Oxfam GB CIO: Simon Jennings

Dan Farber:

Simon, thanks for joining me.

Simon Jennings:

It's a pleasure Dan.

Dan Farber:

Now, Simon, you're the CIO of Oxfam Great Britain which is part of Oxfam international. Could you explain the scope of your responsibilities as well as how Oxfam GB fits into the international organization?

Simon Jennings:

First thing to understand is that Oxfam is an organization that is trying to tackle the issues of poverty and suffering around the world. Oxfam international is the umbrella organization. It's a confederation of twelve organizations which include Oxfam America, Oxfam Netherland, which is known as Novib locally, Oxfam Ireland, et cetera. And Oxfam GB is one of those organizations.

Dan Farber:

Now as I understand it, Oxfam GB is a rather large organization in fact.

Simon Jennings:

Yes, Oxfam GB is about twice the size of the second largest Oxfam in terms of revenue, and was in fact the original Oxfam, if you like, starting in 1942 during the war. The organization's got five thousand three hundred employees around the world, we operate in seventy countries, this is Oxfam GB I'm talking about here. And we have about a hundred and forty-four offices that staff work out of in those countries. My responsibilities are therefore, at a very operational level, from an IT perspective, is four thousand PCs have to work on Monday morning. Of course it's much more complicated than that because really, it's about ensuring the business processes of the organization can operate efficiently and effectively around the world.

Dan Farber:

Now it seems that if you're operating in all those countries and all those offices that it's a real IT challenge. And how do you think of those challenges in terms of bringing innovation into the picture?

Simon Jennings:

Well I think the challenges in innovation are always about how we take learning and apply that to a problem and then get an answer which is a new approach. Before I go into sort of IT examples I'd just like to give you an example of innovation that Oxfam GB has come up with in the past. This is a thing called the Oxfam bucket. So, what's so innovative about a bucket? Well, the innovation is when you have a problem which was how do we transport water for a displaced family and keep it safe and clean? So, first you have to look at the transportation of the water, and you have a handle on the bucket. You have a bucket that is designed with a capacity that is carry-able by people so it's not too heavy to carry, and you actually grind the plastic molding pieces off the bottom because in many of the cultures where we work they carry these things on their heads. The second thing is that you have to look at sanitation about water, we want to keep it clean, and we are talking perhaps about carrying it through a camp. So the bucket's got a lid on it, so you can fill it up, put the lid back on so you won't spill it while you're carrying it, but that lid also stops things falling into the bucket or insects getting into it. And it's also got a tap on the bottom, an insertable tap that allows you to draw water from the bucket without putting in any dirty implements to bring it out. And then lastly, the real interesting piece of this innovation is that these buckets take up about a tenth of the size of the old Jerry Cans. And of course, when you're transporting in a plane, the thing that matters is size. So it's a very good example of innovation, and in fact this bucket won a design award.

Dan Farber:

So it seems that innovation for you is not just technology, it can be process, it can be organizational, it can be products such as the bucket.

Simon Jennings:

Absolutely. Another good example that happened about two years ago was one of the business challenges that Oxfam faced, was how do we engage with our supporters better? Now these are either people who are donating money to Oxfam and putting enormous trust that what we will do with that money is good program work and affect poverty and suffering overseas. Now, to actually engage with those supporters in a new way was the problem. And the solution was a thing called the Oxfam Unwrapped catalog. What we have is a catalog of products like mosquito nets, camel, water tank, desk, and people can now fund that desk. They can buy a gift for a friend which is a card that they get given which says "I have bought you a desk in a school." And Oxfam will deliver that desk. So, it both enables the supporters to engage with us directly in what we're doing, and it also happens to be an excellent fundraiser for us. But it also means we maintain our accountability that we did actually put this many desks into schools. We did buy this much livestock, and that's very, very important because accountability and trust go hand in hand in the way we operate.

Now, the innovation around that catalog was not only that we were enabling the businesses to engage with our supporters more directly, but the way we went about it. We actually now have started a business from scratch two years ago, just over two years ago, and last Christmas we did over fourteen million pounds revenue and eleven million pounds of that was done over the internet. So, the tool, IT, became absolutely critical in order to be able to deliver revenue to the organization and engagement with our supporters. And that's a significant revenue string for us now.

Dan Farber:

Now Oxfam GB is also unique in that you have over seven hundred stores and a lot of your revenue is generated from those stores. What are the innovations, the technologies and the process management that you're using to effectively get a good yield and get a good return on your investment?

Simon Jennings:

Well that's a really interesting question because when you start looking at Oxfam's revenue through its trading business we made about eighty-five million pounds revenue last year from the trading business, but we actually made a thirty-one percent margin on the high streets. That's taking in about twenty, twenty-four million pounds profit, if you like, which we can then put towards our program overseas. But the proposition, the trading proposition is that we have we're about the fifth largest retailer in the UK in terms of number of shops, we have a mixture of donated products, which can be clothing, bric-a-brac, books, etc. And we also have some fairly traded products so we have a warehouse system. So, the technology is very, very slim. We have warehousing which provides and replenishes the stock, sometimes its coming direct from the supplier. We also have some shops with some PCs in but in fact, it's a very strange environment but I think I'm one of the few IT managers that has ever taken epos out of a trading environment, a retail environment. Because, when I first arrived at Oxfam, they'd been doing some experiments with epos.

Dan Farber:

And epos is Electronic Point of Sale?

Simon Jennings:

That's right. And, unless you had a very large amount of fairly traded and bought-in products in the shop to sell, the value of epos was very limited. You were spending, in those days, something like five thousand pounds a shop to put epos in and you actually could never reorder your secondhand jumper because it was donated product. So the value of epos was not realizable by the organization so we actually removed it from the shops.

Dan Farber:

So that's almost an innovation by not using or applying technology.

Simon Jennings:

Yes, if you like. Just looking at that, the way our shops operate is, effectively, with one shop manager in each shop who is usually a paid employee and we also have twenty thousand volunteers. Now this is an enormous engagement and commitment by the public in the UK but they're actually enabling us to keep over seven hundred and sixty stores open often seven days a week selling product which then we generate revenues to go to our program overseas.

Dan Farber:

Now you have over five thousand employees, you have twenty thousand volunteers, you have people all over the world in terms of dealing with poverty and starvation. How do you manage that from an IT perspective?

Simon Jennings:

Effectively there are two real pressures on us. One of which is the delivery of application services to people who are based in offices. And the second one is mobility. If you look at the office delivery we have, effectively, a VPN, with offices on the end of that VPN. We have a central data center in the UK so all of the applications run in the UK with the exception of Lotus Notes which we have replicated notes servers in each of the offices so that those offices can work should the network go down. We therefore provide all of our financial applications, we provide all of our project management applications from the center. The mobility issue is a significantly different challenge because you've got the normal mobility that people would associate with any operation which is managers moving from office to office. Because we are structured into eight regions we have regional administrative centers who manage between six and ten countries each. The regional management are often going out to assess what's happening in the field, going to country offices, doing training and evaluations and so on, or hiring people. And of course that means that they are in a mobility world very similar to many organizations in the commercial world.

And our second challenge for mobility is where we're actually going into humanitarian disasters. So in these cases your first stop in the humanitarian disaster is an employee who's arriving saying "there isn't any power, there isn't any water, there isn't any phone line, there isn't any broadband, how do I connect?" And of course there you have to be quite innovative. But, you have to be innovative in a secure way because the purpose of communications for people who are in the field in a humanitarian disaster is two-fold. Both to enable them to communicate and say what's happening and what they need, so they can call on the resources of the organization. But secondly, to make sure that we have communication to ensure their security. Many of the places the people work are relatively insecure, so you need to make sure that there are at least two forms of secure communication for anybody that's working away from the office in a troubled zone. We did some innovation work a couple of years ago to actually look at how can we produce a product that enables a humanitarian worker to have a laptop and a product that can connect to a satellite so that they can do voice and data. We actually came up with one internally but it was very, very quickly eclipsed by the market. And so we've actually been working with major suppliers. For example, we're looking quite closely at the Inmarsat BGAN product which gives broadband, good, good quality broadband worldwide coverage.

If that product really fits and, it tests out, there are competing products but we'll look at all of them, but effectively that product there enables us to have a very small, lightweight satellite link that has voice, fax, phone and data connectivity for a humanitarian worker. So they can open up their laptop and they can connect. They can do email work, they can send faxes, they can make phone calls. It's expensive, but when you're talking about saving lives the first couple of months can be quite critical so you bear that expense.

Dan Farber:

Now Oxfam is in many of the hotspots around the world, as well as other NGOs. How much are you communicating with those other NGOs on the topic of how do we innovate, how do we not just try to invent everything ourselves, but take advantage of what others had done?

Simon Jennings:

There are two direct collaborative groups that we're working with at the moment and both of them are actually quite closely linked. So in the humanitarian world we're working with seven other NGOs such as Plan, KUS and so on that are working specifically on emergency capacity building and there are four steps in the project there, one of which happens to be focusing on IT. Now that particular piece of work we started out with which was funded by Microsoft, that piece of work enabled us to assess our responses to the tsunami and in Pakistan and we've actually, collaboratively, been looking at the results of those assessments and out of that have come two pieces of solid work, one of which is around developing a mechanism for providing ICT training to our staff because one of the issues we've discovered was that people just weren't able to use the products and the tools that we might be able to deliver, and that's a training issue. And the second one was to actually put up an internet site which is specifically focused on sharing the knowledge and information we have about disaster situations. That's what's coming out of the emergency capacity building work. And it's very exciting, but the major piece of work that was identified out of that, the major discovery was of course collaboration and coordination is absolutely critical in all these situations.

Now, another organization that we've been involved with a little bit longer is an organization called NetHope, it's at NetHope.org. And that's a twenty-seven agency organization, it's now a separate NGO in its own right, not for profit in its own right. And it's looking at network solutions for charity organizations. And the innovation there was if you sit with twenty-seven organizations that have got worldwide interest in responding to humanitarian disaster, or in the case of the Nature Conservancy, perhaps tracking whales around the world, suddenly you can go out to the supply market, if you like, as a buying club and say "we need satellite bandwidth and satellite dishes. Can you give us these? And so we worked together with that group to go out to market and we've now got a supply arrangement.

Dan Farber:

Well Simon, I really want to thank you for joining me today.

Simon Jennings:

It was a pleasure Dan

Dan Farber:

"I've been speaking with Simon Jennings who is the CIO of Oxfam, Great Britain. For CIO sessions I'm Dan Farber, thanks for watching."