Meeting ever-changing IT needs at Unicef

Pic credit: Unicef Sverige

“The key thing for any IT architecture,” says Phil Durbin, UK head of IT at international children’s charity Unicef, “is to enable the business to meet its aims and objectives.” That is as true for a charity as it is for an investment bank.

And Durbin is keenly aware of the commercial pressures facing his organisation. In 2008 Unicef UK raised £59.6m from contributions to help protect children’s rights and save their lives when caught in emergencies or humanitarian crises. All the money comes from voluntary donations, the sale of cards and gifts and partnerships with firms.

In many respects this “commercial” pressure on the charity has helped create an IT architecture that is incredibly responsive to the business and the overriding need to maximise efficiency, drive fund-raising and process donations as quickly as possible.

“The bottom line is to ensure the architecture is robust, reliable and agile enough to enable Unicef UK to respond to changing business needs on relatively shoestring budgets,” says Durbin.

Consequently, Durbin sees many parallels between the charity sector and commercial organisations: “Both sectors want our IT architecture to help us go that extra mile,” he says.

But while some commercial organisations invest heavily in IT innovation, looking to eke out competitive advantage, Durbin is more pragmatic.

“I strongly advocate that any architecture should be based on proven technology that has stood the test of time. If an architecture is bleeding edge, then the business will bleed as well as IT,” he says.

This philosophy has informed Durbin’s attitude towards service-oriented architecture (SOA), where he appreciates some of the benefits it can bring but is far from being an SOA zealot.

“We have not built our architecture entirely on SOA because that would be restrictive and expensive. It would restrain the kind of organisations we could work with, as not every supplier is pushing for the SOA architecture,” says Du rbin.

“However, there are clear benefits to SOA. It is important to weigh up any benefits by looking at the overall architectural fit, implementation, cost and methodology.”

One area where the benefits of a more agile architecture were immediately apparent was in its customer relationship management (CRM) system. Unicef UK uses a CRM system called alms.NET from charity software maker Westwood Forster.

“The architecture of the CRM system is built on an SOA model and runs on the .Net platform, which is a good fit for us as we are a Microsoft shop. It has services that can be deployed in different ways across the user community depending on what we are trying to achieve,” says Durbin.

“We want our CRM system to give a 360-degree view of the supporter and Unicef UK. Application integration is as important as data integration because we need to know everything the supporter is doing with us and everything we are doing with that supporter,” he says.

Application integration is intended to streamline business processes and improve the flow of information around the organisation, while minimising the level of manual data entry. So the CRM system is integrated with Microsoft Office, allowing staff to input customer data using familiar applications.

Unicef UK has also integrated its CRM system with Microsoft Exchange, allowing it to capture information from the email system.

“We look at critical business processes and where we can make improvements by integrating one application with another to make us more agile and responsive,” says Durbin.