Industry: Not for Profit.

Profile: Over 150,000 people are ICAEW Chartered Accountants. They train, develop and support each one of them so that they have the knowledge and values to help build local and global economies that are sustainable, accountable and fair. ICAEW has been at the heart of the accountancy profession since they were founded in 1880 to ensure trust in business. They share knowledge and insight with governments, regulators and business leaders worldwide as ICAEW believe accountancy is a force for positive economic change across the world.

When an organisation has existed since 1880, there is naturally a huge amount of historic data and processes which has been moved from technology to technology as time has gone by. The sprawl of data, systems and sheer number of members meant that ICAEW were dealing with a miasma of processes and systems which needed to be untangled to move the organisation forward.

ICAEW decided to take the brave approach to truly transform their services by redesigning business and technical processes from the ground up to drastically improve the levels and speed of service they provide to members across the board. To do this, they would need to take a totally new approach to their infrastructure and IT service delivery. To ensure this ‘clean slate’ approach ICAEW wanted an independent partner to work with them to assess which applications were critical, where data was hosted and reengineer the infrastructure to give newfound efficiency and flexibility.

cloudThing and ICAEW identified that the main objective was as follows:

• Assess current IT estate.
• Establish key business processes.
• Establish business critical applications.
• Business and technical architecture to move to a cloud-based infrastructure.
• Clear roadmap to migrate applications and services to Azure.
• Ongoing support and development for incremental improvement and fixes.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 was used as the basis for the solution, with a four-year transformation programme currently underway. We have worked with ICAEW to understand all the various users, departments and requirements across the organisation, and are working together to break down siloed data and processes through the various tools available across Dynamics 365 and our development skills. We have built various bespoke add-ons for Dynamics 365 to add functionality for automation and bring together the core data from multiple sources across ICAEW's IT Estate.

We helped ICAEW deploy and adopt Office 365 to improve collaboration and communication through tool such as OneDrive and Skype for Business. The integration between the Microsoft ecosystem was a key benefit of the choice, as it enables ICAEW data to be held securely in one place whilst accessed by multiple applications across multiple devices and locations.

Additionally, we have migrated existing IT applications onto the Microsoft Azure cloud platform. This led to further reductions in cost alongside higher levels of reliability and availability levels for their applications. These solutions can then be supported by our DevOps service to provide ongoing end-user support of the managed applications which would ensure constant improvements to user experience levels, amplified efficiency and the team on hand should changes need to be made in the future.