CanTeen gets an IT makeover

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.

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