The document discusses developing a more agile and sustainable model for CARE's IT operations. It proposes moving from the current decentralized model, where each country office manages its own IT infrastructure, to a shared services model. This would centralize infrastructure and consolidate it into regional data centers. The benefits would include lower total costs, increased agility, reduced administrative costs, improved quality of services, and leveraging synergies across the organization. The key aspects to consider in architecting this new model are CARE's geographical scope, business processes, and ensuring adequate resiliency and redundancy.

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DEVELOPING AGILE AND CONNECTED COs
WITH IT SHARED SERVICES/CONSOLIDATION
INTRODUCTION
CARE as an organization is currently grappling with a number of
challenges. These include, among others, a strained donor market,
political upheavals in some of the places we operate, increased
insecurity and global financial crisis.
These and a number of other forces within the organization and
without are questioning the viability of some our business and
operating models.
How best can we adapt and model ourselves to tackle these and future
challenges?
How can we remain relevant in a world where change is the only
constant?
How agile are we in responding to a generally unpredictable external
environment?
We need to re-think our current operating models and in particular
how IT will need to evolve to support the organization in these
challenging times.
This paper will examine our current model of IT operations and
suggest strategies for creating sustainable IT operations.
OUR CURRENT MODEL OF IT OPERATIONS
The following are the two main characteristics that define how our IT
operations are structured.
I. COLLECTION OF SILOS AND DISPARATE SET-UPS
Country Offices that make up CARE Global Operations as we know it
are basically a collection of “silo-ed” and disparate set-ups without a
foundational basis (i.e. from an IT point of view) from which they all
function from. We’ve each built our own server rooms from which we
offer a collection of dissimilar services and functions and at varying
levels of advancement.
II. “BUILD AND MANAGE YOUR SELF SET-UP”
Traditionally, and the current practice is, we each build and maintain
our own data networks and information systems. This essentially has

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increased our hardware footprint all across the organization resulting
in a lot of waste (in terms of resources) and duplication of effort.
ENVISIONED SET-UP
The above mentioned structure or mode of operation was basically
constructed around having computing resources been widely deployed
in many locations to give local users the best possible service delivery.
However, based on the current realities of tighter budgets and also
advancement (improvements) in the industry, this is now seen as
wasteful and expensive with extra hardware and software to buy and
maintain for many locations, and often few local IT staff to support the
systems.
How then can we develop a more forward-looking IT Operation?
The following are some guiding principles that can inform the
development of a more sustainable model of IT operation:
1. Lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)1
2. Agile or Flexible Solution (Easy to Scale up and down; Speed and
Flexibility)
3. Standardized Base Processes (Common IT Backbone or Systems)
4. Leverage on Economies of Scale (Shared Approach)
SUGGESTED SOLUTION: IT SHARED SERVICES
This approach basically involves taking infrastructure (IT services and
functions) out of the remote offices (COs/Sub-Offices) and centralizing
and consolidating it into a regional or headquarter main data centre.
What is informing this proposition?
Well there are both internal and external motivations that are behind
this push.
Externally we have the introduction of Managed Service2
, the adoption
of Virtualization3
as mainstream technology and the buzz around
1
A TCO Analysis includes Total cost of acquisition and operating cost-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_cost_of_ownership
2
This is the practice of transferring day-to-day related management responsibility as a strategic method
for improved effective and efficient operations- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Managed_Services
3
This is a broad term that refers to the abstraction of computer resources and a technique of efficiently
utilization computing resources- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtualization

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“cloud computing” where services will be hosted in the Internet as
infrastructure (Fiber Installations and O3b Satellites) improves all
across the world.
Internally of course you have the cost, the need to be more connected
and integrated as an organization.
In architecting this mode of IT operation we need to consider the
following:
• Our Geographical Scope- CARE basically has the Headquarter
(based out of ATL, USA), Regional Management Units (spread
out across the globe), Country Offices, Sub-Offices and Field
Offices. This will inform the physical aspects of the model i.e. in
deploying the data centers which will host the servers and
generally IT services and various function to serve a particular
concentration of users based in a particular location (national,
regional, global etc)
• Our Company Processes- This include information flow,
communication flow and decision-making processes. These are
the logical aspects of the model that need be analyzed.
• Resiliency – With this kind of Infrastructure shift where you
have centralized your IT Systems, any downtime or outage can
impact a huge part of the organization. Consequently
redundancy of applications, servers and the Wide Area Network
(WAN) needs to integrated within the design of the model.
THE PAY OFF
1. Reduced Costs
2. Higher Agility
3. Value Adding IT; Increased Innovation
4. Reduced Administrative Costs; spend less money “keeping the
lights on” in operational costs and spend more on innovation.
5. Reduced Business Risk; Security, Disaster Recovery and
Business Continuity and Easy for compliance
6. Quality-of-Service improvements – end-to-end service
management and SLA
7. Leverage on Synergies that exist within the Organization

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