DCN October 2017 | Page 28

case study The Art Of Science The Science Museum Group (SMG) is a collection of British museums spread throughout the UK. With this in mind, inter-site collaboration was SMG’s next goal, to ensure effective communication between all systems. This required significant developments to its IT strategy, so SMG turned to ONI to do just that. Challenges Technology has always been key to SMG’s operations, but until recently, each museum in the group operated independent systems. With the group keen to increase workforce mobility and inter-site collaboration, it was apparent that development of the group’s ICT strategy was necessary. Disparate telephone and email systems drove excessive 28 | October 2017 complexity and divergent working practices, duplicating support requirements, inflating maintenance costs and impacting collaboration, best practice sharing, and other day- to-day operations. Meanwhile, shared systems relied on the Science Museum’s single data centre, with the result that outages disrupted the entire group. To address the systems’ stability, capacity and performance issues, and enable the infrastructure to support group objectives, a new centrally driven approach to ICT was necessary. ICT needed to be moved to the heart of the business planning process with clear strategic focus on benefits and outcomes, and to be supported by coherent lifecycle planning and appropriate investment.