Guinness Partnership is integrating five technology infrastructures onto a common platform with support from ANS Group.
Guinness Partnership, which manages over 55,000 properties, comprises the Guinness Trust, Guinness Northern Counties, Guinness Hermitage, Guinness Midsummer and Gloucestershire Housing Association. As each housing organisation had previously operated independently, they each had their own infrastructure, such as email addresses, login details, electronic filing systems and other internal processes. Following the merger, these five separate infrastructures had a considerable effect on the ease with which staff could work at different offices.
Mirroring Guinness Partnership’s new brand and organisational structure, ANS Group helped to design and implement a proof-of-concept project to consolidate the existing five infrastructures into one. This will enable the Guinness Partnership to have a common domain structure with the same login process, filing systems and consistent graphical identity at all five locations, covering over 2000 users.
Nealle Ball, head of ICT for service delivery, Guinness Partnership, said, “Infrastructure integration is always challenging, from both a technical perspective and how our customers are affected by the change. Having an existing relationship with ANS helped to minimise risks during the project as they have considerable experience and technical expertise that in-house staff may not necessarily have.”
ANS began the integration project at Guinness Partnership in April 2009 and completed it eight weeks later.
