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
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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.