Oxfam| Simon Jennings

Oxfam's UK CIO Simon Jennings explains how the charity runs the fifth largest retail business in the UK to support its humanitarian efforts, and describes the challenges of delivering application services and mobile solutions to remote, and often insecure, locations. Jennings talks with Dan Farber, editor-in-chief of silicon.com's sister site ZDNet for this latest CIO Visions interview.

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 5,300 employees around the world, we operate in 70 countries, this is Oxfam GB I'm talking about here, and we have about 144 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 organisation can operate efficiently and effectively around the world.

DF: 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 [Oxfam] bucket.

SJ: 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, 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.

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 £14m revenue and £11m 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 organisation and engagement with our supporters.

DF: Now Oxfam GB is also unique in that you have over 700 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?

SJ: Well that's a really interesting question because when you start looking at Oxfam's revenue through its trading business we made about £85m revenue last year from the trading business, but we actually made a 31 percent margin on the high streets. That's taking in about £20m to £24m profit, if you like, which we can then put towards our programme 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 - a mixture of donated products, which can be clothing, bric-a-brac, books, 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 [electronic point of sale] out of a trading environment, a retail environment. Because, when I first arrived at Oxfam, they'd been doing some experiments with epos. 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.

DF: Now you have over 5,000 employees, you have 20,000 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?

SJ: 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 centre 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 centres who manage between six and 10 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 organisations 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 organisation. 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.