SAVE THE CHILDREN
Gerry Waterfield , Director of IT Global Operations at Save the Children International , discusses the charity ’ s IT evolution and its response to COVID-19
Gerry Waterfield is Director of IT Global Operations at Save the Children International , the world ’ s leading charity focused on children . In his role , Waterfield ensures the charity ’ s vital work is supported by robust IT systems . Having had a long career in the private sector , Waterfield brought a fresh set of eyes to Save the Children when he joined five years ago . “ It ' s honestly the best thing I ' ve done ,” he enthuses . “ It ’ s almost like all my other experiences were done to bring me to a greater purpose . We deal with 30 to 50 million children a year , literally saving lives , providing education , all those kinds of things .”
As a global organisation , creating a unified IT infrastructure requires the consideration of many moving pieces . “ Save The Children International was born about seven years ago from 24 members that were created a hundred years ago . When I joined , it was best described as effectively a multi-billion dollar startup . The challenge we faced was that we had all these different solutions for the same thing , globally .” One such example is the recently accomplished relaunch of its service desk . “ Five years ago , there were
“ WE ' RE NOW CLOUD-FIRST AND THAT ' S BEEN OBJECTIVE FOR SOME TIME ”
GERRY WATERFIELD DIRECTOR OF IT GLOBAL OPERATIONS , SAVE THE CHILDREN INTERNATIONAL
various systems and people would literally create a ticketing system for each system . Now what we ' ve done is brought them into one tool , providing a much improved and easier experience .”
A big focus has been on moving entirely to the cloud , which Waterfield accomplished in November . “ We ' re now cloud-first and that ' s been objective for some time - four or five years . That allows us a work anywhere approach .” In some of the areas and situations in which the charity must work , for instance responding to an earthquake , that ’ s particularly important . “ That ’ s why we have all our global , core services , identity and network infrastructure in the cloud . We still have some infrastructure left in some countries and that ' s the next part of our journey - removing the localised stuff .”
The organisation must also be ready to react 24 / 7 , but the previous method of achieving this had inherent problems . “ One of the challenges we had were single points of failure all over the world ,” says Waterfield . “ We literally had one person responsible for system A , serving 17,000 people , two people in Africa for system B . If one of them went on holiday or fell sick , everyone sweated for two
422 April 2021