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World Bank Modernizes IT With AWS, Azure, Office 365 And Box

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To support staff working in 186 country offices around the globe, the World Bank is making aggressive use of cloud.

When Stephanie von Friedeburg moved over to the bank from its sister organization, the International Finance Corporation (IFC) which works with private corporations and private-public partnerships, she found an IT organization that had been treated as a cost center, and a convenient source of budget cutting.

Employees were making due with mobile devices ranging from 10-year old Blackberries to the latest iPhones, and the data centers were running on big old clunky computers.

“They had under-invested for 10 years,” she said. Over that time, technology had changed so the organization was well-positioned for a big leap forward.”

Her approach was to see what is new and how it might be beneficial in helping the staff deliver on goals of eliminating poverty by 2030.

One result showed in mobile — the bank now offers staff a choice of several Android and iPhone models with corporate rate plans.

In addition to mobile, von Friedeburg focused on cloud, data and analytics.

“These are the things that are going to matter. We wanted an environment that staff could access from anywhere in the world on any device,” she said.

“We were on Lotus Notes while 75 percent of the corporate market was using Microsoft Exchange. We had new staff asking ‘What is Lotus Notes?’ Microsoft worked closely with us as we moved to Office 365 (which is cloud-based). Once we got people’s email into the cloud, the conversation began to shift.”

Because the bank’s data centers were so hard to reach through existing networks, a lot of people were using unsanctioned tools like Gmail and Dropbox. The bank signed a deal with Box .com, which makes data available to authorized users across devices.

“We add three terabytes a week to Box now.”

“With Box, World Bank employees all over the world - from Baghdad to DC - can now easily and securely share files like briefing materials with partners in the government and private sector, collaborate with colleagues and provide access to their files and folders from anywhere in the world on any device,” a company spokesperson said.

After negotiating with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Azure, Microsoft's cloud offering, it began moving more to the cloud. Microsoft apps like Office 365 and SharePoint will be on Azure, most of the rest will move to AWS. The bank is building a decision tree to guide the migration of its workload. One result of shifting work to the cloud is that the bank is moving from five data centers to two, and probably to one eventually. Systems for financial reporting, which have strong internal controls, will stay on-prem for longer she said.

“Over time we want to get to micro services and containerization so we could shift from one cloud provider to another.”

The IT group has shed 10 to 15 percent of its headcount, repositioning many staff positions and cutting a lot of contractors.

“The run rate to manage Lotus Notes was $12 million and now it costs us $4 to $5 million with Office 365, and we went from 20 FTEs to 6. Many of our staff are here on special visas so we try to retrain and reposition.”

The bank uses SAP for financials.

“SAP is very old. We have done a few upgrades but not very substantive. In the new fiscal  which started July 1, we will lift out the classic general ledger, which is a huge lift because it has so much customization. Since our general ledger was so old, we would invent products and then we would have to customize apps to get that into SAP. The new version has many of those off the shelf, so by upgrading our SAP environment we are simplifying our landscape.”

It uses Oracle ’s PeopleSoft for HR but has resisted efforts by both SAP and Oracle to draw the bank into their cloud environments.

As the IT organization has modernized, it has lost its image as a cost center and become a facilitator for the business von Friedeburg said.

“When the business reorganizes and redesigns processes, we are at the table. When I came, we did not have a seat at the table. People thought of the unit as a cost to be contained. The IT people running infrastructure were trying to hold it together. Most of the IT people had never been to a country of operation and didn’t understand what was needed to be effective.”

Over the past year, the IT group has had over 30 of our staff assigned to operational projects. These assignments included providing advice on disease surveillance information systems, supporting the modernization of state-owned financial institutions in Bangladesh, helping develop geo-spatial analytical capability for the partners at Trade Mark East Africa  supporting the East African Community (EAC) integration project.

In the seventies the bank often told countries what they needed to do, now the demand comes from a country-driven model.

“We don’t do what they don’t want.”

The IT group is also making life easier for its internal customers.

One of the bank’s reports, the Implementation Status & Results Report had 800 fields. Over the years people added fields and no one ever stopped to ask what information was really useful.

“One of my IT guys said he thought we could change the form, so we did a task force with operations and slimmed it down, cutting the data required from project managers by close to 40 percent.”

People around the bank started to think about the IT group in a new way.

“Once we started those kinds of initiatives, people starting coming to us and showing us their current process and asking us what they should do. HR or facilities might have 100 apps —we ask if they really need them all.”

Instead of dozens of reports in Excel, the bank is offering standard reports that are available to everyone and cut across all the vice presidents.

“We developed a new standard reports tool that provides consistent definitions, formats, and data across the organization. Historically, as much time was spent reconciling custom spreadsheets and data as there was spent on actually analyzing the data.”

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