Agile Business Change Blog Thoughts on Agile Strategic Business Change and Agile Delivery

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Yesterday's Government report "Making it easier to set up and run a charity …" makes a number of interesting points and recommendations, including easing VAT rules and reducing red tape (i.e. reducing the number of CRB checks needed). Included in the report are a couple of significant IT issues faced by charities - access to IT expertise and sharing resources.

Access to IT expertise is the major IT issue highlighted - "there are still many charities that are either unable to fully exploit the potential of technology and digital media or see the opportunities it provides" and "many small and medium sized charities say they have nobody they trust to discuss IT needs with".

This certainly resonates with our experience - that charities have IT requirements (and IT knowledge requirements) significantly higher than SMEs of a similar size. They have demanding IT needs, for contact relationship management, sophisticated websites, document management, complex processes, etc.

It's kind of difficult to respond to this without blowing our own trumpet, because this is exactly the niche that our services are designed to meet - to fill charities' IT gap with our strategic consulting and project management services.

The other significant IT issue identified in the report is about sharing IT resources - "collaborating, to make efficiency savings and become more effective by consolidating assets, merging back-office functions and sharing services". There is an alternative here however that isn't considered in the report - to use Cloud services effectively to share resources with other users. A number of our customers are using Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) cloud hosting, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offerings, such as hosted website CMSs and Business-Process-as-a-Service (BPaaS) offerings, such as HR services.

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