| | October 201419CIOReviewcompanies and companies in transition. She holds a B.A. in Psychology from the University of Missouri at Kansas City.Williams and Cook take a great deal of pride in the corporate culture at SI&A: it's easy going in terms of two-way communication among management and line employees, but vigorously hard working. "We meet every deadline that we or our clients set," Williams says.The company's headquarters in El Dorado Hills features several open areas in which people can meet spontaneously, a regulation outdoor basketball half-court (Williams is one of the most frequent lunchtime players), a fitness room and state-of-the-art conference rooms. "I think what makes this company so different from others and what I've worked for is the genuine spirit of collaboration," says Grace Spencer, Product Management Vice President. "We have a `flat' organization: anyone can talk to anyone else. That kind of communication prevents messages from getting filtered and misinterpreted--and it allows our people who are out in the field to remind us what our clients' concerns are."Right now, those concerns are invariably positive for A2A--a product that Williams says, without hyperbole, "works 100 percent of the time. That's not a boast; it's a documented fact." He smiles. "But it's also worth boasting about, isn't it?"data entries, erroneous codes and unusual data variances within the district. As often as each week, district attendance information is reviewed by three different independent teams and automated data routines to ensure accuracy--by checking data constancy, unexplained anomalies and comparative analysis to district historical trends. "If any anomalies are identified--home language is missing, guardian information is missing, address is missing --we issue `data alerts' so that the schools can update their Student Information System," says Cook. "Our team of experts understands data, which is why the precision of our data is unmatched. Some districts use A2A as their data of record because of the numerous data-integrity checkpoints built into our process.Williams says that through his company's patent-pending technology and processes, "We can extract data from any Student Information System (homegrown or otherwise) and compare districts to 1.5 million students and more than 1,500 school sites. We can also do this with non-clients, with less than 30 minutes of their IT department's time, and then compare their data with our A2A data-set: averages and best performing districts."Adds Cook: "We can look at truancy, chronic absenteeism and excessive excused absences by detailed student attributes like grade, ethnicity, school site, English language learner, and so forth." Williams says that when certain data get aggregated, they can hide worrisome issues and useful, actionable facts. "I'll give you an example," he says. "A 96 percent attendance rate can co-exist with high absence rates in Kindergarten and first grade. But absence rates change significantly in transition years and tend to keep climbing." "Aggregated data won't show grade & school-site specific issues," he continues, "which can cause Districts to focus strictly on average daily attendance (ADA) rates rather than performance predictors, such as absences and lost learning time."Detailed" BackgroundsBy the time Williams founded SI&A 11 years ago, he'd already enjoyed a varied but targeted career in paying attention to details.He holds a Master's degree in Finance from California State University, San Diego, where he also served on the faculty, and another master's, in taxation, from Golden Gate University. His bachelor's degree is from Santa Clara University and he's been a certified public accountant since 1987.Williams has done extensive forensic accounting, and has specialized in helping rapidly growing small businesses stay their strategic courses. He's taken a similar approach with SI&A, keeping the company in fighting trim (it currently has a work force of approximately 100 employees). "Susan Cook and I have made it a top priority to keep everyone in the company talking to each other," he says. "Everyone here has a pretty good idea of what eveyone else does--and everyone knows that the company's culture requires absolute candor." Cook laughs and clarifies, "Civil candor."Cook, who has worked alongside Williams since the company's founding, is a respected industry expert in line management operations, individual and team coaching, and organizational alignment to meet critical goals. She served as the general manager for AT&T Business Systems, and as a vice president and general manager at ARC, Inc. Immediately prior to joining SI&A, she owned a successful consulting business that provided CEO coaching, executive and management training, organizational and managerial effectiveness, and organizational design. Her clients included high-growth
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