Barnardo's revamp to save £1m for charity

System and hardware upgrade improves services at charity

Children’s charity Barnardo’s has revamped its IT infrastructure to cut costs and improve its care services.

The charity says the revamp will save £1m a year, which it will redirect into charitable work. With net voluntary funding of just under £40m a year, the savings will represent a big increase in its annual spending.

Bob Harvey, Barnardo’s director of information services, says installing the LiveLink document management system was one of the most important parts of the overhaul, saving its workers time and effort.

‘It’s critical to the work we do with children to know what was said about whom and when,’ he said. ‘You have to be able to keep a comprehensive history of what has gone on.

‘We can now search more easily and quickly for any historical documents and minutes, whereas before it would have taken us hours, if not days, to find copies.’

The charity has also updated its servers, consolidating 260 Novell systems across the UK into one virtual server.

Harvey says it was clear that if Barnardo's had continued with its previous architecture it would have had to add increasing numbers of servers every year.

‘The local networks were not only giving us no added value, they were negative because we weren’t able to access files on a network site if they weren’t there,’ he said.

‘We also wanted to create a principle that you accessed a single original-source document and didn’t store many copies of it around the networks.’

The charity has also upgraded 4,000 PCs and laptops at 1,100 UK sites to Windows XP.

‘The challenges were two-fold,’ said Harvey.

‘The first was to make sure we got it absolutely proven through piloting. We also needed to make sure we were systematic in the whole change-over process; everything had to be done in a very precise way to a stringent set of guidelines.’

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