The Ed-Fi journey for technology providers usually follows these steps:
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 include:
- 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
- Creating the Ed-Fi Academy training modules
- Learn what it will take to enable Ed-Fi. Analyze the impacts on other operational processes at your organization. In this stage, we strongly suggest planning one or more limited pilots with customers engaged in the first step and using those results to inform technical and marketing decisions.
- Build 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.
- Certify your implementation. 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.
- Contribute your expertise to the Ed-Fi community. We need your help advancing our technical specifications to ensure the technology addresses the right problems.