We talked to Luc Botten, CIO of the Flemish Red Cross about the changes within his organisation, tha need for standardisation, the different operational needs within the different units of the organisation and his vision for the future.

The 1,300 employees and 14,000 volunteers of the Flanders Red Cross provide blood services, national and international humanitarian services, and manage refugee centres, using their own central support services.

Luc Botten’s department delivers help-desk and infrastructure services, and is also responsible for the development of new tools and IT strategies, validation and quality. He joined two years ago, after the Red Cross began to use the experience of senior managers from the business sector.

“The plan is to use Red Cross donations in the most efficient way possible so that we can maximize our help to people in need, all around the world.”

The key words are consolidation, centralisation, standardisation and virtualisation, pushing for plain and simple IT standards in the workspace so that if necessary a member of the Belgian Red Cross and a member of the Brazilian Red Cross can hot-swap a hard drive in the middle of a disaster area!

To ensure that different services benefit from the appropriate solutions, he chooses standard tools; configures them to meet the needs of the user community; and, most importantly, ensures buy-in from the communities he serves.

He selected Microsoft SharePoint as the common platform for collaboration and knowledge sharing, above all because it can be deployed as a controlled environment - and control is essential if change actually leads to improvement. The plan is to create an environment which will make things better.

And he chose Getronics because “you showed a distinct level of maturity. Success was about effective change management, not just IT expertise.”