (e.g., 200K records) unfeasible, taking 8+ hours for full-year district data loads. Suggested: A bulk API handling 1,000+ records per call is needed.
Scalability Challenges in Large-Scale Implementations – States like Indiana process 25+ million records per month for 1.6M students, requiring optimized batch processing. However, many vendors are unaware of Indiana’s existing bulk POST implementation, indicating a gap in communication and adoption.
Need for Benchmarking & Performance Validation – Lack of clear performance benchmarks for bulk API efficiency makes it difficult to justify adoption. Ed-Fi can facilitate benchmarking efforts, leveraging Indiana as a proof-of-concept to validate real-world performance gains.
Next steps/recommendations
Engage Solutions team and EdWise Group to visit with SIS SIG about Indiana’s Bulk API implementation, share findings with vendors
Ed-Fi Alliance lead efforts to collect and share best practice strategies for performance
Review of best practice required resources and data elements for SIS Certification
General agreement that best practices should be more visible and findable
List them in the Data Standard version home page
List them in the Technology Providers Playbook
Standardizing SIS Practices & Reducing Fragmentation
Documentation began in Fall 2024 in response to state requests for guidance on Enrollment. Goals were to standardize SIS practices across the field. Address key questions, including handling crisis events and extent of transportation data inclusion. Reduce state-driven extensions that lead to fragmentation.
Evaluating New Use Cases & SIS Adoption: Ongoing discussions to determine whether SIS vendors already support these use cases. Tech Congress will serve as a platform to present and discuss a proposed set of requirements for adding to Ed-Fi certification.
Group agreed to participate in 1:1 calls over the coming weeks to share feedback about the required elements in best practices, then discuss at Tech Congress session.
Next steps and action items
Topics for Tech Congress and future sessions include:
Certification and best practice alignment
Business logic and extension reduction analysis and findings
Performance strategies and guidance
Gather strategies for supporting states through go-live