Case Study

The Situation

Act For Kids provides Australia’s children with one of the most valuable services of all; protection from abuse and assistance for the abused. Operating primarily throughout Queensland with a growing presence in Adelaide, South Australia and Sydney, New South Wales, Act For Kids is active in regional and most rural areas in Queensland. They have grown from just one person to over 200+ due to demand for the valuable services they provide.

As a charity operating in diverse locations, the integration and utilisation of technology were always going to be a challenge. Especially when it was running the bulk of its technology internally.

“We had an IT system that relied on our own hardware located on-site, “Koni Hanlon, Executive Director People, Culture and Infrastructure at Act For Kids, said. “We did have our email and Office 365 in the cloud, but we didn’t have any way to transition fully to it. We were also concerned that a lot of our hardware was quite old and starting to fail. We didn’t have a network and it was very difficult for us to work flexibly; for example, working from home or a remote location wasn’t particularly easy with the infrastructure we had.”

The Challenge

Act For Kids is also growing rapidly; adding 25 per cent to its size at the beginning of the year and winning tenders for five new locations – including Maroochydore, Roma and Toowoomba. It had plans to add another 100 people to its workforce which meant, it needed an IT solution that would be scalable and future proof. A solution that enabled new locations to be brought online quickly, and enable remote working.

“One of our challenges as a charity is that we want to spend our money on providing services to kids, but we recognise the need to spend some money on IT so we could operate as an organisation,” Hanlon said.

“We went out to tender with an outline of what we needed without being technically specific. We wanted a system that is scalable, flexible and robust and able to meet the needs of a team spread over multiple locations. We needed managed services, but also direction and recommendations around what else was required for us to improve our IT approach, to meet our current and future needs.”

The Solution

Brennan IT was selected to provide managed services, migrate a wider range of data sets to the cloud, as well as provide the organisation with all hardware procurement and a private IP network. The rollout happened on a site-by-site basis, with remote locations being the first to benefit from the new solution.

“With so many regional offices, the rollout of the technology solution was not seamless. Adopting a cloud-based solution when Internet connectivity is often limited in rural locations had been a challenge, one that Brennan IT has been working tirelessly to find a solution to”, Hanlon said. “Some of our sites are poorly located when it comes to data and broadband capability,” she said.

“Thanks to the efforts of Brennan IT, we’ve managed to address a lot of that now, and we’ve been continuing to work with them on additional solutions on how to address this without spending a fortune.”

Brennan IT’s skill with support at all levels has also been relied on by Act For Kids as the managed services have been rolled out, Hanlon added. “We have services in sites people have never heard of, such as locations in the Cape and Gulf. In those places, our staff are generally locals who aren’t necessarily IT savvy. So we have relied on Brennan IT’s helpdesk staff to support staff cope in areas where power can go out regularly, and staff would otherwise struggle to do a basic recovery process.”

Brennan IT’s skill with support at all levels has also been relied on by Act For Kids as the managed services have been rolled out, Hanlon added. “We have services in sites people have never heard of, such as locations in the Cape and Gulf. In those places our staff are generally locals who aren’t necessarily IT savvy. So we have relied on Brennan IT’s helpdesk staff to support staff cope in areas where power can go out regularly, and staff would otherwise struggle to do a basic recovery process.”