Data-Driven Decision Making at Scale: Volusia County Schools

The Challenge

Volusia County, Florida, is geographically the size of Rhode Island and serves nearly 70,000 staff and students. The district’s IT team faced a familiar dilemma: constant demand, limited funding, and technology lifecycles stretching far beyond their prime.

Cherwell Service Manager had been implemented as the new service management platform, but it was being used as a transactional tool rather than a source of insight. Decisions were often reactive and politically sensitive — especially when it came to retiring old equipment — leading to frequent crises and eroding trust in IT.

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The Approach

To move from firefighting to proactive leadership, I focused on three pillars:

1. Integrating Data Sources

   • Linked Cherwell ticket data with the district’s asset management system.
   • Surfaced correlations between equipment age and service volume, exposing where aging technology was driving disproportionate costs.
   • Built dashboards to show average device age at each school, creating transparency for tough replacement conversations.

2. Redrawing Support Boundaries

   • Plotted a year’s worth of tickets on a wall-sized district map.
   • Rebalanced workloads by redrawing hub boundaries based on historical demand and productivity data.
   • Shifted the model from anecdote-driven assignments to evidence-based resource allocation.

3. Deploying Mobile Hubs

   • Created a flexible resource model with field techs in vans covering the east and west sides of the county.
   • Piloted the approach with a failing “catch-up lab” filled with 10+ year-old PCs and bad networking. Instead of dictating the fix, I gave the tech the dashboard, empowered him to decide, and evaluated performance against data.
   • The lab stabilized, validating the model and proving that trust plus verification could scale.

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The Transformation

These interventions shifted the IT organization’s posture from reactive to proactive:

• Improved service delivery. Fewer crises and smoother resolution of recurring problems.
• Greater satisfaction. Staff experienced more consistent, predictable support.
• System-level visibility. Leadership could see aging equipment patterns and ticket hotspots in black and white.
• Scalable flexibility. Mobile hubs became a durable strategic asset for handling spikes and stabilizing struggling sites.

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Key Lessons

1. Data builds legitimacy. When leaders see decisions grounded in transparent metrics, even unpopular tradeoffs become credible.
2. Integration unlocks insight. Joining asset history with ticket data revealed patterns invisible to either system alone.
3. Flexibility creates resilience. Mobile hubs gave the district a structural advantage without adding headcount.
4. Trust, verified by data, multiplies leadership. Empowering techs with dashboards created accountability and capacity without micromanagement.

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Reflection

For me, this work wasn’t just about IT. It was about education — about making sure technology supported teachers and students in the mission of learning. In a district the size of Rhode Island, the only way to scale service with integrity was to make data the backbone of decision-making. That shift turned 70,000 users’ daily frustrations into a system we could finally manage with clarity and confidence.