Schools everywhere are being asked to run themselves more like data-driven organizations, and digital management platforms are usually presented as the tool that will make this possible. This article synthesizes literature from multiple national and resource contexts using an integrative (narrative) review method, examining what separates cases where a platform genuinely changed how a school operates from cases where it became just another administrative burden. Five interacting mechanisms emerge from this synthesis: strategic alignment, capacity-building, infrastructural readiness, leadership and governance, and continuous monitoring. The study's theoretical contribution lies not in listing these factors separately, but in modeling their interdependence (e.g., infrastructure as a precondition for capacity-building, leadership shaping monitoring) and in showing how AI-enabled decision-support systems may extend this framework. The article concludes that a platform's strategic value comes from the organizational work built around it rather than its technical sophistication, and recommends that the proposed model be empirically tested through future multi-case studies.
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