The Cost You Don’t See: When “Working” Systems Still Create Friction

Written by: Steven Anderson

Senior Education Director, PowerSchool

September 24, 2026

Most technology problems are easy to spot when something breaks.

The system goes down. A login stops working. Data doesn’t sync. Messages don’t send. Someone opens a ticket, someone gets an email, and eventually someone asks what happened. But some of the most expensive technology problems in a school district never generate a support ticket, because technically, nothing is broken.

Years ago, when I worked in a school district, we had just implemented a new student information system. We had made progress connecting some of our processes. When a new employee was hired, for example, we could automatically create their master login account.

That felt like progress at the time. And it was, considering the effort it took in the past.

But beyond those individual processes, information still lived everywhere: different data systems, files and folders found on desktops, scribbled notes from Principals, stacks of handwritten walkthrough forms, and, of course, spreadsheets.

Data, as you can imagine, didn’t easily flow from one place to another. We didn’t have a data warehouse that allowed us to look comprehensively across systems. Spreadsheets became the connective tissue holding much of our information together. And still to this day I can remember hearing multiple times a day, “Is this the most recent version?”

We had three incredibly talented data analysts who spent enormous amounts of time pulling, combining, cleaning, and organizing information so others could actually use it.

Everything worked, but it took forever to make it work.

When friction becomes normal

That experience isn’t unique. Across schools and districts, there are countless small moments of friction that have simply become part of the work. These include:

• A teacher logs into another system to find a piece of information

• An administrator exports a report, opens a spreadsheet, and combines it with data from somewhere else

• A staff member enters information into one system, then enters the same information somewhere else

• A family searches through multiple apps, portals, emails, and websites trying to figure out where something lives

None of those moments feels significant enough to raise an alarm, so people adapt. They keep building spreadsheets and bookmark another portal. They create another process that seems to work (but not very well). They ask the person down the hall who knows how to get the report. They keep a sticky note with the steps they need to follow. Eventually, adaptation gets mistaken for functionality.

We live with the friction because the friction has become normal.

And that may be one of the biggest challenges district leaders face when evaluating the value of their technology ecosystem. If people have spent years finding ways around disconnected systems, those workarounds begin to look like workflows.

The most expensive friction may be the friction nobody reports anymore.

Five minutes is never just five minutes

The cost of friction is difficult to see because it usually arrives in small increments.

Five extra minutes to find something. Another login. Yet another spreadsheet. Another manual data entry. Yet another email asking someone for information. And another phone call from a parent who can’t find what they need.

Individually, none of these feels particularly expensive. But school districts operate at scale. Multiply five minutes across hundreds or thousands of employees. Multiply it across weeks, months, and an entire school year. Add the time spent maintaining spreadsheets, reconciling information, answering questions, correcting errors, and navigating between systems. Suddenly, those five minutes begin to look very different.

And the cost isn’t limited to staff time.

When information takes longer to reach the people who need it, students may wait longer for support. When families have to navigate multiple places to find information, frustration increases. When staff spend their time managing systems instead of using information, capacity disappears.

Friction consumes time. Time consumes capacity. And eventually, lost capacity affects the work districts are trying to accomplish.

Leaders don’t need to know the plumbing

Superintendents and district leaders shouldn’t need to understand APIs, data integrations, authentication protocols, or every technical decision happening behind the scenes.

That’s why districts have talented technology leaders. But delegating the technical work doesn’t mean delegating responsibility for the experience those systems create. Technology now touches nearly every strategic priority in a school district, including:

• Teaching and learning

• Family engagement

• Attendance

• Student support

• Human resources

• Finance

• Operations

That means technology alignment isn’t simply a technology department question anymore. It’s a leadership question.

District leaders, superintendents and technology directors included, don’t need to ask how every integration works. They need to ask whether the ecosystem is making it easier for people to do the work. That requires moving beyond one deceptively simple question: Does the system work?

Instead, ask:

• Where are staff still maintaining spreadsheets because information doesn’t move easily between systems?

• Where are people entering the same information more than once?

• How many places does a family have to go to accomplish routine tasks?

• How quickly can educators get the information they need to support a student?

• What manual processes exist simply because “that’s how we’ve always done it”?

And perhaps most importantly:

• What does it take for our people to make our systems work?

Look for the friction

A district technology ecosystem doesn’t have to be broken to be expensive. Sometimes the real cost is hidden in the extra steps people take every day without thinking about them anymore. Those steps consume operational capacity. They shape the experience of employees and families. And over time, they can slow progress toward the strategic priorities technology was supposed to support in the first place.

The goal isn’t to eliminate every extra click or replace every system. It’s to notice the friction we’ve learned to accept.

Because the question isn’t whether your systems work. Most of them probably do.

The better question is: How hard does everyone else have to work because they don’t work together?

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