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Introduction
The importance of Information Systems cannot be over emphasized in any sector today. Education industry is no different. The local and federal government has often emphasized and supported thorough implementation of information system collaborating schools and other related organizations to achieve better visualization of these organizations and institutions as well as provide a unique framework for everyone involved in the process. This paper discusses the SIF standard and the concept of Student Information System to outline the main components of such information system that can effectively cater to the unique needs of everyone involved. This paper will focus k-12 schools to define the system and its functionality.
What is SIF?
SIF stands for Schools Interoperability Framework, SIF is a set of standards and specification for data sharing across schools and local or federal agencies and departments. The SIF provides a platform for defining standards for the data and a SOA(Service Oriented Architecture) protocols to effectively share this data between school districts and state departments to enhance better visualization and understanding of schools and students within any district.
Significance Of SIF
Currently, most of the K-12 schools have their standalone information systems catering to their unique requirements, but the lack of a uniform standard for these systems emerged as a gap and isolation of data and made information sharing impossible to achieve. SIF was introduced to bridge that gap by standardizing the data and the interconnectivity of this data between local district as well as state level education department that are SOA based. The SOA based architecture also allows future growth in terms of functionality with ease.
In most cases schools have a limited IT budget and system migration or technology upgrades require heavy investment costs, additionally, it is hard to design a system that could easily communicate and interconnect with any other system across the schools network considering the entirely different specifications of systems. To fulfill these requirements SIF enabled solutions are required that can manage the interoperability and communication channel needs with ease. Thus, SIF enabled solutions are independent of any vendor, technology or platform and therefore provide seamless interoperability.
The numerous benefits and efficiency that SIF brings for automation and connectivity across technologies and platforms can be illustrated through a graph (figure 1) as presented below that is based on actual figures provided by school district showing the difference in time before and after using SIF based solutions.
Considering these figures it can be established that SIF based solutions provide better opportunities for institutions and school districts by offering several additional benefits such as reducing system administration and management costs, providing extensive and automated reporting all in a secured and real time fashion. Therefore these solutions become a natural choice for any k-12 school ready to comply with federal legislation for education institutions.
Components Of SIF compliant SIS
SIF is a basic open standard that outlines how data can be exchanged and shared among education industry sub systems or applications. SIF offers schools and districts to choose from standardized applications such as Student Information Systems (SIS) software, transportation and food service software, library automation systems, learning management systems, assessment management, state reporting and directory management to design an enterprise level solution according to the needs and requirements. The standardized design allows easy integration of more applications enabling scalability with ease thus future proofing the system. The following figure(figure 2) shows the basic components of a SIF compliant solution integrating different application agents interconnecting and communicating through Zone Integration Server and SIF application agents. A zone integration server acts as a central messaging server that manages inter messaging between all applications and zones (any school, district, building or entire state) while guaranteeing delivery, security and authentication. The SIF application agents communicate between individual applications and ZIS for updating and communicating any data changes.
Figure 2: SIF Architecture Source: IBM DeveloperWorks,2011
It can be viewed that the applications cater to all the requirements of all involved stakeholders such as the students, school administration, parents and legislators. In addition to that the SIF compliancy also offers extensive reporting, network management and real time messaging and information sharing.
Horizontal Integration
SIF compliant solution and the applications adhere to the industry standards thus they are easily extensible and scalable as well as reduce integration issues at any time in future. The layered architecture of SIF also secure the applications from external threats as no application communicate or share data directly but the ZIS and the SIF application agents manage the entire interoperability scenarios providing guaranteed shield for the entire system. These application are arranged in a logical grouping into SIF Zone where SIF agents intercommunicate through ZIS.
Specification & Open Standard Development
SIF has already proven to improve education systems and performances by reducing business management, support and infrastructure overheads. Additionally, considering the nature of schools and their limited budget SIF has provided their specifications and standards freely for anyone to consult and built their own interoperable application compliant with SIF. An open product that is vendor neutral is the right choice for schools.
Community Based Support
In order to successfully implement SIF compliance and to encourage schools in leveraging the information available through these system several local schools, Department of Education, educational associations and software vendors have formed a support forum. Due to the popularity and need of SIF more and more vendors are designing better products through continual discussion and to better serve the purpose.
Conclusion
In order to successfully implement a SIF based solution, different vendors might be scrutinized to assess their products in comparison to the unique needs. The chosen product should have the applications pertaining to the stakeholders that are the school administration, parents/students and the local, district and state level authorities. The security and privacy should be well checked and the vendor should be able to provide scalability and extensions in the future. The solution should support SOA to communicate with the state level departments.
References
Christopher Jay Davia, G. C. (2011, March 15). Schools Interoperability Framework and SOA. Retrieved from DeveloperWorks,IBM: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/websphere/library/techarticles/ind-sifsoa/
Pearson. (2013). Future-Proofing Your SIS: Why Open and Interoperable Solutions Are Critical. Pearson (http://www.pearsonschoolsystems.com/pdf/pov/pearson-open-pov.pdf).
Schools Interoperability Framewor. (2004). Schools Interoperability Framework-PESC Best Practice Submission. Schools Interoperability Framewor.
SIF Association. (2013). DECISION MAKERS: WHY CHOOSE SIF? Retrieved from SIF Association: https://www.sifassociation.org/AboutUs/Why-Interoperability/Pages/Decision-Makers.aspx
