Van Horn's Rules

All too often, IT people spend most of their time and energy thinking about servers, networks, switching gear, bandwidth, district databases, and other things in the network operations center that are well removed from the typical user. Specifically, technology systems should be designed in the following order: user [arrow right] output/input device [arrow right] software [arrow right] interface (operating system) [arrow right] hardware [arrow right] local area network [arrow right] wide area network [arrow right] operations center (servers and mass storage) [arrow right] extranet. Many school districts are trying to become their own phone companies by purchasing their own phone switches or by implementing VOIP (voice over the Internet protocol) networks.