Two years ago, Charles T. Thompson, Sr. was bringing
over $50 million worth of broadband services to
Seoul, Korea, as a senior engineering manager for
Cisco Systems. Today, he’s applying that technical
and business expertise to his position as the chief
technology officer for District of Columbia Public
Schools. He talked with us about lessons learned
from the corporate world, current projects underway,
and trends he sees on the horizon.
Q: What was it like to make the
transition from the business world to
education?
A: There were some cultural challenges
to overcome and new language to
understand—for example, understanding
terms like pacing charts and rubrics. I
learned it’s not about the technology per
se but the business of using technology
that has a direct impact on instruction.
I didn’t get that when I first came here,
but I listened to a lot of educators the
first 20 months, and they enlightened
me as to why I was there.
Q: Do you think coming from the
business side gives you a distinct
advantage? How does it inform your
work as CTO?
A: Some K–12 people who’ve
grown up in the system may not have
the business acumen for negotiating
the best price. Having been in the
commercial world, I understand what
margins are, and what company end-ofquarter
cycles look like. The key is to
form strong partnerships where everyone
profits. I have two sets of e-mail
folders. One is called partners, the other
is called vendors. If any of our partners
do something that adversely affects our
ability to be successful, I’ll move them
from the partner folder to the vendor
folder. When they have a meeting with
me and I share this, they’ll say, “Well,
how can we fix that?”
Q: The Council of the Great City
Schools’ recent study on D.C. Public
Schools indicated the district lacked
reliable data for gauging instructional
progress. What’s your department’s role
in turning things around?
A: My definition of good information
is that it must be accurate, concise, able
to be manipulated, and timely to the user.
But most districts—unless they got way
out ahead—have their data residing in
individual silos. This is a problem corporate
America was dealing with four
or five years ago. Right now we’re
investing in applications that can easily
“talk” to each other so data elements can
feed from all the functional areas into a
data warehouse that allows analysis to
take place. Every application will be
School Interoperability Framework
certified—not just compliant, but actually
certified—so if we decide we don’t like
a partner, we can pull them out and put
another SIF-certified module in without
much disruption. My advice to other
CIOs: Don’t build a data warehouse to
meet NCLB, build it to capture the
appropriate data for analysis.
Q: What else is on your agenda?
A: There are two areas I’m investing
some time in right now. One is something
called a dashboard system, where CIOs
get performance metrics on their organization
based on the IT Infrastructure
Library framework. The other is the whole
issue of privacy, information security,
and identity management—for example,
complying with acts like FERPA for
protecting student records, knowing
definitively if a parent or guardian is
logging on from home and they are who
they say they are. One IT governance
model I’m looking at is CobiT. The model
has 34 processes and 318 controls; the
idea is if you meet all those processes
and controls, you’re in full compliance
as far as IT goes. I imagine some time
in the next 36 months the government
might ask districts for this information
for accountability reasons. Being able to
protect information and individual privacy
is where CIOs are going because we are
the owners of the information and all
the related business processes.
