The Challenge
Broward County is the fifth largest school district in the U.S. with more than 250 school buildings and 266,000 K-12 students. Keeping the network up and running for such a large school system is a daunting task. In an equivalent-sized business, a Network Operations Center (NOC) would be considered essential. Yet, when the School Board of Broward County (SBBC) made the decision to implement a NOC, it was one of the first school districts in the country to begin operating like an enterprise business.

“Prior to implementing the NOC, we were far more reactive to the district’s needs and sometimes we were virtually working blind,” recalled Chuck Stanley, Broward’s Director of Technical Support Services. “We couldn’t continue to add field techs and service vehicles to meet our growing needs. With the explosive growth our district was experiencing, we needed a better method to address our network concerns.”

The Solution
Broward augmented its internal resources, drawing upon outside IT support to help design a NOC. After a competitive review, the School Board awarded the contract to JDL Technologies. And, upon completion of the NOC’s design, JDL assumed full responsibility for the ongoing operations of the Broward County School District network. A small staff of six highly trained JDL engineers monitors and maintains approximately 10,000 network devices from a single location. They detect incidents, diagnose problems and implement the solutions.

The Result
Contributions and savings of both man hours and dollars can be directly attributed to the JDL-operated NOC. It has proven to be a great advantage to Broward’s IT department by decreasing network downtime and increasing teacher/student productivity.

“The NOC works great,” stated Stanley. “It gives us excellent visibility into network devices beyond active and inactive status. Now we can see not only if a device is where it’s supposed to be, but we can see whether it’s doing its intended job such as actually serving up Web pages.”

The Next Level
SBBC is now evaluating how to incorporate ITIL best practices into the district. By pioneering enterprise business practices, Broward County is setting new precedents on how managing technology better can measurably enhance a school district’s overall ability to achieve its budgetary and educational goals.