Paul Herbert is CIO of Northcott, one of Australia’s largest not-for-profit disability service organisations, with more than 2,500 employees across New South Wales and the Australian Capital Territory. Herbert is responsible for the IT infrastructure to support the delivery of personalised specialist services for more than 13,500 people with disabilities and their families. The delivery of digital workspace technologies is vital when it comes to enabling premium outcomes for his staff and customers.
Herbert leads three teams, but it’s the IT team of eight who are responsible for everything from service delivery, network engineering to systems, voice, and applications administration. Today he is leading Northcott to the cloud, having shaken off the shackles of infrastructure as a service and moved toward hybrid cloud and a cloud-first application future.
“We love the Citrix Workspace roadmap of where they are going in the future and what that means for our organisation,” Herbert says. “It means taking a lot of our infrastructure into the cloud; however, this is where everything is heading. Our goal is to map this out over the next couple of years in an orderly and cost-beneficial way.”
Northcott will prioritise how it will support new technology and give staff the great tools its customers need for a great user experience. For Herbert and his team, it’s all about “getting to the cloud in a way that is simple, stable, and secure. Plus, it shouldn’t cost a lot.”
The Impact of COVID-19
Northcott had to increase the technology environment for its staff and customers quickly due to the impact of COVID-19, adapting to a work-from-home policy for staff who were used to meeting customers onsite every day.
“We have been able to continue to deliver front line services throughout COVID-19 — they literally could not stop,” Herbert says. “However, instead of face-to-face onsite interactions, we moved as much as we could to work-from-home and video conferencing solutions. We completed 500 video sessions in the first week alone. Users were active for longer periods from both a workflow and voice perspective.”
Herbert led the team through the overnight move to Skype for Business for video conferencing, tracking how many users and sessions were connected across the hybrid-cloud environment. It was easy for the team to deploy more servers to carry the additional load in a new digital-only environment — and manage the additional redundancy demands, as well.
“So, for us, if we lost a computer for any reason, we just re-allocated that load courtesy of Citrix ADC, which is very easy within a hybrid-cloud network.”
A Clear Vision Backed by Definite Plans
As a change agent, Herbert is very focused on continuing to build out the Citrix technology environment to achieve better outcomes for staff and customers.
“We are looking forward to rolling out the latest version of Citrix and Microsoft Office,” Herbert says. “And our goal is to move away from our historic on-premise approach to move more into the cloud environment.”
This is where the excitement kicks in for Herbert, examining how the Citrix Workspace technologies offering can provide a solution that ensures Northcott staff spend less time in front of the computer and more time supporting customers.
“I couldn’t imagine doing this without Citrix, to be honest,” he says. “I pity any organisation that doesn’t have access to a virtual workspace environment as this has been a core component of our success. It certainly has facilitated business growth.”
And for organisations wondering what type of commitment and budget should be made in the virtualisation of the corporate workspace, the answer for Herbert is easy.
“We need to continue to invest in this technology,” he says. “Gone are the days when you will never know when you will need to rely on it. And by this, I mean being able to support the mobile workforce and give staff a choice of devices. For some, it may be easier to use an iPhone, or some may prefer a laptop.”
Citrix is paramount as part of the solution for ensuring staff and their customers are benefiting from a premium user experience.
“Our teams want flexibility to choose where the work is going to happen, and the technology is going to need to support that approach.”
