SCHOOLS I.T.
A costly MIS step
SCHOOLS relying on IT provider Bromcom’s management information systems (MIS) struggled with a five-day outage at the start of term, which left many unable to pay bills, take attendance registers or access safeguarding information.
As reported in Eye 1623 last year, schools have long been caught in the crossfire of the battle between major players in the education MIS market, with schools and academy trusts offered attractive incentives to rely on external providers to handle the large amounts of sensitive data involved in running a school. Bromcom even offered to pay the legal fees of any schools sued by rival ESS SIMS, which had threatened customers over unlawfully interfering with its intellectual property when transferring their own files when changing provider.