Unicef's journey toward the adaptive enterprise (page 1 of 3)

"I want to demystify a few things and explain the relationship between Unicef and technology," he said. "By the end of this session, I hope you will come away knowing that Unicef does IT and has IT."

Unicef was created in 1946, with headquarters in New York, operating in 158 countries and 245 locations providing 40% of the world's doses of children's vaccines. As a semi- autonomous but integral part of the UN, Unicef's annual revenue was $1.6 billion in 2003, with over 8000 staff, 85% of which are located outside of the headquarters operation.

"We are mandated to advocate and act for and with children to protect their rights and to help meet their needs," Spatz began. "Our programs include immunization against childhood diseases, nutrition, early childhood development, girls education, HIV/AIDs programs, and more.

In 2003 for example, Unicef built 7000 schools in Afghanistan and hired 30,000 teachers. One vaccine campaign in Kenya alone resulted in 13 million doses.

"All of this activity goes through our IT systems, our processes and of course our people. We need to achieve operational excellence under very difficult, unpredictable and dangerous settings. We need to achieve results for children, share and use information globally. We need to change and scale for long-term sustainability and presence," stressed Spatz.

Offering an historical perspective on IT, he explained that in the mid 90s, Unicef had no global IT organization, and our IT infrastructure was extremely weak and disparate. "We had few LANS, no WAN, and no standardized desktop. Limited email was available, and 70% of all the countries in which we operate had less than 1K of bandwidth," he added.

Unicef also had over 100 custom systems on WANG legacy, and stand-alone DOS-based systems. It was under-invested in terms of processes in infrastructure, poor control, little or no governance, and no business alignment, according to Spatz.

"In the mid-90s, we began to redistribute and reorganize our IT environment," he said. "Fast forward seven years, and today we have a fully-deployed ERP (SAP-R/3) in our headquarters, and we have one custom-developed C/S field system in 245 locations. We now have a global fully-managed and secure WAN, IP-only WAN, QoS in over 150 countries, policy-based firewalls, SSL-VPNs, with a minimum of 128Kbps," he added.

Unicef now has Voiceover IP (VoIP) deployed in 90+ countries, and fly-away emergency (IP)-VSAT operations, deployable in less than four hours, as well as standardized desktop/server infrastructures everywhere.

Spatz proudly states, "You can go anywhere in the world now, emergency or non-emergency, and you will have the same infrastructure anywhere." Unicef also implemented a global intranet and extranet, and dramatically revamped their web presence with a new web content management system.

"We are running most of the elements that are required for enterprise management with HP OpenView. Why? How else do you manage an infrastructure with desktops all over the world? We have used enterprise management systems to manage and deploy our systems globally," noted Spatz.

"In the end, today we have a mix of technology and risk. We have one globally implemented IT strategy. We re-centralized our IT functions for costs and skills and efficiency, but we leverage those resources by rotating people around the world in a decentralized model. We have transitioned from push by IT philosophy to pull of IT.