In addition, crisis-avoidance meant adopting a philosophy of do it right the first time and building support by involving parents, students and teachers in the early stages. They resent being put into a situation where they can't teach because of a glitch in the system or trouble on the network. Few organizations may afford to do everything that needs to be done all at once. The temptation is to act fast, get the technology in place and debug it as you go. By listening to constituents up front and spending the time required to both plan and get people aboard, Oswego district personnel avoided some of the worst traps that lay in wait for overly ambitious system builders.
Nothing can derail a plan faster than built-in obsolescence.
District staff were determined this would not happen. They addressed critical issues of capacity, emerging technology and continuing costs, thus laying a foundation for future growth and expansion. As a result, they are well-assured the money spent in recent years is an investment they can build upon, not a cosmetic quick fix that will have to be replaced in a few years. Oswego staff tackled the capacity problem head-on by designing a 7,000 node network with about 2,000 currently active nodes, plenty of room for growth down the road. Real costs of network expansion come from the addition of PCs and peripherals, so over-design in the planning stages and development are not a costly proposition.