For the last 155 years Mission Australia has “strived to reduce homelessness” and strengthen communities.

The organisation has 2,838 staff and 3,790 volunteers, spread across 220 locations, delivering 450 plus services across Australia.

In a year the NFP said they help over 130,000 people overcome challenges in the areas of homeless ness, domestic and family violence, addiction and substance misuse, mental health, disability, training and employment.

But over the years the legacy computer systems which have been developed to support the organisation have become dated, expensive to operate and update, and impossibly complex.

Mission Australia has embarked on a digital transformation journey to drive mobility, flexibility and agility across the organisation and do it in a way that reduce costs while enabling staff to access technology that supports the services that they deliver to clients.

Moving to the cloud and leveraging Software as a Service solutions such as Office 365,

Complex challenge

 With 450 programmes, thousands of users, clients and supporters, as well as multiple Government-, regulator- and funder stakeholders, Mission Australia has a complex environment and a wide array of needs.

Peter Smith, chief information officer for Mission Australia, said, “We need to provide connectivity to remote locations across Australia. At the same time many of our sites are located in tradition al houses in residential areas that aren’t necessarily well designed for IT.”

Mission Australia has redesigned its IT governance, rigour and project management to better support its digital transformation, and carefully selected a range of technology partners including Microsoft, and the Cloud Collective, a strategic alliance of Micro soft Gold Partners – Antares, Modality and Quorum.

Supported by its technology partners, Mission Australia has also developed a roadmap, which will leverage Windows 10 and InTune, allowing the organisation in the future to introduce a well-governed and secure Bring Your Own Device programme, injecting flexibility and choice for staff and volunteers while keeping a tight rein on costs.

“If we provide people with the most efficient tools and the most efficient ways to do things, that allows them to spend more time with clients. In the future we want to be able to create smarter applications that help us serve clients better – we can help more by running things efficiently,” said Smith.