When the economy began to slow down, the Salvation Army's IT operation started looking for ways to increase efficiency and cut IT costs. The outcome: reducing IT support costs through workforce realignment and clientless remote access tools.
With 1,500 remote locations in its Western United States territory, the nonprofit organization knew it could no longer afford to keep IT staff in each division. It used to deploy IT staff members based on its geographic divisions and lines of businesses.
'IT in each division was relatively autonomous,' said Clarence White, CIO for the Salvation Army's Western United States territory, which covers 13 states, including Alaska and Hawaii, as well as Micronesia and Guam. 'We recognized that this was very duplicative and wasteful, and we were asking these poor IT employees to really become experts in many different technologies that were being run in their division.'
The workforce realignment has focused on developing internal specialists in certain technologies who support the organization as a whole. 'Now, some employees are responsible for vertical technologies that slice the whole organization,' White said. 'We have people who are bona fide experts in various technology disciplines.'
This approach has led to cost savings in many areas for the organization, which provides disaster relief, elderly services and clothing and household goods to those in need. It has meant less reliance on external consultants, and it has allowed more closely aligned IT business units to realize benefits from economies of scale and synergies between divisions. 'We have the ability to share data and discover trends that we couldn't do when things were in isolation without spending any more money,' White said. 'We've really changed the game in terms of IT effectiveness.'
The workforce realignment depended largely on clientless remote access tools, which not only created further efficiencies but have also led to cost savings of their own.
White chose Bomgar Corp.'s Bomgar Box, a remote desktop control that allows IT to support staff members without physically traveling to their locations.
'We have users all over the west in about 1,500 different locations,' White said. 'I can't afford to deploy someone in each of those locations. But I still had to have some way to provide some level of support to these users.'
The Salvation Army was seeking a support solution that required no client-side software to be installed on the end-user's computer, and was network-independent, feasible on a variety of operating systems and cost-effective.
The Bomgar Box B300 appliance costs $9,995, and each enterprise license is available for $2,995. Bomgar counts the number of concurrent support users to determine the license cost, rather than requiring a license for each support user. If the Salvation Army had used a solution requiring named users, it would have needed more than 75 licenses; with the Bomgar Box, it needed to purchase only 20 licenses, the quantity appropriate to support typical workday capacity.