IT helping-hand for autism support charity

When Victoria’s largest disability services provider of its kind, Alpha Autism, began blowing thousands of dollars on failed IT investments it turned to Emerging IT to standardise its infrastructure, manage its operations and position it for future growth.

About Alpha Autism:

For more than 25 years Alpha Autism has provided support for adults and adolescents, living with an Autism Spectrum Disorder, to plan and realise the lifestyle of their choice.

Through its ambitious vision – “infinite possibilities” – Alpha Autism has become the largest of its kind in Victoria providing a range of specialist services, innovative programs and leisure activities to as many as 450 individuals a year, across eight locations.

Harnessing their clients’ imagination, the not-for-profit registered charity empowers people to create a better future by achieving their own goals for employment, recreation and independent living.

Challenge: Fragile IT start worsened by costly advice

From humble beginnings in 1985 – as a group of parents concerned about their children’s future as they moved from adolescence into adulthood – Alpha Autism’s growth in disability services has been exponential.

But after becoming a registered charity in 2001 the organisation, like so many not-for-profits, struggled along with the most rudimentary IT infrastructure.

“When I started with Alpha in 2003 we had one computer in four sites and we had four computers in our head office, which doesn’t sound like much, and it wasn’t,” CEO Tracel Devereaux recalls.

“To get onto the internet we had a switch and you had to walk out into the office and say `is anybody else on the internet?’ and flick the switch over to your own computer. So we had one line in, no email, no cloud computing and no electronic services.

“It sounds a bit barbaric because it was only eight years ago, but it was where we were.

“And then from 2003 to 2005 we underwent significant growth, but also an absolute nightmare as to how to develop our IT.

“You name it, anything that could go wrong did go wrong, and of course, being a charity, a not-for-profit focusing on disability services, we had no IT department.’’

In what Ms Devereaux described as “a disastrous mess” the charity blew thousands of dollars on external guidance and IT support consultants only to get “three answers to the same question and a poor result every time.”

“I think over that sort of 2003 to 2005 period we lost, in terms of bad IT decisions, probably $20,000,” she said.

“The vast bulk of it was sunk money because we weren’t getting the outcomes.

“I wouldn’t have minded the unpredictable budget quite so much, although heaven knows we had no money, but we were making investment decisions and they turned out to be the wrong ones, so they were always lost money.”

With 82 per cent of the charity’s budget going directly on providing between 65-85 hands-on, frontline support staff, Ms Devereaux said it left 18 per cent of its annual revenue for everything else including buildings, vehicles, IT and administration support.

“So to lose $20,000 out of something like that and get no result is just appalling,” she said.

Solution: Outsourced IT under LANserve

Alpha Autism’s expertise is delivering highly specialised services to some of society’s most vulnerable individuals. And through tremendous growth for these services, the charity found itself in all too familiar circumstances.

On one hand it had an unprecedented reliance on its IT infrastructure, which was un-planned, un-managed and plagued with daily outages. On the other it had very limited resources, virtually no in-house expertise and no idea how to move forward.

Towards the end of 2005, as Alpha Autism was looking to re-locate its Melbourne headquarters to the city’s south east, it engaged Emerging IT as its sole IT provider – essentially outsourcing the charity’s non-existent IT department.

Today Alpha Autism’s head office computers run off a master server, with staff from its eight remote sites running their PCs off a dedicated local server-computer which, in turn, is connected to printers, routers and any other peripherals.

The network’s simplicity, according to Ms Devereaux, underpins its reliability, efficiency and cost-effectiveness but belies its functionality and sophistication.

“All of our major data transfers, email, internet access, timesheets, is all in the Cloud, so they’re all web-based technology,” she said.

“So all our sites need, in order to be able to access anything, is internet access.

“Emerging IT provided us with, first and foremost, the expertise and the right answers, which was a great start and then they provided us with hardware installation, maintenance, remote site backup, support purchasing – basically all of the hardware, all of the software, all of the programs and all of the setup was done by Emerging IT.”

Under its LANserve Care Plan, Alpha Autism pays a set monthly fee which includes the remote monitoring and management of its entire system, helpdesk support, disaster backup and ongoing security with the latest patches, hot fixes and anti-virus upgrades.

Given the nature of some of its remote locations Alpha Autism also has the ability to pre-purchase block maintenance hours for the rare occasions when it is necessary for technicians to go out on-site.

Benefits: The value of expert guidance

When Alpha Autism set out to find an IT partner it had three objectives; reduce costs, improve efficiency and create a stable technology platform from which to improve the quality of its services.

“The other thing that was really important was someone who understood not-for-profit,” Ms Devereaux said.

“Because we don’t have big buckets and our profits are not in dollars – our profits are in people.

“I think that’s something often overlooked with IT companies but Emerging IT is very good at understanding the not-for-profit context and they’ve tailored their service to what we need.”

Now heading into its seventh year, Emerging IT’s guidance has been critical in the success of the partnership, as demonstrated by a recent three-year computer upgrade across all Alpha Autism’s sites.

“Emerging IT did all of the purchasing, project planning, installation and all of the setup of the hard drives as well,” MS Devereaux said.

“They know what we need to do, we told them what we want to do and they came back with recommendations of the right size, the right type.

“We took their advice, they went ahead with the purchase and it’s all been rolled out.”

Efficient, worry-free computing

Given the money it wasted prior to partnering with Emerging IT, coupled with its limited resources, Alpha Autism needed to know that whatever infrastructure investment it made would be robust, reliable and sustainable into the future.

“To give you an example, between 2003-2005 we tried three different types of servers to get the right one and backup systems, you know, sort of tape backup, CD backup, or remote backup, all that kind of stuff and none of them worked,” Ms Devereaux said.

“That meant we had wasted quite an amount of money on things that didn’t work and then we brought in Emerging IT.

“[Corporate Sales Manager] Gerald Bartels had a look at it, his recommended solution initially sounded more expensive but we’ve only had to replace that server last year.

“So we got six years out of the one server and that other server is still there doing some backup duties for us. They changed our backup system which, again, initially was a bit more expensive but it hasn’t needed to be touched for five years.

“The time involved for staff in doing backups is virtually nothing, whereas it used to be an hour at the end of every day. So the efficiencies, the sustainability and the stability of the system, has just been wonderful.”

Insightful planning, industry best-practice integration and LANserve’s proactive monitoring and maintenance of Alpha Autism’s entire network has enabled Emerging IT to troubleshoot emerging IT problems before they arise.

“Before we took on Emerging IT our computer systems would go down approximately two-to-three times a day and since they’ve done their setup, I think I can count the number of unplanned outages on the fingers of one hand; they just don’t happen,” Ms Devereaux said.

Securing the future of improved services

Having met and exceeded the challenges of the past, Alpha Autism’s IT systems have become the backbone of the organisation, an irony not lost on Ms Devereaux.

“We rely very heavily on email, web contact, we have Cloud computing for our client database, we have Cloud computing for our staff logons to do their timesheets, we have, yeah, basically all core functions of our operations are IT-based,” she said.

“It’s that mission-critical, which sounds a bit ironic because our core service is actually hands-on, face-to-face personal care.”

Another irony is that while Alpha Autism’s core business remains unchanged, its solid IT foundation is unlocking untold opportunities to improve the quality of its services through iPads, web-applications and host of emerging technologies.

“It’s a defining factor of autism that IT is just made for people who are autistic,” Ms Devereaux said.

“Our vision is empowering people living with Autism Spectrum Disorder, our mission is to create a better future for people, for adults and adolescents. And while those are sort of buzz words, they particularly relate to how people with autism communicate with the world – and that world is email, internet, Facebook, chat, all of that kind of stuff.

“Our IT infrastructure is not just about how we do finances and timesheets, it’s about how we communicate with our clients as well. So yes, we are looking to expand how we use modern technology and Emerging IT’s support is going to be critical in that.”

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