This article is more than 1 year old

CIO of children's charity: Data re-org will change the giving game

Centralised, digitised, organised - gee, thanks, IT

There’s nothing charitable about working in the third sector. In fact, it’s extremely unforgiving, as children’s charity Merlin discovered in 2013.

The charity merged with Save the Children after management determined they couldn’t raise the kinds of funds that corporate sponsors wanted to see it raising.

The giving scene is changing – bigger grants with more strings attached – with the charities themselves competing harder for our cash.

This month, October, Macmillan runs its GoSober campaign, followed by Movember next month – both raising funds in separate fights against cancer.

That’s on top of the usual cycle of coffee mornings, cake bakes and various muddy and riverside runs from many other charities.

One of those changing to stay ahead in this game is Plan International, the 75-year-old children’s charity.

Plan is replacing a patchwork of decentralised information systems, ditching legacy AS 400 and Microsoft Dynamics finance and canning ad-hoc HR systems for an all-in-one, $15m SAP global finance and SuccessFactors rollout.

Change was unavoidable and inevitable.

“You are taking mega grants and managing that across countries with many actors working with local community groups. That creates large complexity," Plan International's global CIO and director of shared services Mark Banbury told The Reg during a recent interview.

“The competition has increased and it’s pushing out smaller players who can’t invest in the scale or depth like Plan and Oxfam.”

Mark Banbury

Mark Banbury with an IT infrastructure to manage

complex grant giving. Photo: Plan International

The donors are getting more demanding, too.

“Years ago, child sponsorship involved taking a picture of a child, writing it down and the photo was stapled to a piece of paper and posted to the sponsor,” Banbury said.

“Now that’s all digital – we capture the data. It’s loaded onto a central server and sent as a PDF or to a central website.”

Move aside, IT is taking care of this...

In June, the company completed the replacement of HR systems in its 57 offices worldwide with SAP's SuccessFactors – a three-year, £5m project. Rollout couldn’t have gone smoother. “We took it off the shelf,” Banbury said.

“In our design cycles, we literally demonstrated [to staff worldwide] what the systems did out of the box and said: ‘This is what you are going to get, now tell us why it won’t work’.”

The same couldn't be said of Plan's £10.5m SAP finance system. It was “floundering,” according to Banbury, who “liberated” it from the project’s incumbent leader – Plan’s finance officer. The finance rollout fell to Banbury following a 2013 corporate re-org of the charity. Commissioned in 2010, 2013 was the year finance was supposed to be delivered.

Specifically, development of Business Objects and Business Warehouse were going badly - both pivotal to Plan's future reporting and data query.

ERP projects are well known for their tendency to go wobbly. Banbury reckons the reason it happened this particular time wasn’t scope creep – of people adding more features – but rather that the chosen integrator was simply overwhelmed by the application development work. The unnamed SI had only a handful of experts, rather than the thousands Banbury considered necessary.

“The scope was well known. We had legacy systems that we knew how they worked. We took those and shifted them to an SAP environment. The vendor [SI] lacked the depth of resources.”

How did he solve this problem?

By his own admission, Banbury - who only became Plan International CIO in 2010 - is no SAP expert. But he has rolled out what he calls "large" CRM systems before and he was CIO of Plan International in Canada immediately before taking on the global role.

Among other changes he instigated, Banbury switched vendors – he picked Atos, which had delivered Plan’s SuccessFactors rollout on time – and took on a project manager experienced in running SAP rollouts.

According to Banbury bringing the finance project under an IT leadership is what really made the difference.

“It’s about getting a good project manager that knows the subject matter – not necessarily knowing the software first but owning the business. We can rely on an SI and hold them accountable if we know what the business problem is,” he told The Reg.

Banbury reckons it takes an IT person to successfully deliver a giant piece of software like SAP.

“IT people tend to run projects of scale on a regular basis, we are working with project managers who are certified, they sit there with numbers and are holding people accountable to deliverables.

“Financial teams in general don’t have the experience in a project like that and knowing the importance of changes that get made that could have an IT impact.”

Also, coming from an IT background meant he could monitor the project full time rather than rely on somebody in finance who already has their day job.

Banbury reckons there were no hard feelings with the CFO, who became the overall business owner while he – Banbury – was executive sponsor.

“There was a clear understanding – it was better aligned,” Banbury said

“IT people tend to run projects of scale on a regular basis, we are working with project managers who are certified, they sit there with numbers and are holding people accountable to deliverables." - Plan International global CIO Mark Banbury

A solid foundation in finance and HR are vital for Plan.

SuccessFactors is now Plan’s central repository for all of the data about the people in its operations. Before, that data that lived in Word documents, Excel spreadsheets and third-party payroll systems around the world.

That was a problem. Plan has 10,499 staff but until June, when SuccessFactors was finished, it didn’t know that for sure - or what skills they possessed.

“It was very decentralised. We couldn’t get a handle on data. If you asked how many people worked for Plan today, I’d say: 'Where are they located?' But today if you ask me... I can say: 'This many people, these are their skills, this is what they are doing, and this is the career path they are on'.”

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like