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Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians' Education Portal Paints Better Picture for Strategic Planning, Program Forecasting

The portal is helping the band to understand the lives of its students, and officials want to explore a machine-learning algorithm that can help uncover even more new insights within the next year.

When the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians, based in Michigan and Indiana, launched its education portal last August, it faced a unique challenge for a government of its size: The band’s approximately 6,000 members attend learning institutions across the nation in school districts with varying requirements, standards and conditions.

The band’s customer relationship management (CRM)-integrated portal not only solved that problem, but it also built a foundation for future technologies — like artificial intelligence — that the government’s leaders say will improve the lives of citizens.

In 2013, long before the CRM launch, keeping track of everyone’s needs and offering them the appropriate services was challenging, said Sam Morseau, the band’s director of education.

“In terms of the education portal, one of the biggest issues we had was collecting documents from citizens all across the nation,” Morseau said, pointing to the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) as a key impediment. “One of the things that’s really helped out was being able to get an educational release and actually having the families submit data electronically. It’d be tremendously difficult for educational associates to collect that data on all of our citizens, but by putting it onto the citizens, it helps out in terms of efficiency and seeing strategic planning.”

The education portal is now being used by about 800 pre-college students and about 200 students attending colleges and universities. The portal streamlined several processes for students, like applying for scholarships, applying for book stipends, and applying for housing assistance, into a single application. The portal is linked directly to the band’s CRM, eliminating any manual data entry on the government side, and providing access to real-time data about students. By building dashboards, Morseau said officials can find answers to questions like, “How many fourth-graders are at a particular GPA?”

The system also helps the band manage a distributed populace. Districts vary in their adaptation of common core testing and preference for ACT or SAT testing, for instance.

“[It’s] huge,” Morseau said, “because it paints a better picture in terms of strategic planning and forecasting for different programs and services. … We’re extremely happy and excited about the use of technology and we’re looking to continue this on. One of our mottos is making sure we take care of the next seven generations and I think that by using and leveraging technology, it helps us continue that mission.”

The portal was built by several vendors and an internal project management team, said enterprise architect Pawel Majkowski. Microsoft and the band’s Microsoft partner developed the portal’s backbone, which is SharePoint; Auth0 provided authentication; and K2 developed forms.

The education portal is a great starting point for the band to understand the lives of its students, Majkowski said, and within the next year, officials want to explore a machine-learning algorithm that can help uncover even more new insights.

“What’s more attractive is what it could uncover potentially that we never knew about,” Majkowski said. “And to allow it to analyze and take a look at what’s going on and create relationships for us that we never thought or knew existed, and then possibly use that data as a driver to make business decisions on how we want to change services or reallocate budgeting."

Culturally and historically, he said, the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians is a population that, unfortunately, has not had the best access to education and health care, and "a lot of things have happened as recently as 50 or 75 years ago that really shape how they do things, how they grow up, how they raise their families," Majkowski said. "And governments are coming in and getting smarter and smarter on how to give those citizens an edge to be competitive in today’s society.”

Colin wrote for Government Technology and Emergency Management from 2010 through most of 2016.