Bringing Order into Chaos: Building an Integrated School Management Information System - A Case Study from Germany

How can a public educational organization deal with new information requirements from outside the organization when there are problems with the internal data flows? The German school system is currently changing towards data-driven decision-making for school improvement and accountability. Data becomes an important asset and building large-scale information systems becomes a necessity. In other countries and especially in corporate organizations data warehouses have already been implemented to support analytical data processing for high-level decision-making. These existing approaches will be used to transfer some findings to the German education system. Based on the methodology of information needs analysis, we will introduce a case study from the German State of Bremen. Its department of education is under way of building an integrated school management information system. With the help of qualitative interviews and ethnographic methods, we elicited the requirements and suggested a step-by-step participatory design approach to combine information demand and supply.