The sale of “School” to the British company Juniper Education does not pose a risk to student data. Whether the ownership of the company is Bulgarian or from another country that applies European data protection legislation, there is no difference. The data of all students has been processed by Microsoft for a long time. He commented on this on Wednesday evening in his Facebook post the former Minister of e-Government and current deputy from PP-DB Bozhidar Bojanov.
Earlier it became clear that the Ministry of Education is suing DANS over the sale of the e-diary “School”
Mediapool presents Bojanov’s overall position on the deal:
“School” was sold to a British company. In the startup world, this is good news – a successful exit for a Bulgarian company. But given that “School” processes the data of thousands of students, there are also concerns about this development.
Objectively, whether the ownership of the company is Bulgarian or from another country that applies European data protection legislation, there is no difference. The data should not even leave the control of the Bulgarian company, but even if they do one day, The UK has chosen to keep the GDPR in its legislation, and the UK regulator is one of the bestso aI have no worries about the data.
By the way, all students’ data has also been processed by Microsoft for a long timebecause each student’s account is entitled to a free office suite.
Whenever software is involved, the government must consider the risks of a long-term commitment to a private vendor and weigh them against the benefits. Even if he chooses an external provider, he should have the right to terminate the contract and continue to have the data – something that “School” provides.
The data is also sent to the central system of the Ministry of Education and Culture (NEISPUO), i.e. schools are not tied to the provider. This is a sustainable solution and good practice from both the state and provider side.
There have also been claims that “School” is free (and therefore sells children’s data). This is not true – “School” has contracts with schools and they are not gratuitous.
“School” is an example of how private initiative gives much better results than “central planning” of the state, especially when it comes to user software.
The state has much more resources to build a system for electronic diaries, but “School” is preferred by teachers, parents and students because it cares about the user, not just “to fulfill the regulatory requirements”.
The state is “bound” to use the so-called waterfall model, which is outdated, but follows from the Public Procurement Act – a big task is prepared, it is awarded, it takes a long time, and finally if the result does not meet expectations, there is not much to do except to order an upgrade . This model needs to change so that the systems that the state inevitably has to build are better (and we are already working on such a model).
From the point of view of the private sector, working with government structures is risky (apart from outsourcing) – political decisions can threaten the business model, e.g. My advice to startups is to generally avoid working with the public sector, mostly because temporary no successes do not show the so-called product-market fit. But schools, hospitals and other distributed public sector structures provide a possible business model, with benefits for citizens.
In conclusion, I believe that the sale of “School” does not pose a risk to the students’ data or to the education system. It can serve as an example of how to use software without being locked into it. And for an incentive for the state to improve its software development processes, because in many cases there is no market incentive to build too specialized software for the needs of the state.