The ECNO program was first implemented as a joint initiative of the Ontario Ministry of Education and Training and the ECNO member School Boards. Through this partnership, ECNO and Ontario Ministry of Education and Training developed and managed a significant suite of software assets, and built a strong and successful co-operative Information Technology program involving over 70 Ontario School Boards. In 1996, prompted by a decision by the Ministry to reduce funding of the ECNO program, ECNO decided to re-group. With a renewed vote of confidence from the membership, the cooperative secured control of all software assets, and began to reestablish and expand on the services, previously provided by the Ministry, through new strategic alliances and partnerships with the Private Sector. After a competitive proposal process, the contract to provide technical support services to ECNO was awarded to SRB International, an Ontario based firm, with experience in providing administrative software and services to education. As a direct result of this partnership, all essential ECNO products and services were transitioned to the new ECNO Corporation, with virtually no interruption of service to the members. A new, strong and viable support organization was established. And, in the end, the costs for maintaining the ECNO products and services were reduced by over 66 percent. Since that time, the ECNO-SRB partnership has flourished and strengthened. Immediately after the software transition, ECNO embarked on a program to upgrade all supported software systems and to make them Year 2000 compliant. In early 1997, SRB, with the support of ECNO, took over the Trillium project, a joint-venture software development, designed to create a new Ontario client-server based Student Administration System. Today, this product has been completed, has been licensed to over 2500 schools in Ontario, and is rapidly becoming the de-facto standard for Student Information Management in Ontario

As one of the most successful co-operative ventures in the history of Education in Ontario, ECNO is truly greater than the sum of its parts.

Real Numbers, Real Savings…

ECNO provides and maintains a comprehensive school board HR-Payroll system. For an ECNO Board with over 6,000 staff, this service is provided for an annual cost which is less than the cost of two in-house programmers.

ECNO’s cost to implement Year 2000 compliance for all their applications was $300K. If all Boards had to complete this effort on their own, estimates for the collective costs ranged from $15M to $21M. This represents a significant saving to the Ontario educational community.

In 1985, the ECNO Co-operative adopted the BAS Financial System and subsequently negotiated a province-wide license for all ECNO Boards. The system was implemented in over 70 ECNO member Boards, representing a saving of over $4 Million.