Four years ago, the Children’s Society’s finance director and head of IT Charles Noll was confident that the organisation’s IT function was a lean-performing entity that measured up well against others in the charitable sector he even had benchmarking standards to prove it.

But for some time he had looked on at the commercial world with some envy, eyeing the big multi-nationals as they ploughed millions into automated IT support centres that, by turn, could yield significant long-term savings.

Noll wanted to imitate the same strategy and capitalise on growing economies of scale that he felt could be achieved in IT. However, he had a problem: ‘No one could produce hundreds of cars a week until you invented a production line, but you needed a lot of money to produce that production line,’ he says. As a charity with a £40m turnover, the Children’s Society needed a partner.

Looking around at other children’s charities, Barnardos and NCH were out ­ too big and unlikely to come on board ­ while Save the Children had already outsourced. The NSPCC, however, was a nice fit and the pair soon turned the germ of an idea into a full-blown strategy which in 2004, emerged as Charityshare, a joint IT operation perched outside the two organisations.

The plan was rolled out over 18 months, with the helpdesk teams the first to be integrated, a move that saw the introduction of a new automated helpdesk software system which Noll says would have been an impossible investment for the Children’s Society on its own. The transition later saw standardisation on Windows XP, a commitment to broadband technology and the integration of each organisation’s server farms, via a fibre optic cable.

‘A key lesson we have found in delivering big IT projects is the danger of getting obsessed with a deadline or a budget, as the key thing is to be obsessed by the capability ­ what processes does the business have to have in place and what could you leave out to hit a deadline. When all’s said and done, you can choose,’ says Noll.

The impact on the IT personnel has, he insists, been positive, with natural wastage taking care of the most contentious element ­falling staff levels. ‘The end result is an IT department bigger than either charity could afford but smaller than our combined IT departments would have been, so we ended up paying less but getting more expertise,’ says Noll.

‘You can now allow people to concentrate on their area of specialisation, so if a person’s speciality is web development or running successful server farms, there was enough business in that area to allow them to focus on that one core area.’