Child-Centered Community Development
Map of Belgium, an independent nongovernmental organization (NGO), is part of the international Plan network. Plan Belgium’s mission is to bring about structural improvements in the living conditions of children and their communities in the poorest countries of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. This is achieved through a specific approach that focuses on child-centered community development. Plan Belgium’s activities are deeply rooted in local communities and governments.
Alistar is a virtual IT manager who provides strategic input on our IT policy.
Kristof Saye, former Head of Finance & Administration
Kristof Saye, former Head of Finance & Administration at Plan Belgium: “Our local presence is undoubtedly our strength: only in this way can we develop programs that make a difference in the areas of health, education, and protection.” Another pillar is raising public awareness in Belgium by, for example, putting children’s rights on the agenda of schools, the media, and politicians. To fund its mission, Plan Belgium raises funds from individuals, Plan Parents, government agencies, and businesses.
Map of Belgium Today, it has 34 employees and is working on about 20 projects in 9 partner countries. Kristof Saye: “As a small organization, we at Plan Belgium focus on a limited number of issues: education, gender issues, reducing violence against children, and, finally, ‘emergencies.’”
Growth and Professional Development
In 2007, Kristof Saye was hired as Head of Finance & Administration. Since then, however, the organization has undergone a transformation: Plan Belgium’s activities have evolved from purely fundraising to full-fledged development cooperation. At the same time, Plan Belgium’s structure has also changed, and the organization has become increasingly professional in its operations.
As a result, Kristof Saye can focus exclusively today on one priority from the IT policy: an ambitious CRM project, PlanLink is at the top of his agenda today. “Our target audience is particularly demanding.”. You can only project a sense of quality to the outside world if your internal processes are also streamlined. ”This explains why a well-developed IT infrastructure is so important to Plan Belgium," explains Kristof Saye.
ICT in the Service of Business
Management's vision regarding ICT has remained unchanged: ICT must serve the business, to optimize the operations of the entire organization. When Kristof Saye joined the company in 2007, he found an ICT infrastructure that was somewhat outdated and fragmented. His first priority, therefore, was to modernize it.
Kristof Saye: “With the modernization of the infrastructure, we had two objectives in mind: increasing internal efficiency and reducing overall operating costs. ”The challenge was to achieve this within an organization with a wide variety of internal tasks and activities and a limited budget."
Alistar is modernizing its IT infrastructure
After a IT Audit An external consultant identified the short-, medium-, and long-term objectives that needed to be achieved. Unfortunately, the collaboration with the previous IT partner, who initially oversaw the project, did not yield the hoped-for results. However, choosing Alistar as the IT partner proved to be the right decision.
We expect an IT partner to proactively contribute ideas on how we can continue to evolve in the future. Alistar was willing to work with us strategically to develop the building blocks for our new infrastructure. This was exactly the approach we were looking for.
One of the first tasks was to virtualize the server environment. Alistar chose Hyper-V, Microsoft's virtualization solution…
Optimizing Backups
A second key area of focus was backups. After all, the information and knowledge the organization gathers on a daily basis are invaluable. Daily backups are therefore a must for Plan Belgium. In the past, they used tapes, which required manual intervention every time the tapes needed to be changed. Alistar implemented a backup system that is completely reliable and fully automated, without any manual intervention. Kristof Saye looks back with satisfaction: “A few days ago, an employee accidentally deleted an entire brochure. Well, a quick fix by Alistar ensured that all the information was restored within 30 minutes!”
Meeting Complex Needs Within a Limited Budget
If there is one term that characterizes Plan Belgium’s activities, it is diversity. This is true not only because of the variety of internal processes (marketing, fundraising, projects, finance, etc.), but also because of the geographic spread of the projects across different countries. The challenge was to meet fairly complex IT needs within an overall limited IT budget. This was the challenge that Alistar tackled head-on. Kristof Saye gives an example: “In some countries, internet connections are unreliable or even nonexistent. Alistar implemented a synchronization solution that allows users to work offline as well.”
Delivering on Promises Within Budget
Alistar provides strategic input on Plan Belgium’s IT policy; for example, the IT partner always attends Plan Belgium’s monthly IT meetings. In addition, Alistar’s employees are up to date on the latest IT trends They are also expected to provide proactive advice. Plan is currently working internationally on the rollout of an ambitious CRM project. Together with Alistar, the organization is already considering the next step: a Microsoft SharePoint solution for document management that will be integrated with the CRM system.
Decision
Kristof Saye concludes by describing Alistar's role as that of A virtual IT manager at Plan Belgium: “We have built an excellent relationship of trust with Alistar. We can count on them for anything that goes beyond direct user support. They also have access to our systems and can quickly intervene directly when necessary. Just as important, however, is that they will never charge us for unnecessary costs!”
