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Caulfield Grammar

Providing confidence and clarity for Caulfield Grammar’s digital uplift

Enterprise architecture provided Caulfield Grammar School with clarity, governance and confidence to deliver one of its most significant digital transformations.
Enterprise Architecture as the Foundation for Transformation
Caulfield Grammar School has embarked on a major Digital Uplift Program to modernise three of its core enterprise systems, including its Student Information System (SIS) and Learning Management System (LMS). The initiative will touch every part of the school community including students, teachers, professional staff, parents, alumni and applicants, making it one of the most significant technology transformations in the school’s history.

As the school’s digital ecosystem expanded over time, knowledge and expertise existed across teams, but it had not yet been consolidated into a formal enterprise architecture baseline. Leadership recognised that before replacing critical systems, the School needed a clear, shared view of how its technology environment operated as a whole.

“We had people who knew different parts of the puzzle,” explains Paul Gladwell, ICT Project Director at Caulfield Grammar School. “What we wanted was a definitive reference, an artefact we could confidently return to and say, this is our current state.”

Responsible planning required that clarity. The Digital Uplift Program would impact thousands of users and hundreds of integrations, and even small changes had the potential to ripple across the environment. Rather than proceeding reactively, the School deliberately chose to invest in enterprise architecture, a step more commonly seen in large corporate transformations to ensure the program was grounded in strong governance from the outset.
Establishing a Clear Baseline Before Change
To formalise this foundation, Caulfield Grammar School engaged PerData to deliver a focused enterprise architecture and planning engagement. The objective was practical and operational: to create a usable baseline that would support decision-making throughout the transformation.

“This wasn’t about producing diagrams that looked nice,” Paul says. “It was about understanding what we actually had, how everything was connected, and what would be affected if we changed or removed something.”

PerData provided the structure, templates and architectural framework, while Caulfield Grammar School’s ICT staff contributed deep technical and operational knowledge. Together, they documented applications, integrations, databases, dependencies and stakeholders, creating a shared, trusted view of the environment.

The engagement delivered unprecedented visibility into the scale and interconnection of the School’s ecosystem, deeper than any previous review had captured. What emerged was not a problem to fix, but a clearer understanding of the maturity and complexity of a growing organisation operating at enterprise scale.

“That visibility was a turning point,” Paul notes. “It gave our executive team a full picture of how extensive the environment had become and reinforced why a structured approach to transformation was essential.”
Turning Architecture into a Business Asset
A key success of the engagement was positioning the architecture outputs as a living organisational asset, not a one-off project deliverable. The baseline is now owned by CGS ICT and embedded into Change Advisory Board governance, serving as an ongoing reference for future decision-making.

“The value only makes sense when you explain it in business terms,” Paul explains. “We treated it like blueprints for a building. You wouldn’t start drilling holes without knowing what’s behind the wall.”

This framing helped leadership see enterprise architecture not as a technical exercise, but as strategic infrastructure. With a clear baseline in place, Caulfield Grammar School can quantify risk, understand the cost and impact of retiring systems, reduce duplication and make informed trade-offs throughout the uplift program.

“It gave us confidence,” Paul says. “It accelerated decision-making and reduced the chance of uncovering something late that we hadn’t planned for.”
Building Momentum for the Future
The work didn’t simply reduce risk, it created a shared language for digital strategy across the School. By investing in architectural clarity upfront, Caulfield Grammar School strengthened governance, improved cross-team visibility and established a foundation for long-term digital maturity.

With the baseline now in place, the Digital Uplift Program moves into implementation with a clear roadmap, strong governance and a unified understanding of how technology supports learning, operations and community experience. Rather than focusing on short-term change, the School has positioned itself for sustained, strategic progress.

Ultimately, the enterprise architecture engagement enabled Caulfield Grammar School to move forward with confidence. By formalising and elevating an already complex ecosystem, the School ensured its transformation is guided by clarity, informed decision-making and a long-term vision, setting the Digital Uplift Program up not just for success, but for lasting impact.
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