CanTeen gets an IT makeover

Running a charity organisation is no different from operating a business. Andrew Young, CEO at youth cancer charity CanTeen, is still accountable for every dollar he spends on running the organisation.

Young says the average person on the street understands the importance of IT, but when they hand their donations over they do not expect the charity to spend it on sophisticated PCs – people want the money to go to initiatives for the people suffering whatever illness they have.

“[Being accountable] is understandable. However, public perception that we as a charity organisation can work on Commodore 64 PCs works against us,” says Young.

“A business case does exist for us to ensure we maintain our IT systems. But we have to balance our needs with what the community expects – for us not to spend a lot of money [but still] meet the needs of those that are sick.”

Losing contact
Young says CanTeen’s IT system runs all Microsoft Word applications for fairly generic work. The charity’s real business is being able to provide support programs for 12 to 24 year olds with cancer and this includes family camps and a range of other programs.

IT is used to maintain records of members as well as maintain a relationship with the public. However, the organisation’s website is instrumental in bringing in money and Young says it can make thousands of dollars from public donations via the site. This is where IT comes in to help the organisation as a business tool, he says.

The relatively small organisation, which includes 60 staff across all regions and territories, recently faced its worst crisis since Young joined three years ago. It happened during CanTeen’s 2006 National Bandanna Day: the organisation’s email system was down the whole time during this event.

“When I first started there were a lot of small issues that we could deal with. However, the final straw came during the two weeks of National Bandanna Day,” Young says. “It is one of our biggest charity events and can earn the charity around $2.7 million. Being able to access email during this time was very important for us.”

Ian Woollett, CEO of local IT service organisation Tripoint, says CanTeen, like any other corporate business, knows that email is a mission-critical application and if the system goes down then the company is incapacitated. “CanTeen’s reputation as a charity will be affected if they can’t take donations from its website. If their server goes down then they can’t make any money,” he says.

Broken down
Having witnessed these disasters Tripoint decided to help and in January 2007 offered free IT services to CanTeen. The relationship between the charity and the service company actually goes back to 2005. Back then the organisations worked together to purchase, build and deploy desktops and laptops for the charity’s ageing equipment. This project also involved Tripoint developing a standard operating environment for CanTeen.

“Back then things were a complete mess at the charity organisation. We had to rip out the old system and completely rebuild them a new one,” says Woollett. “There’s no adage to outsourcing, because a broken down system won’t be fixed if it’s completely broken.”

Woollett says at CanTeen there was no understanding of the frailty of the IT system. Most organisations would look at how well their IT systems were working, how they may have worn out – something that is ongoing and done on a yearly basis. CanTeen did not have the capability to do that.

If a website cannot be generated and email, which is a critical part of the business, is not working, then IT cannot really be looked at like a cost, Woollett says. IT is not just hardware, it’s all the services that go into maintaining the equipment.

Woollett likens IT to running a car: everything might run smoothly in the first year, but when you take it in for service in the second year all sorts of problems might start springing up. Although CanTeen had a hardware upgrade in 2005, by 2007 the products needed servicing, something CanTeen could not afford.

“We estimate CanTeen will need around $250,000 worth of servicing a year. IT is critical to the organisation, because it needs IT to help bring in money for them to spend on programs and activities,” Woollett says. “Yet CanTeen can’t afford to spend the money on the services.”

Better system
CanTeen has nine offices and five or six members of staff located around the country. All of its servers are located in Sydney and work between the offices is done through Citrix remote office application. When CanTeen’s email fell down Tripoint had to “relook” at the whole system, says Woollett.

The service company had to take all of CanTeen’s routers, desktops and WIN/Tel servers, email systems and supporting infrastructure apart. Tripoint followed the simple mantra – plan, design and build – for CanTeen’s complete IT system and built in ongoing management of it.

“We have established a better system, which we monitor, and we also patch CanTeen’s HP Openview management agent. We will tell them they have problems before they tell us and CanTeen can fix it themselves through a Web portal, called Triagra, says Woollett.

The Team
The project took Tripoint 12 weeks in total to complete, which included an in-depth planning phase, says Woollett.

The project team included four or five Tripoint staff members with different skills sets including a systems administrator, systems architects, database expert, application expert and a networking expert.

“What we did for CanTeen was bring multiple skills sets to the project. They were all brought in at the different phases, which included planning, building, integration and management levels,” says Woollett.

The main challenge of the project – and for many other Tripoint clients – says Woollett, is understanding how bad things were or how they have under-invested in maintaining an IT system.

Not a great IT market
After the email debacle CanTeen fully appreciated the business implications of its IT system. When it fell over, it wasted a lot of the business’ time.

However, for charity organisations it is very hard for them to convince others of these implications. Young says they cannot just go to people and say, ‘Please give us lots of money to fix out IT systems’.

“We do tend to run on a lot less resources. In some cases we just have to make do, and in other cases we can achieve a business goal through partnerships likes this,” Young acknowledges.