Why Support the Ed-Fi Data Standard?

Contents

Make your data more valuable to education agencies

By allowing your data to travel fluidly to other systems and reports, the data becomes more valuable to your customers. If data from one area—for example, assessment—can be combined with data in other areas—say, attendance—educators get a more complete view of their students.

Reduce costs and customization around data usage

You may be barraged with "one-off" requests for data in or data out from your customers. And you may define your own processes and specifications for data in. If everyone "does their own thing" in this way, agencies get saddled with a complex set of nightly ETLs (often porting data between many different systems via fragile Extract-Transform-Load (ETL) processes).

Their systems end up looking and functioning much like a spaghetti bowl—difficult to untangle and extract value from:

Education agency architectures to link systems result in more time fixing internal pipes and less time making better use of data.

On the technology provider side, every new system-to-system data provisioning need becomes a customized request from the agency to you. This kind of enabling work is critical, but is generally low-value and something no one likes paying for; customers want new front-end features and insights, not new back-end stuff.

The result of all this is a messy server room and data architecture for agencies, along with a bloated set of one-off requests coming your way. In too many cases, data that would be extremely valuable to educators ends up trapped in siloed systems. Standardized methods of exchange can help surface these insights by providing clear and reproducible methods for data to move between systems.

Everyone benefits, including teachers and students.

Contribute to a more secure ecosystem

Ad-hoc integrations prevent a clear and controlled approach to data security and privacy. Concerns about data security are well-founded. Standardized integrations allow you to focus on common patterns and points of intersection and allow education agencies to understand where and how data is moving. System-to-system communications eliminate intermediaries like SFTP sites and manual transmission of files, which are often far less secure and more difficult to monitor.

Key Concepts

• Standardized data exchange develops new value for existing data and reduces costs of system integrations, all while improving security.