On Saturday, March 20, 2010, the CTO Mentor Program held its second session for the 2010 cohort, and the K-12 Technology Works Process SelfCheck was there. The CTO Mentor Program is a joint project of CETPA, CCSESA, CDE and FCMAT that's designed to educate and certify Chief Technology Officers for leadership in the California K-12 community. The program is designed to provide instruction in three interrelated strands: Technology, Education and Leadership. Each strand is divided into multiple topic areas that are taught over the course of a calendar year.

The Leadership strand consists of curriculum covering several complimentary disciplines, including Professional Development, Fiscal Management, Project Management, Communications, Personnel, and Organizational Management. IT Governance has been a key component of the Organizational Management curriculum since the program launched in 2007. Subject matter covering the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL), Control Objectives for Information and related Technology (COBIT), Balanced Scorecard, SixSigma and others is central to the course.

This year, for the first time, the COBIT Quickstart was introduced. The larger COBIT 4.1 framework is still covered, but the Quickstart is now offered as a simplified entry point to control assessment and implementation. Based on the COBIT Quickstart, the K-12 Technology Works Process SelfCheck™ is featured in the class. The application provides a user friendly interface that enables an organization to perform a self-assessment that can be used as a baseline for more detailed improvement programs. All candidates in the CTO Mentor program for 2010 will use the application to assess IT operations in their home organization. This activity will not only provide exposure and familiarization with control objectives in general and the COBIT framework specifically, but will also aid in the implementation of IT Governance in these critical K-12 organizations.

K-12 Technology Works specializes in IT Management and IT Governance for K-12. This free offering to the CTO Mentor Program is just a small part of our commitment and dedication to help establish better IT operational practices in K-12. IT is an asset, and with proper focus and control can help to reduce costs while improving performance across the K-12 enterprise. It is our goal at K-12 Technology Works to help make this happen in our schools.

For more information regarding the array of IT optimization services provided by K-12 Technology Works, please checkout our Technology Improvement Plan.

If you would like further information or assistance in implementing better process control, alignment, or infrastructure optimization in your organization please do not hesitate to contact us at (925) 634-3483 or email us at info@k12technologyworks.com.