Preparing centralised IT infrastructure for a national agency
Client name: A national agency
The business challenge
In order to move towards consistent working practices, our client took the strategic decision to replace its regional, disparate IT infrastructure with a centralised information repository. In doing so, the organisation wanted to enable its members to share business-critical records, across more than 40 national locations, in a secure and efficient manner.
How we helped
Detica was employed to undertake two key tasks. Firstly, to develop a framework for a national IT network that would enable intelligence exchange across the entire organisation and, secondly, to highlight any working practices or processes that would have to be changed in order to achieve this.
Working closely with senior representatives within the agency, Detica quickly identified that it would have to make some critical alterations - primarily because each location was responsible for defining the type of information it collected and the way in which it was held. This resulted in situations in which local requests for vital information could not be met by the rest of the network. Furthermore, even when the requested information was available on the network, other locations were reticent to share it with colleagues due to security concerns.
It was clear that this situation would not be resolved by imposing a new IT infrastructure over ineffective working policies, so based on its findings, Detica developed a series of best-practice standards that covered:
- A common policy to regulate reporting processes and information management, so that the entire network had access to the same facts, figures and records
- A single authentication and encryption framework to guarantee maximum security at all times, and allow authorised employees access to data from the entire network - without undergoing a lengthy, and often futile, request process
Outcome and benefits
Detica developed a set of proposals that would enable the organisation to create a single coherent IT framework that would ensure secure and efficient information sharing across all its locations. In achieving this, Detica helped its client to undertake a tactical examination of previous working methods and to view itself from an external perspective - thereby generating a climate for change and setting internal expectations for future working practices.
Furthermore, Detica ensured that the organisation could begin its procurement process, confident that it had addressed a series of previously unidentified barriers to adoption. Without undergoing this process it would have run the risk of wasting money on an IT system that would not have been able to bridge the gap between all the cultural nuances and working practices across each of its local and regional locations.
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